Gutenberg's Apprentice (40 page)

“He gives us gifts, out of His grace.” Brack’s gaunt old face was luminous, and sage. “And then He watches us, to see how we will use them.”

“To serve the Lord, you mean, or else our private gain.” Peter did not try to hide his bitterness.

Brack smiled, and placed a hand upon his forearm. “We do not live upon this earth, my son, quite long enough to judge.”

His vision drifted over Mainz’s rooftops and her spires, the remnants of the ancient camp beneath her vineyards and her orchards. “The Romans, too, were geniuses at engineering. Inventors of such marvelous techniques. Yet they have left us nothing but some stones and rubble.”

CHAPTER 4

SPONHEIM ABBEY

        
March 1486

F
OR THE LONGEST TIME he thought he could prevent it. Peter would hold the two of them together as they strained apart, through his sheer strength, the force of his own will.

“The thought was unacceptable to me, that the workshop might be torn apart.”

Outside Sponheim Abbey winter has redoubled its assault, as if to punish the temerity of crocuses and hope. A freezing rain beats at the windows in which Peter sees reflected one old man, his hair gone pewter, and the back of one young Benedictine less than half his age. It strikes him that he’s nearly the same age the master was, the year he died.

“This . . . altercation,” asks the abbot, “happened the same year the pope declared Crusade?”

The printer shakes his head. “The summer after. The princes and the clergy met incessantly for months, but could not come to terms.”

It was that letter of indulgence that destroyed the workshop, he has always felt. “It might have ended differently, but for the Turk.”

Again the abbot gives a little smile. “Yet as I’ve said, the book was done, as well as both of those
confessionalia
.”

“It wasn’t the letters per se—but what they represented. Lies. Deceit. That was the fundamental breach.” Methodically, Peter sets out the counts of treason.

“First Gutenberg concealed too much. But more than that—he put the Book at risk. He was prepared, as well, to fleece my father and the guilds. Ends for him always justified the means, however roughshod he might run you over.”

“And you,” the abbot says, “were caught between the hammer and the anvil.”

Mirthlessly, Peter laughs. “The insane thing is that I still
hoped
. I had this wild belief that all would come out right, if we could only make it to the fair.” He shakes his head. “We were so close! I thought if we could just hold on, the revenues would fill the holes—especially that gulf that since the prophecy had grown between them.” He shakes his head again and strokes his throat, a tenderness inside for his young self.

“I put my whole self on the line. I nearly killed myself, to make that second letter, carving every night those final weeks.” So cruelly had he pressed the crew and his own body that he hardly can recall that final burst. They were machines by then, churning blindly, truly.

“You didn’t use Hans’s type?” asks Trithemius, surprised.

“I didn’t want to give him even that small satisfaction.” Peter looks the abbot in the eyes. Deceit will breed deceit; in those last months when he had felt betrayed, he’d kept his secrets, too. “Besides, I had my reasons. Technical improvements I was working on, that I could use a smaller alphabet to test.”

The abbot waits, but Peter says no more. There is a kind of stiffness to the monk as he sits facing him, the printer thinks. He is polite, but something in his attitude suggests he is more critical inside. So be it: every chronicler must sift the stories he is told.

Trithemius will never see the shining city they had built, like Augustine’s, inside that workshop dug into the earth. He’ll never know how it was both monastic cell and nave to that young man and all who labored there. Peter wipes a hand across his face. He’s had his fill of boats and wagons driving up this muddy forest track; he’s tired of telling the whole sordid tale. It’s painful still—the recognition is unwelcome. He’d thought that he’d forgiven them both long ago. But now he finds they’re still inside his mind, both of those fathers, locked so blindly in their battle that they can’t perceive the hellfire that they rain on those below.

How zealous—yet how fragile—he had been. He feels a twinge of pity for that stern young man, who offered his own self as the connecting wire—the thin gray bead of solder.

CHAPTER 5

FRIDAY AFTER THE TRANSLATION OF SAINT BENEDICT

        
[62 of 65 quires]

        
12 July 1454

B
oth hostages were freed, after some haggling over the cut that Mainz would get from every letter of indulgence printed for the Cologne diocese. The only one remotely pleased with this was Jakob. Gutenberg returned, his body clean, his bearing truculent; he thrust a packet under Peter’s nose. “Accounts, in black and white,” he said, and turned his back. No word of thanks, not even an acknowledgment; Peter should have known. The man could not be humbled. Just the reverse: his manner was abrupt, offended. How dare they question his veracity, was all his haughty look, his brisk resumption of command, conveyed.

