‘Was that what Fust’s letter said?’

‘Not precisely. You can see yourself.’

Olaf twisted in his seat and began fiddling with his wheel-chair. It was an old contraption, with wooden armrests screwed to a metal frame. One of the screws was loose. Olaf scrabbled underneath and slid out a piece of paper folded over and over, concertina-style, so as to be no wider than the armrest.

He handed it to Nick. ‘Even in the blackest hole, information survives.’

‘To the Most Reverend Father in Christ, Cardinal Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini:

I am writing in order that I may humbly acquaint your most exalted person with the injustice which diverse blackguards and vagabonds have caused to be perpetrated in the name of the Church; which deeds, if you knew of them, you would surely deplore, as I do, to the depths of your soul. Yesterday, in the afternoon, two men came to my house by the church of St Quintin, the Humbrechthof. They interrupted various works my son was undertaking there, the nature of which need not detain Your Grace, and ransacked the workshop until they had found a certain book they sought. Though small and unremark able in every way, this book had come into my possession from a particular gentleman known to Your Grace.

Despite my heated protestations, these men took the book away with them. Wherefore I pray Your Grace, if you know anything of this outrage, to bend your authority to seeking out the evil-doers and restoring to me my rightful property.

Johann Fust

Humbrechthof, Mainz

Emily stared at the piece of paper, as wrinkled as Olaf’s skin. ‘You remember it word for word?’

‘The priest took all my papers, but he could not take my memory. Even after the accident. Since then, not a day has gone by when I have not recited it.’

‘Who was Piccolomini?’ said Nick. ‘A man who rose from a farmer’s son to be a cardinal, and eventually pope. He was also a novelist, a poet, a travel writer and a keen horseman.’

‘A real Renaissance man.’

‘Some decades in advance of the Renaissance itself. It is from him, incidentally, that we have the only eyewitness account of Gutenberg’s famous Bible. He saw it at a fair in Frankfurt and wrote to describe it to a fellow cardinal.’

‘ “A particular gentleman known to your Grace,” Emily read off the page. ‘You think it was Gutenberg?’

‘Gillian thought so.’

Olaf looked up. His eyes were pale, the colour dried up long ago. He fixed them on Emily, then Nick, stretching forward, trying to discern something distant.

‘She was right.’ Emily took the reconstruction out of her bag and gave it to him. The paper shivered in his hands.

He sighed deeply and settled forward in his chair. The wrinkles on his face seemed to sag, as if something inside him was slowly deflating. He murmured to himself in German: to Nick it sounded like, ‘Only the spear that made the wound can heal it.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Did Gillian say where she found the reference to this Devils’ Library?’ Emily asked.

‘Here in Mainz – at the Stadtarchiv, the state archive.’

‘I bet it’s gone now,’ said Nick. ‘The men who took your book seem to be pretty good at clearing up after themselves.’

‘By the time she came here, your friend had started to realise this too. So she hid her discovery.’

‘Did she tell you where?’

‘She hid it where she found it,’ said Olaf. For a moment, Nick wondered if his mind had started to wander. ‘The clue – she did not say what it was – she found in an inventory of books from the Benedictine monastery in Eltville. This inventory came in a box which has a bar code for the catalogue. Gillian replaced this with a different bar code. If you look for the Eltville monastery inventory, you will find nothing. If, how ever, you look for a seventeenth-century treatise on agronomy, you may be surprised.’ He wrote the reference on their paper.

‘Did you go and have a look at it.’

Olaf shook his head. ‘It would have been too dangerous. Even now.’

He reached across the pew and grabbed Nick’s arm. Nick flinched, though there was no strength in the withered fingers.

‘I said this library – if it exists – is a hell for condemned books. But books cannot endure torment as humans can. Be careful.’

LXX

Mainz

A sultry day in June. The sun streamed through every crack in the close-packed houses, steaming the limp-hanging laundry and baking the dung on the streets into bricks. Children played in the fountain outside St Christoph’s church, screaming with delight as they splashed each other. Butchers put down their cleavers and wielded horsehair whisks in vain efforts to keep the flies away. The city slumped in a daze, stupefied by the smell and the heat.

I walked down the street from the Gutenberghof towards the Humbrechthof. Behind me, two apprentices hauled a hand cart loaded with small casks. Whatever the neighbours thought we transacted behind the Humbrechthof’s doors and shuttered windows, they knew it was thirsty work. How else to explain all the barrels that rolled down that street?

This was my life’s journey, I thought: a matter of a hundred yards. Past the baker where I had bought sweet pies as a child, the stationer who had sold me my schoolbooks, the sword master who tried to teach me fencing when my father still believed I might become a worthy heir. If I had walked past the Humbrechthof, the same distance would have taken me to the mint where I first glimpsed perfection. I walked more slowly now. The page of my soul bore the imprint of many pressings, some indelible, others written in hard point, invisible to all but the author. The ink was dense, heavy with crossings-out and corrections, new words overwritten on washed-out texts still visible beneath. In places, the nib had nicked tears in the paper. Water had stained it, fire curled the edges.

Today I would start a new page.

In seven months, the Humbrechthof had been transformed. All the walls had been whitewashed against damp. The thatch on the outbuildings had been stripped and replaced with tiles. The weeds in the courtyard had been trampled to dust by the criss-crossing of many feet, and a saw pit dug beside the old pastry kitchen. Stout timbers lay beside it. All the doors brandished new locks, and a heavy block and tackle sprouted from a dormer in the roof. Empty barrels like those that had just arrived stood stacked in a corner waiting to return up the road.

The apprentices unloaded the barrels and prised them open. Inside, large jars of ink lay nestled in straw like eggs. They began to unload, but I gestured them to follow me quickly into the house. Others had seen us arrive and emerged from the outbuildings: the paper shop, the ink store, the tool shed and the refectory. They followed me up the stairs, along the corridor and into the press room.

Everyone was there. Fust, with the haunted look of a soul approaching judgement; Götz, still wearing a leather apron from the forge; Father Günther, whose inky fingers played with the cross around his neck; Saspach, a hammer in his hand ready for any last-minute adjustment; and around them all our assistants and apprentices from both houses, almost twenty men in total. Even Sarum, the ginger cat who kept rats out of the paper store, had wandered in and crouched behind one of the table legs. And in the middle of them all, the press.

It stood like a gate in the centre of the room: two thick uprights, joined at the top and again halfway down by heavy crosspieces. The posts had been nailed into the ceiling and bolted to the floor, so that the whole instrument was knitted into the fabric of the house. A screw descended through the middle and held the platen over a long table that stuck out like an apron between the posts. That supported a flat carriage on runners, which could be slid under the press or pulled out to change the paper and the type. It was far removed from the wobbly device we had first erected in Andreas Dritzehn’s cellar a dozen years earlier.