Free Gutenberg's Apprentice by Alix Christie Page A

Jakob or the children.
    “That’s good. This place is just too backward for belief.” Heilant ran a hand across his face. “I’ll see who I can show you to. Perhaps sneak you in to chapter mass.”
    “Mass?” Peter said, surprised.
    “You don’t imagine we would go without it, just because some peasants think that they’re in charge?” Heilant’s smile was barbed. “The ban will soon be lifted anyhow. They’ll take His Grace’s offer and say please and thank you as he rams it down their throats—and all of it in time for Advent.”
    “You sound as if you know.” Peter looked at Heilant’s rosy face, the cheeks of one who in his later years would tend to floridness and fat; he scanned the room and took in all those larded monks, and saw as if in shadow all the townsfolk, saying their own prayers in their frigid houses. A feeling of revulsion rose.
    “It’s just a question of the price.” Heilant gave a careless shrug. “If they can’t pay, they’ll have to take the terms their bankers—and their betters—dictate.”
    Somehow Hans had talked the master into freeing them a few hours every Sabbath afternoon. They were as thick as thieves, that master and his foreman; even Konrad, the big pressman, did not have the right to talk to Gutenberg as the old smith did. Peter spent the cold gray afternoons inside his father’s house, writing out his Cicero to pass the hours.
    Grede tucked her feet beneath her as they sat before the fire, and said it felt just like old times. “One of us, at least, is glad to have you home,” she said.
    He made a face and kept on writing. “Come, read to me,” Grede said, patting the seat beside her. “From Proverbs, please.”
    He wiped his pen, blew on his sheet. Reading was as good as anything; at least that way he didn’t have to speak. “You ought to learn to read,” he said. “You could.”
    “I leave that to Tina.” Grede’s eyes were calm. They swiveled to the whirring mantel clock. “She’ll be down shortly.”
    She’d roped him into teaching Tina’s chubby hands to form her letters in a tray of wax. No child of mine, Grede said, will grow in darkness as I have. How Peter had always admired her: the way she steered that older, slightly pompous husband with the gentlest of touches, her calm persistence covering the steel beneath. He felt a twinge at hiding so much from her now. Once they had been so close, conspirators in youth and their own unexpected freedom. They’d kicked their shoes off, eaten with their fingers, thrown snowballs at each other when her husband was away. Like brother and sister they had always been, determined to make life obey.
    “For just a while, but then I must be off.”
    “Not on the Sabbath? Shame.” Grede raised one dark, arched eyebrow.
    “I only meant to take a walk.” His tone was sharper than intended. He took the small handwritten Bible from the shelf. When he sat down, he felt her eyes reproach him.
    “What should I say?” His voice was querulous, but he was powerless to change it—powerless, in fact, in every way. “Everything I do here is at someone else’s pleasure.”
    “I wouldn’t have asked a favor then, if I had known.”
    “I should have thought that it was obvious.” He flipped the pages, lifted up the crimson band of silk.
    Grede frowned and, shaking her head, restrained him with a hand. “Stop fighting everything and place your trust in God.”
    “How long? Tell me. You must know—if he shares more with you than just his bed.”
    He regretted it the instant it was out. She flushed and drew back.
    “How you have changed,” she said.
    How could he not have, once he’d tasted freedom and felt his destiny begin to beat inside? Could none of them see this? He felt it in him, greatness—he had practiced all his life, done everything they’d asked of him. In his mind’s eye the archdiocese of Mainz rolled out across the valleys either side of the great Rhine. He saw the tiny, jeweled