Tom Harper - The Book of Secrets

Mainz

I took him into the parlour and gave him wine. The evening was cold, but Kaspar kept his distance from the fire, as if the scars from that night in the mill still recoiled from heat. His clothes smelled of damp and mud; dried blood laced his cheek where it had been scraped by brambles or branches.

‘The Armagnaken dragged me out of the flames,’ he told me. ‘Half dead – more. I don’t know why. They should have left me to burn. Instead, they took me as their captive. Their plaything.’

I shuddered. Drach kept perfectly still, so stiff I feared the least movement would snap him.

‘They did things to me you would not believe. Could not imagine. Their cruelty was infinitely inventive. The things they taught me…’

‘If I had known,’ I said quickly. ‘If I had known you were alive I would have moved heaven and earth to rescue you.’

‘You would have been looking in the wrong place.’

I stared at him in the firelight. He was a dim impression of the man I had loved, sunken where he had once been proud. In the lamplight, the right half of his face resembled one of his copper plates, criss-crossed with scars etched deep into his skin. Fire had burned away half his hair, and the rest was shaved away so that his skull had the mottled look of an animal hide. His eyes, which had shimmered with ever-changing colour when I met him, were fixed black.

‘How long…?’

‘Months? Years?’ Kaspar shrugged. ‘I didn’t count. At last I escaped. I went to Strassburg but you had gone. I asked after you; I heard you had gone back to Mainz. I have been making my way here ever since.’

I leaned forward awkwardly and touched his shoulder. ‘I’m glad you came. I pray for you every night.’

Kaspar curled up in his chair like a coiled serpent. ‘You should have saved your breath. God has no power over the Armagnaken.’

The ferocity of his gaze terrified me. I said nothing.

‘But you’ve prospered.’ In Drach’s rasping voice it sounded like an accusation. ‘A fur collar, gold stitching on your sleeves. A respectable burgher in your father’s house.’

‘Still in more debt than I can afford.’

‘Still chasing your dreams of perfection?’

‘Our dreams.’

Kaspar clenched and unclenched his hand. The fingers looked hard as talons. ‘I have not dreamed in years.’

I stood, desperate for a distraction. ‘Let me show you what we are doing.’

He padded after me down the gallery. I brought him to the press room, where silver shafts of moonlight bathed the machinery in their glow.

‘We set each letter separately,’ I gabbled. I was trembling. ‘You would not believe how true-’

A cold hand gripped my neck and forced me down, squeezing my face against the inky bed of the press. I bent double, gasping for breath. Kaspar held me down with one hand, while the other fumbled with his belt.

‘What are you doing?’ I cried. ‘In Christ’s name, Kaspar…’

He was smothering me, thrusting himself against me from behind. The coffin smell of wet earth was all around me.

‘Do you know what they did to me?’ he hissed in my ear. ‘What I suffered while you were playing with your toys?’

‘I thought you were dead.’

His hands were tearing at my clothes, scratching my skin. ‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Not like this.’

‘What is this?’

Tongues of light flickered around the room. In an instant, Kaspar was away from me. The shadows seemed to draw around him like a cloak. I pushed myself up and looked round.

Father Günther stood in the doorway holding a lamp, straining to see in. ‘Johann?’

I stammered something unintelligible. ‘I heard a scream.’

‘The press squeaked. I was demonstrating it to… to my friend.’

Günther moved the lamp so that Kaspar’s face swam out of the darkness. He gave him a searching stare but said nothing.

‘If all is well…’ he said doubtfully.

‘I will be fine.’

Kaspar had come back, but he was not the same. The darkness in his nature, which I had once accepted as the inevitable shadows of a brilliant sun, had consumed him. After that first, terrible night, he did not talk about what he had suffered; nor, thank God, did he attack me. I forgave him that – what I could not accept were the small changes. The tiny cruelties, the savagery in his eyes. Like a ghost, he could chill a room the moment he entered it. I resisted the idea as long as I could, but in the end I was forced to admit it. I did not love him any more.

Yet his talent remained. Even the demons that ravaged him could not quench his interest in the work of the book. I encouraged it: I hoped it might draw out some of the poison and fix his mind on purer things. I gave him a room at the top of the house: ink, pens, brushes, paper, whatever he needed. And he repaid me.

He showed me one evening, when I climbed to the attic after the rest of the press crew had gone. Kaspar sat at a sloping desk at the far end of the room. He was writing intently and did not look up as I entered.

I leaned over to see what was on the desk. A single leaf of paper, twice the size of the indulgences, criss-crossed with faint pencil lines and sweeping arcs like the blueprint for a cathedral. A heavier line roughed out a rectangle in the middle of the paper, subdivided into two weighty columns like pillars on the page. Kaspar had shaded them with the flat of the pencil, except on the first line of the first column where he had written in a bold, meticulous hand, ‘In principio creavit deus celi et terram.’ In the beginning God created heaven and earth.

‘This is how it should look,’ Kaspar said. He traced one of the arcs with his finger. ‘The most harmonious proportions. Your perfect book.’

I rested my hand gently on his shoulder, imagining the columns filled with rows of words. ‘It’s beautiful.’

He seemed to be waiting for something more. When I said nothing, he sighed.

‘You see how I have written the letters so they fill the column exactly, edge to edge? No scribe could do that except by luck. It took me a dozen attempts to do it just for this one line. But with your types, you can control the exact position of every word, every letter. Like a god.’

I knew at once that he was right. I could feel the familiar resonance, the echo of angels singing. I had been so busy staring down, getting each letter to print evenly, I had not raised my gaze to consider the broader scheme. We could arrange the words so that each line was as solid as carved stone: massy columns of text supporting the weight of the word of God. Something no human hand could do.

In the fading light, my old eyes blurred. For a second, I focused not on the shaded columns on the page but at the wide, white surrounds. Background and foreground reversed themselves: the blank paper became a window framing the misty darkness beyond its panes. The scribbled pencil marks seemed to swirl like ink drops in water, threading themselves into words that spoke of God.

It was the last, best gift Kaspar gave me.

Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

The battered Volkswagen crawled along the street. No one noticed it, except maybe the snowmen standing sentinel on the suburban lawns. If anyone had been watching, they would have been struck by the car’s erratic progress. It nosed forward a few yards, braked suddenly, paused, then lurched into gear again. A few moments later it repeated the manoeuvre. Perhaps the driver was afraid of ice – except that the road had been ploughed and salted only that afternoon. Perhaps he was lost, or drunk. That might explain why the car always stopped in the shadows.

‘In a different neighbourhood we’d be arrested for soliciting,’ Nick complained.