Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

‘And a house?’

‘Rented. In St Argobast. You probably do not know it – it is some miles from Strassburg.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘I know it well. A pretty village, and no distance from the city at all.’

I was about to embark on a disagreeable anecdote about a woman who had been surprised by bandits and abducted on the road to St Argobast, when a knock sounded at the door. Ellewibel stood.

‘My daughter. She will be delighted to meet you.’

I had prepared myself for a monster. In fact, all that surprised me was her utter ordinariness. True, she was no beauty. Her face was flat and hard, like overbaked bread, its oval shape accentuated by her white wimple. Her nose was small, her teeth crooked (but no more than normal), her skin no longer smooth. With two hundred gulden attached to her name, there seemed no reason any man should not want to marry her. Except me.

She curtsied. We both stood there, neither knowing what to say. With a start, I realised she was examining me just as I had examined her. What did she see? A man in his middle age, sweating under the weight of the fur-trimmed hat and coat he had borrowed. My back was stooped, my face scarred by too many misadventures in the forge. Grey had begun to appear in my beard, though my fair hair disguised it. With a good name and an adequate income, why should she not want to marry me?

‘Of course, there is the matter of the dowry,’ I said.

‘My late husband – bless him – was an honest and thrifty man. When he died, his estate was valued at two hundred gulden. I am willing to endow my entire claim on Ennelin.’

There was something evasive in her manner. ‘That is very generous.’

‘A mother’s joy at seeing her daughter established in marriage is beyond price.’

I did not answer. My borrowed coat weighed on me like stone; the collar choked me. I could hardly bring myself to look at Ennelin. The worm twisted in my guts.

‘I will have to consider…’

Ennelin was well schooled. She watched me modestly, without betraying the least doubt. Her mother was more direct.

‘Herr Gensfleisch, do you want to marry my daughter?’

Paris

The Jaguar pulled away from the kerb and headed up the boulevard de Sebastopol towards the E19 highway and Belgium. Atheldene swung across two lanes of traffic and past the Gare du Nord, then gunned the throttle as the road opened in front of them. Nick sank back in the leather seat and wondered if Gillian had sat there, if she’d felt the same throb of the car’s powerful engine and been impressed by it.

He glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone was following. The road behind was empty. All he saw was Emily, curled up in the corner of the back seat staring out of the window.

‘What did you mean when you said the book was frozen?’ Her voice was soft, barely audible over the engine noise.

‘It’s the latest thing in conservation. After fire, water’s a book’s worst enemy. You need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. But drying out a book – a valuable one – is a bugger of a job. If you’ve got a whole library on your hands you can’t deal with the books individually. No time. So you flash-freeze them and keep them in a cold store until you’re ready to thaw them out and conserve them properly. That’s what this outfit in Belgium does.’

‘How long does it take to defrost?’

‘A few hours. They have all the kit there on site.’ Atheldene guided the car past a line of trucks. ‘Then we’ll see what we find. Maybe your mysterious playing card?’ He jammed on the brakes as a small Peugeot veered in front of them, then swung out to overtake. ‘Unless, of course, you’ve already found it?’

Nick had expected the question, had debated at length with Emily what they’d do. He reached into the bag in the footwell and pulled the card out of its stiff-backed envelope. Atheldene’s eyes flicked towards it.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘Gillian left it for me.’ Nick knew it sounded defensive. He glanced down at the card, then across at the badge on the steering wheel, a snarling jaguar’s head. Everywhere he looked he saw open jaws and sharp teeth.

‘I don’t suppose she left any clue where she’d disappeared to?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Pity.’ Atheldene fixed his gaze back on the road. The speedometer needle edged slightly higher.

‘Nick said you mentioned the Bedford Hours on the phone,’ said Emily from the back. ‘What’s the connection?’

‘As I’m sure you know, Emily, a book of hours is a prayer book that offered lay people a series of prayers to use through the different hours of the day. It’s based on the idea of the monastic schedule. The Bedford Hours is one of these books, commissioned for the marriage in 1423 of the Duke of Bedford. The Bedford Hours is an enormously elaborate and richly decorated book produced in Paris. We don’t know the name of the artist who commissioned it, so we call him the Master of the Bedford Hours.’

‘Like the Master of the Playing Cards,’ said Nick. ‘Don’t any of these guys have names?’

‘Almost none,’ said Atheldene. ‘Not until the end of the fifteenth century. Until then, the medieval ethos of anonymity prevails. Art wasn’t seen as a way to show off your own genius, but God’s. All inspiration came from God, so the thinking went, and the artist or craftsman was merely a channel. It was only with the Renaissance that art becomes egocentric again. You can draw a straight line from da Vinci right through to Picasso, the ghastly Mr Hirst and all the rest of that gang.’

‘It’s an attractive way of thinking,’ said Emily.

‘But not terribly helpful when it comes to determining the origins of a piece. All we can do is try to identify work on stylistic grounds. Which is where the Bedford Master comes in. So far as we can tell, he must have kept a studio in Paris and employed a number of journeymen and assistants to execute the work. Various people have studied the books attributed to the workshop; what they noticed is that several of the motifs from your playing cards also occur in these books. Birds and animals that look very similar, sometimes absolutely identical, to the ones on the cards. I suspect the point Gillian was trying to make, ever so obliquely, is that the pictures in the bestiary she found are closely related to the images on the cards.’

Nick digested that. ‘So you think the playing card Master might be the same as the Bedford Master?’

‘Probably not.’ Atheldene reminded Nick of one of the professors he’d had at college, a pompous man who’d loved nothing more than displaying his learning like a peacock – especially when it came to pretty female undergraduates. Had Gillian been impressed by it?

‘He could have worked in the studio as an apprentice. He might just have seen the pictures and decided to copy them. Or there might have been a common model book.’

‘A model book?’

Atheldene didn’t let Nick’s question divert him. ‘Europe in the fifteenth century is really in the twilight of the medieval and the pre-dawn of the modern age. Everything’s changing – and nowhere more so than in the diffusion of ideas. People are waking up to the fact that they need to communicate far more widely, but they don’t have the tools. Model books are one response to this. You make up a book with examples of a whole set of different pictures, and then anyone who gets hold of the book can create a more-or-less exact copy of the picture. Some of them come with step-by-step instructions of exactly how to draw the picture and colour it in. Painting by numbers. The Master of the Playing Cards takes this to its logical conclusion by inventing copper-engraved printing: mass production.’ He blew air through his nose. ‘And a few years later, of course, Gutenberg blows the whole thing open with the printing press.’