Gutenberg's Apprentice (29 page)

The boy produced a sheet and thrust it toward him.

“How came you here? Who steered you to this house?”

The herder looked at him through narrowed eyes. “I look for Gutenberg.”

“He lives down the road.”

“This here’s his works. He took the hides in here.” The man moved as if to enter; Peter barred the way.

“He isn’t here. But I’m empowered to conduct his business.” He took the paper off the boy. “He owes you then, you say.”

“In consequence of three hundred fifty skins of six-month calves,” it said, priced at six shillings each. The total, 45 guilder, had been struck out, replaced by 35, a scrawled notation “15 down” in Gutenberg’s crabbed hand.

“I see,” he said. Peter looked harder at the man. Why had he come, why was he sent, at this very hour, this very day? “No date,” said Peter, flicking the receipt with one hard finger.

“This time the year just past.” The face turned one shade darker. “The whole stock market is my witness.”

Peter too recalled those heaps of skins, close to overwhelming the poor donkeys as they stumbled from the livestock pens. Damn him, he thought. Damn him.

“Why did you not go to his house? He made the terms.” Peter temporized. Gutenberg had left no lockbox, only coins to keep the men in food.

“His man said he was on a journey. As I would fain be too.” The herder’s hand went to his belt, where hung a battered sheath.

Hans jerked his head, and they conferred. He could get ten off of Lorenz; Henne had a secret jar. As Grede kept her own store for an emergency, thought Peter. He eyed the herder for an instant, recognizing the lean men of his own native farmland.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Black Forest way.”

Gutenberg’s apprentice, now his foreman, nodded. “While you’re waiting, have a bite.” He left them in the courtyard in Frau Beildeck’s care, but not before he locked the workshop and closed up the shutters. “Hey!” said Keffer. “Light a candle,” Peter growled.

The bastard, he was thinking. Timed his trip, most likely, to the monthly livestock market. Kept his head down while the drovers and the butchers did their business in four legs with all the traders.
The wily bastard
, he was still intoning deep inside, as he told Grede in all sincerity that Fust would pay the man if he were there.

Both of the partners were due back now any day. Peter paid the herdsman and watched his whittled staff and belted robe receding down the lane. He shook his head and looked up briefly at St. Martin’s red stone steeple. Who else? The chandler, papermaker, varnish man? He chuckled then and crossed himself and closed the little door cut in the portal. He had been warned.

A few days later, Peter heard from his cousin Jakob that a merchant stopping at the Kaufhaus out of Erfurt had been asking awkward questions on the trading floor. His uncle sent his son to tell him, not a serving boy; Peter understood it was a warning. A year had passed since all the guilds had taken gold for silence, but patience had its limits.

Jakob the younger was a thick man, dark-haired like his mother, not that quick. “There’s them that wager you are casting weapons,” he said. “They know they’re not to talk, but . . .” Up and down went his broad shoulders. “The point is that your ship is leaky—so my father says.”

The Erfurt merchant had inquired if Fust was in the city, as he’d like to buy a book. They had been saved by a swift wagoneer who said he wasn’t—but his brother was Fust’s other half. He’d pointed the fellow to Jakob’s great fine house, built by their father right across from the cathedral. A lucky thing, Jakob the younger said, though Peter knew it was not simply luck. He wondered only how his uncle answered—if he’d impressed upon the man the need for some discretion, and if so, exactly how. They could not say the thing was secret, not from Dietrich—only whisper meaningfully that this technique was of such value, and so marvelous, that none should hear of it until the Book was done. Then he could brandish it as proudly as he pleased, one of the lucky few to hold one in his hands. That at any rate is how the printer would present the thing, if he were charged with sales—which, God be praised, he wasn’t. Why in the devil had his father stopped to show the quires in Erfurt, anyway? It was too close, thought Peter, and too thick with clergymen.

That was the question Gutenberg put sharply to his father too, when in October they both returned home. They rattled in and overlapped just like those tin-plate skaters on the tower clock. Gutenberg was bright-eyed, rested, clean, as if he’d stopped quite close to Mainz the night before, in Eltville or at St. Viktor’s.

