Alix Christie - Gutenberg's Apprentice

Trithemius will never see the shining city they had built, like Augustine’s, inside that workshop dug into the earth. He’ll never know how it was both monastic cell and nave to that young man and all who labored there. Peter wipes a hand across his face. He’s had his fill of boats and wagons driving up this muddy forest track; he’s tired of telling the whole sordid tale. It’s painful still — the recognition is unwelcome. He’d thought that he’d forgiven them both long ago. But now he finds they’re still inside his mind, both of those fathers, locked so blindly in their battle that they can’t perceive the hellfire that they rain on those below.

How zealous — yet how fragile — he had been. He feels a twinge of pity for that stern young man, who offered his own self as the connecting wire — the thin gray bead of solder.

[62 of 65 quires]

12 July 1454

Both hostages were freed, after some haggling over the cut that Mainz would get from every letter of indulgence printed for the Cologne diocese. The only one remotely pleased with this was Jakob. Gutenberg returned, his body clean, his bearing truculent; he thrust a packet under Peter’s nose. “Accounts, in black and white,” he said, and turned his back. No word of thanks, not even an acknowledgment; Peter should have known. The man could not be humbled. Just the reverse: his manner was abrupt, offended. How dare they question his veracity, was all his haughty look, his brisk resumption of command, conveyed.

He took a Bible sheet up off the press, found fault with it, asked querulously where the devil his own letter was. “Set up for press,” came Hans’s answer. Peter turned and made his escape. The packet in his hands was thick with wax, stamped front and back with that queer pilgrim’s seal. As if he’d even think to spy its contents. The workshop’s debts, thank God, were not his cross to bear. He had enough to carry with this second letter and those final quires.

Rapidly he walked down to the Brand and put his head in at the Haus zur Rosau. He heard his stepsister’s keening from the moment Lothar opened the front door. The wails were coming from the kitchen door that gave out on the courtyard.

Tina’s back was shaking from the sobs that racked her skinny frame. She didn’t cease her frenzied wailing even when he sat down on the stoop beside her. “There, there,” he said, and moved his palm in circles on her back. Grede must have left her there to blow the tempest out; no doubt she’d tried, and failed, to calm her. “Tina, my big Tina girl,” he whispered. “What’s wrong? Give me your hands.”

She turned tear-thundered eyes on him and hiccupped, sniffed, resumed her keening at a lower and less frantic pitch. He lifted her limp hands and sandwiched them between his. “Now, chickadee, tell me what’s wrong.”

“Cassius,” she gulped, “and Prinz. Father says—” She drew a ragged breath, and then came sobs.

“Father says what?”

“That they are to be sold. Oh, Peter!” she cried, turning and flinging both arms about his neck. “Say you can stop him. He is mean and cruel to take my very favorites!”

He clucked and soothed and looked across the courtyard to the stables. “Papa can’t do everything. He must have a good reason.” The meaning of it bowed his shoulders, too.

He would not say to her that they were only horses. Only beasts — albeit Fust’s most steady team. Two of the six that pulled his convoys and his wagons, and when home would whicker softly for their apples from the stalls. “Perhaps we’ll find a way to keep them, or to visit them, at least,” he said. She pulled away; she knew it was a lie.

In all these years not once had Fust been forced to sell a horse. He’d leased them out, from time to time, when things were tight. The letter with the master’s ledger dug at Peter’s side. How bad was it, if Fust must sell the very assets he depended on to ply his trade? The interest on the loans that ran the workshop totaled a hundred guilders every year, Peter knew — part to the Jew, part to the Lombard.

Gently he disentangled Tina’s arms and carried her inside. Grede came as he was laying her, a raglike bundle, on the couch. “It’s better now,” he said, and Grede put a cool hand on the child’s brow. “Sleep,” she whispered. The two of them stood watching for a moment, then went out. Grede draped the cloth she carried on the table. “Won’t you join us, just this once?” She gave him a wan smile. “It’s been so long.”

“It’s true, then, that he’s selling them?”

“Yes. Although it breaks his heart.”

“Things are that bad.”

She looked exhausted. “The wagons are too light, the hay too dear.” She must have seen the way it shocked him. “We’ll find a way.” A rueful look came over her. “It’s not like I’ve not been this low before.” She turned and started laying out the plates. “Just be a dear and fetch him from the Kaufhaus.”

On the Brand a group of traveling fiddlers had attracted a small crowd. Their music, though, was harsh and discordant to his ears. He slipped with some relief into the silence of the customs hall. Climbing each step, worn into hollows by the tread of countless feet, he was assailed by memories of all the evenings he’d been sent there as a boy. How often had he been dispatched by Fust’s first wife, and then his second, on this very errand? How proudly he had come into the Kaufhaus those first months in Mainz: swelled up with pride, circumnavigating those great heaping piles, before ascending to the office and his task.

Fust was just locking up when he arrived. “So you are back to playing herald.”

“Grede sent me, sir.” Peter smiled slightly, bowed.

His father looked at him for a long moment, as if he too measured the years behind.

“Before you go, you’ll want to lock up this.” Peter pulled the letter from his waist and gave it over. Fust hefted it with his right hand. Without a word he turned the key again, and Peter followed him back in. When Fust had stowed it in his strongbox and locked up the cupboard with a second key, he turned to find his son entirely still and staring fixedly at him.

“What else?” Impatience edged his down-turned mouth.

Better now than later, Peter thought, when Fust had read the contents of that letter — though this was far from how he’d hoped this scene would go.

“I’d like to ask again for your permission, sir.” He held his cap before him, twisted in his hands. “I still would marry Anna, with your blessing. If you can find it to accept this as my choice.”

“If I can find it,” Fust said quietly. He looked at Peter’s cap, then back up at his face. “My say-so hasn’t counted much, these past few years.”

“I did your bidding.” He’d never satisfy him, ever. “I stayed, as you requested, learned this trade. I think I’ve done my duty by your wishes.”

Fust took a long breath, and then he slowly let it out. They stood a pace apart, but between them Peter sensed a packed and hard-edged distance, dense with disappointments.

“You left me long ago,” his foster father murmured. “Your choices, as you call them, have been yours a good long while — more his, I think, than mine.”

“This isn’t anything to do with him — but me, my life.”

Fust gave the lightest shrug. “I have no power over you. You’re nearly thirty, well past any hope of listening to guidance.”

“I’ve listened to you more than half my life.” Peter’s chest was filling now, the heaviness between them seeping ineluctably inside. “I listen to you still, and ask you to consider my own happiness.”