‘Nick? It’s Simon.’

Nick almost dropped the phone. Emily looked at him and made an O with her mouth. Who?

‘Atheldene,’ Nick whispered. Then, into the phone, ‘How did you get this number?’

‘You rang me from your phone in New York. I’ve been calling for the last twenty-four hours. Didn’t you get my messages?’

‘Where are you?’

‘Mainz. It’s on the Rhine, near Frankfurt.’

Was there something too casual about the way he said it? Too confident, too knowing? Or was Nick just paranoid?

‘Is Mainz nice?’ he asked, trying to sound cool.

‘There’s a lovely Romanesque cathedral and a shop selling chocolate busts of Gutenberg.’ The sarcasm sounded right. ‘But that’s not why I’m here. I rang the office in Paris, found out a package arrived for me the day after we left. Postmarked Mainz. My secretary recognised Gill’s handwriting.’

‘What was in it?’

‘Something you should see. Can you get to Mainz?’

‘Not right now. Can you tell me what it says?’

‘It would be easier to show you.’

Nick’s head began to throb. ‘For God’s sakes, Atheldene, we’re trying to find Gillian. This isn’t a time to be playing games.’

‘I quite agree. Why don’t you tell me where you are?’

Nick hesitated. Atheldene gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Have you heard of the prisoners’ dilemma? Two men in a cell. If they trust each other, they go free. If they don’t, they both hang. That’s where we are.’

Still Nick didn’t say anything. He was jammed, frozen by the uncertainties clogging his mind.

‘Gill was definitely in Mainz two weeks ago. I’ve been to the archives here: they remembered her. We’re near, Nick.’

‘What was in the parcel Gillian sent?’

Atheldene paused. Then: ‘Fine. You want my quid pro quo? It was the first page of the bestiary you ran off with from Brussels. Somebody had cut it out – I suppose Gillian must have found it. I’ve taken a photo of it on my phone and I’m sending it to you now. Hold on.’

Nick waited. Was this another trap? Every second he was on the line he felt his anxiety rising.

A background chime announced that a message had arrived. Atheldene must have heard it on his end.

‘Now – where are you?’

Perhaps it was because he was tired. Perhaps it was because Atheldene’s voice, however patronising and unhelpful, was a rare touch of something familiar. Perhaps it was the desperation in his plea. If we don’t trust each other, we both hang.

‘We’re heading to a place on the Rhine called Oberwinter. I’ll call you when we arrive and we’ll figure something out.’

‘I’ll see if I can get there. Travel’s pretty grim at the moment.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Look, I’m sorry we parted ways in Brussels. We should have stuck together. For Gill.’

‘I’d better go.’

‘Wait. There’s…’

Atheldene’s voice broke up, his words crushed into staccato blocks of static. A few seconds later he came back.

‘… what she is.’

‘What was that?’

Nick looked around. They’d come round a bend between two mountains that trapped the river between them, blocking out the signal.

‘I’m losing you.’

More static. Then nothing.

Nick hung up. In his anxiety he almost switched off the phone at once, until a blinking icon on the screen reminded him of the picture Atheldene had sent.

‘I guess if there’s no signal there’s not much way of tracing the phone.’

He opened the image and gave the handset to Emily. It was hard to see much on the small screen. She fumbled with the buttons to zoom in.

‘It’s the standard opening of the bestiary. “The lion is the bravest of all beasts and fears nothing…” There’s the picture.’ A lion with its back arched, roaring so loudly it seemed to send shivers through the adjoining words.

Nick took the phone back and scrolled around the picture. His hands were so numb he almost dropped it in the water.

‘What’s that?’

A mark in the margin near the bottom of the page, too faint to be part of the illumination.

‘Maybe a smudge?’

Nick zoomed in. The pixels blurred, then sharpened themselves. It was a doodle – there was no other word for it – a crude sketch of a rectangular tower with three doors, and a large cross beside it.

‘The cross must mean it’s a church, or maybe a monastery. That would make sense. If the Devils’ Library did exist, a monastery would have been the safest place to keep it.’

Nick stared at the picture a moment longer, then switched off the phone.

‘I hope I did the right thing, telling Atheldene where we’re going.’

Emily wrapped her hand in his and squeezed it. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it now.’

He stared into the water. Off the bow, black-backed rocks lurked beneath the surface like circling sharks.

If we don’t trust each other, we both hang.

LXXIV

Mainz

All that winter we worked like dogs. While October rains flooded the fields and turned the roads to bog, we were stuck in our own mire of ink and lead. I watched carters bruise their shoulders trying to heave their heavy wagons out of the mud, and felt a kinship.

Snow fell in December. As Fust would not allow fires in the Humbrechthof, we froze. I had to send the crews back to the Gutenberghof in shifts, to thaw beside the forge where we boiled ink and recast the old types. It made the short, dark days shorter still. One morning we found the piles of damp paper frozen solid. The presses jammed, and ink would not to stick to the page.

Yet even more fragile was the human machinery. I was making more books than perhaps any man in history, but my fingers rarely touched paper or ink. The whole house had become a mechanism, as intricate as anything Saspach ever built. I was the screw that drove it. Too much pressure and the mechanism would snap; too little, and we would not make an impression. I had to know how many pages the compositors should set each hour, each day, each week, and how many men the task would need, so that the press men neither sat idle nor rushed their work. I had to see which apprentices were quarrel some or placid, sloppy or over-meticulous, and match them accordingly. I had to make sure that it was impossible for a form to reach the press unless it had been approved, and I had to decide how to order the finished quires in the storeroom so that we could divide them correctly when we assembled them into books. These were invisible mechanisms – systems of thought, order and imagination – but they were as necessary to our art as any invention of wood or iron.

And there was Kaspar. At first I tried to put him in charge of a press, but after three days he disappeared. The press sat idle all morning while we searched for him, and Fust was furious. When we found him, in an alehouse, he told me he did not want the job. I told him I would give it to Schoeffer, which angered him so much he agreed to stay on. But I quickly regretted it. He arrived late, quarrelled with his assistants and in short order offended half the men in the Humbrechthof. Sometimes he insisted on re-pressing for the least blemish; at other times, he waved through the most horrendous errors, and I would spend an afternoon digging through the store house to locate them.

Too late, I admitted he was not suited to the work. He delighted in novelty, in the wild freedom of invention. But our task was a discipline as much as an art, novel only in its absolute routine.

One evening, I tried to explain it to him. ‘In this house we are a brotherhood, serving God, our art and each other. The books we make are not mine or yours or Fust’s. They are of God. The more perfect they are, the closer to God they advance.’

‘And will God take the profits when you sell them?’

I shook my head in frustration. ‘You’ve missed the point. The work is boring and repetitive -’

‘Like a hammer banging nails.’