“How much did you get done?” He threw his cloak off, thrusting it at Peter, then kept moving down the hall. Peter looked at Hans, who rolled his rheumy eyes; he tossed the cloak toward a chair, not caring if it fell. The man moved through the workshop room by room, touching things as if to leave his scent in every corner.

“You might have told me I’d have visitors,” Peter told him. First there had been the creditor, and then a nosy merchant. Gutenberg went still, his dark eyes moving between Hans and Peter. “I’d be obliged next time,” his foreman said, “if you’d leave more than Lorenz’s jar.”

“You’re worse than an old woman.” The master waved a hand peevishly. And then that hand crept up and started worrying the fringes of his beard.

They both jumped to hear Fust’s voice a few hours later, greeting someone in the yard. Peter laid aside his composing stick and stood, but Gutenberg was faster, always; he’d already darted to the door. He grasped his partner by the arm and steered him back out into the fall sunlight. Peter watched the way he turned his back, as if the two of them were all that mattered, and the workshop simply ran itself. Silently he followed, pulling shut the door. He was taller than his father, nearly as tall as Gutenberg, and yet more muscled, stronger than the master now. He inserted himself between them.

“You plunder my own household, I have heard,” Fust drily said. “Ten guilders here, ten guilders there.” He tipped his head in greeting at his son.

“And you shoot off your mouth to merchants.”

“There was a merchant here from Erfurt,” Peter clarified. “Inquiring after Fust’s new Bible.”

His father’s lips pulled tight. “Damnation.”

“I said you’d best take care in how you peddled it,” growled Gutenberg.

“He used the word?” Fust turned to Peter. “He called it, actually, a Bible?” His eyes were troubled. Peter shrugged. “I wasn’t there. Your ‘fine new book,’ or something like it—Jakob knows, he spoke to him.”

“God’s beard, Johann,” said Gutenberg. “We don’t need this.”

“Don’t tell me what we need.” Now it was Fust who growled, his broad face flat, his eyes reduced to slits. “
You
need to get it finished.” He bent his head and dropped his voice. “That man from Avignon has disappeared. But not before he trained some others, I am told.” He looked up toward the workshop window. “You have to speed it up, now, get it moving.”

“What others?” hissed Gutenberg.

“What does it matter? Anybody, damn it, can’t you see how little time we have?” Fust’s voice rose and a flush began to spread up his thick neck. “The longer you drag on, the likelier it is that someone else will get there first.” He turned to Peter. “What is the holdup? Tell me that.”

“There is no holdup,” Peter answered. A man like Fust could never understand the sheer backbreaking labor of it. “I drive them harder than is human.”

“Unless you want to build another press and hire more hands,” said Gutenberg. He glanced at Peter, just the barest flicker that went back and forth between them:
Lord, these moneymen
. “Which I don’t guess you do. If I were you, Johann, I’d go home and relax.”

“Relax?” Fust’s face contorted. “How should I, when you bleed me dry—with not a blessed thing to show for it? Your bloody needs are endless.”

“We only said that Erfurt is too close,” said Peter.

“You think that I don’t know?” His father turned on him. “I don’t see guilders raining from the heavens, though, now do I?”

“It wouldn’t cost so much if we weren’t forced to pay for all the bleeding widows.” Gutenberg cocked one eyebrow. “You know I never saw the gain from drawing in the guilds.”

“Water under the bridge,” snapped Fust.

“It can’t be run in drips, like piss. We need more, yes—but not like this.”

“You got deposits on a third, or even half.” His father’s eyes blazed. “That isn’t piss.”

Ten guilders down on every paper copy, twenty on the vellum; swiftly Peter reckoned. Deposits on a third of the edition came to seven hundred fifty guilders—if Fust had managed to sell half, they’d banked at least a thousand.

“It goes like shit through a goose. Ink and gullets, coal and candles.” The master lifted up one corner of his mouth. “You still owe me for this last half year, in fact.”

Fust shook his head and muttered to his son instead: “Then show me where we are.”

Peter walked him through the shop and showed him their position on the chart. “Not even halfway,” said his father. His whole body seemed to sag.

“Next time we talk, I want to see your ledgers,” he told his partner as he left.

Sardonically, the master touched a finger to his temple and bowed down.

CHAPTER 4

BITTER WATER

        
[31.5 quires of 65]

        
8 November 1453

A
ND YET the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away.

