Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

In the corner of the room, Aeneas looked surprised but not angry. Nicholas was harder to read. Though he could be passionate in his faith, he struggled with emotions on the lowly human scale. I saw the shock in his eyes, his struggle to find an appropriate response. In the end he took refuge in procedure. He slid the piece of paper off the table and read it quickly. There was not much to look at. I waited for him to discard it again, and me with it.

He frowned. ‘This is better. Not perfect – you misspelled amandus on the third line – but definitely improved. Perhaps even promising.’

I looked up at him. Hope shone in my tear-rimmed eyes. ‘I will retain you for one week. If your work satisfies me, then I will keep you on for as long as the council sits.’

Aeneas clapped his hands. ‘I told you he would not disappoint you.’

And that was how I – a thief, a liar and a debaucher – came to work for one of the holiest men that ever lived.

For the churchmen at the council, I suppose it was not a happy time. They did not lack ambition – many of them, including Aeneas, wanted nothing less than the complete subordination of the papacy to the decisions of the council. But that goal remained elusive. They met in committees and debated resolutions; they passed those to the general congregation to be ratified, and they in turn sent them to the Pope. The number of couriers crossing back and forth that autumn must have worn a new pass in the Alps. But I never saw anything to change the impression of my first day in Basle: that there were too many beggars and not enough rich men to make it matter.

I did not care. Nicholas had offered me work while the council sat, and I would have been happy for them to deliberate until Judgement Day. I was satisfied with my lot, simple though it was. Every day I went to Nicholas’s study and dutifully recorded whatever he dictated; every evening I returned to my room and read, or prayed. Occasionally I met Aeneas in a tavern, but not often. He was a busy man, constantly on some errand in the service of his ambition. I enjoyed hearing his stories, and did not begrudge him his progress. I felt a serenity, a feeling that the great tides that tossed me in the world had ebbed.

The council ground on through the winter. Blocks of ice appeared in the river, hard as stone: one cold morning I saw a lump strike a coal barge and smash it in two. In Nicholas’s study, I wrapped rags around my hands so that my fingers could grip the pen. My master never seemed to notice the cold. Day after day he stood staring at his icon, his only concession to the season a fur stole over his cassock.

‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Do you know where it went wrong, Johann?’

As he got used to me, his lectures became more conversational, using me as an anvil for hammering out his ideas. Like the anvil, I could not understand the intricacy of the work being made on my back – but I served my purpose.

‘The Fall? The serpent in Eden?’

‘For mankind, undoubtedly. But Adam’s sin was disobedience, not ignorance.’ He moved across to the window, silhouetted against its harsh cold light. ‘The greatest blow the Word suffered, when the world was young, was the disaster at Babel. When men could no longer understand each other, how could they understand the Word?’

‘I thought the tower of Babel was an affront to God.’

‘It brought its builders closer to God. The sin He punished was not ambition but overambition. And now look how the legacy spreads. What is the first fruit of the heresy that the Hussites and Wycliffites preach?’

I kept silent. That too was part of my job.

‘They preach that the Bible itself should be split apart – rendered in English or Czech or German or whichever language they prefer it. Imagine the errors, the bitter confusion and the arguments that would follow.’ He glanced out of the window, towards the spire of the cathedral where the general congregation of the council met. ‘God knows we find enough to quarrel over already.’

He looked back to the icon. ‘God is perfection. As I told you once before, there can be no diversity in him. So why do we tolerate diversity in the Church? We cannot even agree on a liturgy. Every diocese has its own devotions and ceremonies, and strives to make its own rite more splendid than its neighbour’s. They think thereby they will obtain greater favour with God – when in fact all they do is fissure his Church.’

My pen still hovered over the desk, dripping drops of ink on the page. ‘Shall I write that?’

He sighed. ‘No. Write: “We must make allowances for the weak nesses of men, unless it works contrary to eternal salvation.”’

He dismissed me at noon for my dinner. I had arranged to meet Aeneas that day – we had not spoken in a fortnight – and hurried through the streets to the tavern at the sign of the dancing bear. It was a busy, cheerful place, buried in the cellars beneath a cloth warehouse near the river. Laughter and songs echoed off its vaulted ceiling; in the hearth, a pig turned on a spit. Fat dripped into the fire and flared into smoke.

I searched through the various rooms for Aeneas but did not find him. He was often delayed, though no one ever bore it against him. I bought a mug of beer and perched on the end of a bench. A group of merchants from Strassburg occupied most of the table: they greeted me briefly, then ignored me. A single glance at my dress told them I had nothing profitable to sell.

I watched the crowd while I waited. There were a few men I recognised – a priest from Lyons, two Italian brothers who sold the paper that my master used so freely – but none I wanted to speak to. The cellar was warm, the beer mixed with herbs and honey.

And then I saw him. He was sitting on a bench two tables away, on the fringes of a conversation with a group of goldsmiths. One hand clutched a mug of beer; with the other, he fed himself bites of an enormous pork chop. The fat smeared around his lips glistened in the candlelight; his puffy eyes scanned the room with a suspicious resentment that a decade had not dimmed since he beat me in Konrad Schmidt’s workshop. Gerhard.

I should have dropped my gaze at once and hoped he would not notice, but shock had me in its grip. All I could do was stare, like a rabbit in a trap. The lank hair had receded, leaving a patch of red skin like a blister on the top of his head; his back had developed a stoop, perhaps from too many years bending in front of a furnace. But it was certainly him. And if I could recognise him, he could surely do the same to me.

Our eyes met. I cursed myself for shaving my beard, which might have been enough of a disguise; I touched the pilgrim mirror that I kept in my purse and prayed that a decade of suffering might have aged my face to the point where he did not remember it. But Aeneas had restored my life too well. Stupefied, I watched surprise give way to disbelief, then harden into certainty. And triumph.

He pushed back the bench and rose. I looked at the hearth, at the spitted pig twisting in the flames and the fat oozing out of its body. I knew what would happen to me if Gerhard reported my crime.

A maid with a tray of mugs crossed in front of Gerhard, blocking his path. He stumbled back a step and in that moment I made my decision. I jumped up from my seat and ran to the stairs, careless of the attention I drew. Hot fat spat onto my hand as I passed the fire and I flinched – but my greater fear was meeting Aeneas. I could not bear for him to learn what sort of man he had helped.

I reached the street and ran up a narrow alley towards the cathedral. When I reached the market in the square, I ducked behind a tanner’s stall and doubled back on myself, down a narrow row of shops towards the river. It was almost deserted. If Gerhard had followed me, he would certainly have no difficulty seeing me now.