He took a Bible sheet up off the press, found fault with it, asked querulously where the devil his own letter was. “Set up for press,” came Hans’s answer. Peter turned and made his escape. The packet in his hands was thick with wax, stamped front and back with that queer pilgrim’s seal. As if he’d even think to spy its contents. The workshop’s debts, thank God, were not his cross to bear. He had enough to carry with this second letter and those final quires.

Rapidly he walked down to the Brand and put his head in at the Haus zur Rosau. He heard his stepsister’s keening from the moment Lothar opened the front door. The wails were coming from the kitchen door that gave out on the courtyard.

Tina’s back was shaking from the sobs that racked her skinny frame. She didn’t cease her frenzied wailing even when he sat down on the stoop beside her. “There, there,” he said, and moved his palm in circles on her back. Grede must have left her there to blow the tempest out; no doubt she’d tried, and failed, to calm her. “Tina, my big Tina girl,” he whispered. “What’s wrong? Give me your hands.”

She turned tear-thundered eyes on him and hiccupped, sniffed, resumed her keening at a lower and less frantic pitch. He lifted her limp hands and sandwiched them between his. “Now, chickadee, tell me what’s wrong.”

“Cassius,” she gulped, “and Prinz. Father says—” She drew a ragged breath, and then came sobs.

“Father says what?”

“That they are to be sold. Oh, Peter!” she cried, turning and flinging both arms about his neck. “Say you can stop him. He is mean and cruel to take my very favorites!”

He clucked and soothed and looked across the courtyard to the stables. “Papa can’t do everything. He must have a good reason.” The meaning of it bowed his shoulders, too.

He would not say to her that they were only horses. Only beasts—albeit Fust’s most steady team. Two of the six that pulled his convoys and his wagons, and when home would whicker softly for their apples from the stalls. “Perhaps we’ll find a way to keep them, or to visit them, at least,” he said. She pulled away; she knew it was a lie.

In all these years not once had Fust been forced to sell a horse. He’d leased them out, from time to time, when things were tight. The letter with the master’s ledger dug at Peter’s side. How bad was it, if Fust must sell the very assets he depended on to ply his trade? The interest on the loans that ran the workshop totaled a hundred guilders every year, Peter knew—part to the Jew, part to the Lombard.

Gently he disentangled Tina’s arms and carried her inside. Grede came as he was laying her, a raglike bundle, on the couch. “It’s better now,” he said, and Grede put a cool hand on the child’s brow. “Sleep,” she whispered. The two of them stood watching for a moment, then went out. Grede draped the cloth she carried on the table. “Won’t you join us, just this once?” She gave him a wan smile. “It’s been so long.”

“It’s true, then, that he’s selling them?”

“Yes. Although it breaks his heart.”

“Things are that bad.”

She looked exhausted. “The wagons are too light, the hay too dear.” She must have seen the way it shocked him. “We’ll find a way.” A rueful look came over her. “It’s not like I’ve not been this low before.” She turned and started laying out the plates. “Just be a dear and fetch him from the Kaufhaus.”

On the Brand a group of traveling fiddlers had attracted a small crowd. Their music, though, was harsh and discordant to his ears. He slipped with some relief into the silence of the customs hall. Climbing each step, worn into hollows by the tread of countless feet, he was assailed by memories of all the evenings he’d been sent there as a boy. How often had he been dispatched by Fust’s first wife, and then his second, on this very errand? How proudly he had come into the Kaufhaus those first months in Mainz: swelled up with pride, circumnavigating those great heaping piles, before ascending to the office and his task.

Fust was just locking up when he arrived. “So you are back to playing herald.”

“Grede sent me, sir.” Peter smiled slightly, bowed.

His father looked at him for a long moment, as if he too measured the years behind.

“Before you go, you’ll want to lock up this.” Peter pulled the letter from his waist and gave it over. Fust hefted it with his right hand. Without a word he turned the key again, and Peter followed him back in. When Fust had stowed it in his strongbox and locked up the cupboard with a second key, he turned to find his son entirely still and staring fixedly at him.

