Tom Harper: The Book of Secrets

‘About 1 minute remaining,’ the status bar said. But she didn’t have that long. There was a small window behind the bath: she reached up and jammed the laptop into the opening. Her fingers scrabbled on the keyboard as she typed two brief lines of text, praying that the message would find someone. Another kick. She pulled the shower curtain across the bath to hide the computer.

The door smashed open. A man in a long black coat and black gloves stepped through the splintered frame and advanced towards her, the cigarette glowing like a needle in his mouth. Unthinkingly, Gillian tugged up the zip of her top.

Outside, a faint scream drifted down the street until the cold mist smothered it. Loose snow filled the footsteps outside the front door. The car drove away, the chains on its tyres clanking like a ghost. And on the other side of the world, a handful of pixels flashed up on a screen to announce that a message had arrived.

The Confession of Johann Gensfleisch

The Lord came down to see the city, and the tower which mortals had built. And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people and they all have one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; from now, nothing that they propose to achieve will be impossible for them…’

God have mercy for I have sinned. Like the men of Babel I built a tower to approach the heavens, and now I am cast down. Not by a jealous god, but by my own blind pride. I should have destroyed the cursed object, cast it in the river, or burned it in a fire until the gold leaf melted off the pages, the ink boiled away and the paper charred to ash. But – beguiled by its beauty and its creator – I could not do it. I have buried it in stone; I will write my confession, a single copy only, and they will lie together in eternity. And God will judge me.

It begins – I began – in Mainz, a town of wharves and spires on the banks of the river Rhine. A man may bear many names in his life: at this time, mine was Henchen Gensfleisch. Henchen was a childish form of Johann; Gensfleisch was my father’s name. It means goose meat, and it suited him well. Our family’s fortunes had grown fat and he had grown with them, until his belly sagged below his belt and his cheeks drooped around his chins. Like a goose, he had a sharp bite.

It was only natural that my father’s financial interests led him eventually to the source. He became a companion of the mint, a sinecure which catered perfectly to his vanities. It gave him a pension and the right to march in pride of place on the St Martin’s Day procession, and demanded little in return except the occasional inspection of the mint’s workings. One day, when I was ten or eleven years old, he took me with him.

It was a black November day. Cloud had settled on the pinnacles of the cathedral, and rain pelted us as we scurried across the square. There was no market that day; the rain seemed to have washed every living thing from the streets. But inside the mint all was warmth and life. The master met us himself; he gave us hot apple wine, which burned my throat but made me glow inside. He deferred constantly to my father, and this also made me happy and proud (later I realised he ran the mint under contract, and hoped it would be renewed). I stood close beside my father, clutching the damp hem of his robe as we followed the master into the workshops.

It was like stepping into a romance, a sorcerer’s laboratory or the caverns of the dwarves. The smells alone intoxicated me utterly: salt and sulphur, charcoal, sweat and scorched air. In one room, smiths poured out crucibles of smoking gold onto guttered tables; through a door, a long gallery rang with pealing hammers as men on benches pounded the sheets flat. Further along, a man with a pair of giant shears cut the metal as easily as a bolt of cloth, snipping it into fragments no bigger than a man’s thumb. Women worked them against wheels until the corners and edges were ground into discs.

I was entranced. I had never imagined such harmony, such unity of purpose, could exist outside the heavens. Without thinking, I reached for one of the gold pieces, but my father’s heavy palm swatted me away.

‘Don’t touch,’ he warned.

A small boy, younger than me, collected the pieces in a wooden bowl and brought them to a clerk at the head of the room who tested each one on a small pair of scales.

‘Each must be exactly the same as the others,’ said the master, ‘or everything we do would be worthless. The coinage only works if all its pieces are identical.’

The clerk swept a pile of the golden discs off his table into a felt bag. He weighed the bag and made a note in the ledger beside him. Then he passed the bag to his apprentice, who carried it solemnly through a door in the back wall. We followed.

I could tell at once that this room was different. Iron grilles covered the windows; heavy locks gripped the doors. The moneyers, four huge men with bare arms and leather aprons, stood at a workbench striking iron dies like miniature anvils. The apprentice brought the bag to one of them. The moneyer tipped it out on the bench beside him, slipped a disc into the jaws of his mould, then raised his hammer and struck. A single blow, an eruption of sparks, then the die was popped open and the newly minted coin added to a fresh pile.

I stared. In the heavy lamplight, the coins gleamed and winked back perfection. My father and the master had their backs to me, examining one of the moulds through a lens. At the bench, the moneyer concentrated on aligning the gold blank in the die.

I knew it was wrong – but how could it be theft to take something that would instantly be replaced a hundredfold? It was like scooping a handful of water from the river to drink, or plucking a wild berry from a bramble. I reached out my hand. The coin was still warm from the impress of the die. For an instant, I saw St John’s embossed face in a reproachful gaze. Then he vanished in my clenched fist. I felt no guilt.

It was not greed – not for gold. It was a longing such as my child’s mind had never known, a lust for something perfect. I understood – dimly – that these coins would enter the world and be changed and changed again – into property, power, war and salvation – and all this would happen because each was a perfect duplicate, triplicate, replicate of all the others, members of a system that was unbreakable as water.

They were done. My father shook the master’s hand and offered some approving words; the master smiled hungrily and proposed schnapps in his lodgings. While he turned to say a few words to the moneyers, I tugged my father’s sleeve and pointed to the door, squeezing my legs together to imitate discomfort. He looked surprised to be reminded I was there. He tousled my hair, as close to affection as he ever managed.

I knew I had been caught the moment we stepped through the door. The clerk was standing behind the desk, the apprentice opposite, both staring at the balance in incomprehension. One pan lifted the velvet bag high in the air; the other sat immovable on the table, pinned down by a copper weight. I felt the lightness like a hole in my stomach – though even then, I marvelled at a system so precisely tempered that it could detect the absence of a single coin.

The master ran to the table. Angry words followed; the clerk lifted off the weight and replaced it, the scales swung, but the judgement remained the same. The moneyer was summoned and furiously protested his innocence. The clerk tipped open the bag and counted out the coins one by one, assigning each a square on his chequered cloth. I counted with him silently, almost believing that the missing coin might miraculously reappear. One row of ten crept across the table, a second followed, then a third and the beginnings of a fourth.