His father had departed one last time before the winter, toward the north; the master too was off “prospecting,” as he called it. The six compositors were seated quietly setting type that wet November afternoon. A paperboy came running down the hall and said there was a dreadful banging. One look at that white face and Peter knew. “It’s Mistress Grede,” the girl gasped. “Hannah says that you’re to fetch the midwife, quick.”

Peter grabbed a boy to send a note. “Her name’s Maria Lambeth, in the lane behind St. John the Baptist. You know it?” The dazed boy nodded. Peter scratched some words on two small sheets. “Then take the other to my aunt, Frau Fust, the
Kaisersberg
. Hurry! Go!”

Hans told him: “You go, too.”

The terror in his heart erased all sight of the familiar lanes and houses. All Peter saw was that girl’s white, white face—and then the housekeeper’s, all chalky too, her fist against her mouth.

“What is it?” he demanded as he leapt the stairs.

“She’s bleeding, sir.”

The chamber door stood open and the cook was bent above the bed. Grede lay among the bedclothes, skin the same bleached linen white, her eyes glazed wide.

The bed was filled with blood, her body from the hips down wrapped in rags that blotted crimson just as fast as the cook could wind them. Peter raised a hand to shield the sight. Grede reached for it, and he could only clutch her hand the way the terror clutched his heart. Dear God, he prayed. There was so much blood.

“The midwife’s coming,” he said. The cook just nodded, lips compressed.

“I don’t want to die.” Grede’s voice was twisted, trembling, then it dropped, subsiding with her strength. She fell back on the bed.

“Hush, don’t say such things.” He stroked her slick white forehead. “Think of your life. Your strong and healthy babes.”

Her face crumpled, and she turned from him and wept.

“I bathed,” she blurted frantically. “Oh God, dear God.” Her eyes flew open, hard now, bright as flints. “What have I done, why does He punish me?” Her hand flew to her mouth.

The cook wrung out a cloth and placed it on her brow, and gave him a swift warning look. Where was the midwife, where his aunt? Oh, Grede. What did he know of women, or of bearing children? The pains she felt were deeper than a man could guess.

“Don’t take my child,” she begged the Lord as that bright blood ebbed from her womb. And yet the patron saint withdrew her grace that day.
There shall not be one fruitless nor barren in thy land
. The empty promises of Exodus.

Much later she would say to him that she, and her poor babe, had paid for all the rest of them. Like downy chicks, the first to feel an ill wind’s ill effects. It was the hatred and despair, she said, that swirled like noxious fumes across the empire and the city in those days—if not yet through their workshop.

The women came at last, with herbs and boiling water: Lambeth with her surgeon’s hands and Aunt Elisabeth. Grede squeezed his hand and let her head fall back on to the pillow. “Fetch Johann,” she rasped.

He sent a message with the traders’ fastest rider, and returned to take up vigil on the stairs. He prayed to God, in humbleness, to save her—to keep her life, and take the child’s. As his blood father, in his time—he realized with savage insight—most certainly had done. He bowed his head, beseeching.

What right, what birthright, had a man? What good were his books and tools, the business of his hands? Peter felt his heart cleave as he paced, hearing nothing but the women’s murmurs and the clanking of the pans.

It came to him with certainty: the higher they reached toward heaven’s stars, the farther their feet lifted from God’s earth.

The door swung open finally. The midwife, in a bloody apron, stood a moment to collect herself. She closed her eyes, and opened them, and put a hand out on his arm.

“She’ll live,” she said. “But God has taken back the child.”

He heard his old friend weeping, cries to rend the world, behind the heavy wooden door. He moved to go to her, but when he did, the midwife gripped him all the tighter.

“There’s nothing you can do,” she said, “but leave her to grieve.”

There’d be no public mourning for the unborn babe. Fust held that something few had known should be lamented in the privacy of home. Perhaps he felt too great a show of feeling would diminish him somehow. It was hard to know. All Peter knew was that he’d never heard a woman tear into a man the way Grede did when Fust refused to let her hang the mourning wreaths. She dressed in black from that day on regardless. She knelt for hours at St. Quintin’s in bleakest penance, bludgeoned by the thought of that small, unbaptized soul alone in limbo. The sorrow spread, unnamed, through the timbers of the Haus zur Rosau.