“What else?” Impatience edged his down-turned mouth.

Better now than later, Peter thought, when Fust had read the contents of that letter—though this was far from how he’d hoped this scene would go.

“I’d like to ask again for your permission, sir.” He held his cap before him, twisted in his hands. “I still would marry Anna, with your blessing. If you can find it to accept this as my choice.”

“If I can find it,” Fust said quietly. He looked at Peter’s cap, then back up at his face. “My say-so hasn’t counted much, these past few years.”

“I did your bidding.” He’d never satisfy him, ever. “I stayed, as you requested, learned this trade. I think I’ve done my duty by your wishes.”

Fust took a long breath, and then he slowly let it out. They stood a pace apart, but between them Peter sensed a packed and hard-edged distance, dense with disappointments.

“You left me long ago,” his foster father murmured. “Your choices, as you call them, have been yours a good long while—more his, I think, than mine.”

“This isn’t anything to do with him—but me, my life.”

Fust gave the lightest shrug. “I have no power over you. You’re nearly thirty, well past any hope of listening to guidance.”

“I’ve listened to you more than half my life.” Peter’s chest was filling now, the heaviness between them seeping ineluctably inside. “I listen to you still, and ask you to consider my own happiness.”

The large head dipped, and Peter saw the losses layered in those once-bright eyes. “I wish you well—you know I’ve always only wished for you the best,” his father said.

“Then wish me this,” he softly answered. “We’ve almost done what we set out to do—together. Let’s finish it that way. Let me remain—not lost to you, but near, giving you books, and grandchildren to honor you, as long as I am able.”

Fust closed his eyes and sought; he prayed. His forehead creased as he stood waiting to receive, head bowed above the linen altar of the chest on which reposed his crucifix.

“Go then with God.” He opened up his eyes. “May you and yours remain forever in His hands.” He held one hand out toward his son, a look unreadable upon his face—bittersweet in parting, yet softened by the bond that always would exist between them.

His hand hung half a heartbeat in the air until Peter clasped it.

“I always hoped and prayed to make you proud,” he said. “And that will never change.”

A flicker lifted Fust’s gray lips, and with a nod he shifted toward him and the two of them embraced.

What was this feeling that shot through him, prying open every vessel underneath his skin? That prickled at the lining of his chest, lifted the blood into his cheeks, the hairs upon his arms, as he stood with one hand lifted at that bright blue door? The gold of summer lighted the blue glaze, the same blue tint that once had stained her fingertips. He’d half forgotten he could feel this, had consigned it to a frozen depth. But now he knew, his fingers reaching for the knocker: this was joy.

Klaus Pinzler’s shock was clear upon his narrow, bearded face. His mouth worked for an instant as he looked upon the long-lost suitor on his doorstep. His eyes went to the bunch of daisies Peter had gone culling from the fields.

“I’m much delayed,” said Peter slowly, letting time expand, so that in this one drawn-out instant the whole year past might dissolve. “I’ve been a fool,” he told the man. “But I would hope to learn more patience in this house.”

Klaus wonderingly shook his head. Across his cheeks, a fleeting twitch. “You are a lucky man.” His lips made a straight line. “Luckier by far than I might have allowed.”

Anna, then, had spoken of him somehow. Her father stepped back and opened wide their house.

Peter should have made his declaration then—as Anna’s mother came to join Klaus, drying off her hands and searching Peter’s face, his Sunday clothes, with anxious eyes. But this to him would have been one more wrong he did their daughter. These were new times, he a new man. He could not ask her father until he showed her the respect that she was due: to choose herself, and to give freely her own hand.

“With your permission, I would speak to Anna,” Peter said. Klaus looked at his wife. Alone, he’d have refused, but Anna’s mother nodded.

Above them, stepping lightly down her ladder, floating almost, Anna came: not retiring, but aglow, her dark hair flowing. Her parents disappeared behind the curtain to the kitchen. Peter held his arms out as she put her foot on the last step but two, and she released the rail and soared toward him. He smelled vanilla in her hair and musk; his lips brushed the soft down upon her cheek. Blood hammering, he set her down, hands lingering about her ribs, the dainty cage that held her heart. Her skirts were full as he went down upon his knees.