He threw his cigarette butt onto the floor and ground it out with the toe of his shoe. Emily went up to the information desk.

‘I had a message in the reading room. Is there a Nick Ash to see-’

‘Right here.’

A hand clamped on her arm so tight she thought the bone would snap. It pulled her away from the nodding receptionist and spun her towards the door, pulling her along. Fear froze her into obedience. Was this what had happened to Gillian? She looked up and saw a heavyset man with a crooked nose and bristling black eyebrows. His left arm reached across his body to hold her; his right jabbed something round and blunt into the small of her back.

‘I have a gun. Do not scream; do not try to run.’

She would never have run. Her legs were jelly; she could barely walk. Her captor almost had to drag her across the carpet. They were halfway to the door already. Outside, the man in the puffer jacket hurried to meet them.

The beep of an alarm cut through her panic. By the entrance, the security guard was patting down a long-haired student whose profusion of chains and studs had set off the metal detector. Emily stared at it. Could you really get a gun through that? Or was he bluffing?

‘Please don’t take me,’ she whispered to her captor. They were almost at the exit. ‘I know what you want. It’s in my bag. You can have it. Just please let me go.’

He paused just shy of the velvet rope that marked the edge of the foyer. At least he was listening. He looked down at her empty hands.

‘Where is your bag?’

She jerked her head at the cloakroom. ‘I had to check it in before I went to the reading room.’

As abruptly as he’d grabbed her, he swivelled her back around and marched her towards the cloakroom. Just before they got there he let her go, pushing her off balance so that she stumbled headlong into the counter. She thrust her ticket at the startled attendant, who came back a moment later with her brown bucket bag. As soon as she had it in her hands she felt the grip back on her elbow.

‘One euro,’ said the attendant.

Emily snapped open the bag and rummaged in the bottom. The vice around her arm tightened; she felt faint with the pain. But she’d found what she was looking for. She pulled out a coin – but she was clumsy. It slipped out of her fingers and dropped onto the carpet.

She smiled a weak apology at the attendant and made to bend down and pick it up. Unsure whether to allow it or not, her captor loosened his grip.

It was enough. She came up faster than he’d expected, knocking him back off balance. That brought her room to turn around. She thrust her hand up towards his face and before he could respond, squeezed hard on the can wrapped in her fist.

A jet of pepper spray erupted from the nozzle, straight into his face. He reeled away clutching his eyes. An alarm bell started to screech; Emily wondered if the spray might have triggered a smoke detector. But it was coming from the door. The man in the puffer jacket had seen what was happening and had burst in, triggering the metal detector. He was reaching inside his bulky coat, then went down as a security guard tackled him to the floor.

Emily picked up her bag and fled.

Strassburg

A paw was taking shape. Just as the mother bear licks unformed flesh into the shape of her young, the chisel’s tongue rasped against the stone to carve the image. I could already see the curve of a haunch bulging out of the block; a sloping back and a knob that would become an ear or a snout.

The stone carver stood over his bench in the square and chipped it out. Behind him loomed the cathedral, where the animal would eventually graze among pillared glades and vaulted branches.

This is how God forms us all, I thought: raining down blows to draw out shapes from the crude stone of our creation. A tap and a crack, a puff of dust, the rattle of fragments falling on the cobbles. Another piece of our imperfection cut away. The smoothest skin is scar tissue.

‘The curve of the knee is too sharp.’

A shadow fell over the bench. Drach had arrived, stealing up behind me in silence. He glanced at the bear, emerging from the stone as if from a forest, then at the drawing pinned to the tabletop.

The stone carver looked up. He was well-used to Drach’s interruptions. ‘The bear needs to fit the column. I made him crouch lower.’

Drach laughed and swung away. I followed him through the stone yard. It was like a cemetery: a field of stones in every stage of refinement, from boulders fresh out of the quarry to fluted sections of arches that only wanted a keystone to make them stand erect.

‘That is the way to create copies,’ Drach said. ‘I make a picture and he copies it. What could be simpler?’

‘You said yourself it isn’t a true copy.’

‘True enough.’

‘Not for me.’

We sat down on a roughly dressed ashlar. On a stone capital opposite, a bearded man parted foliage like curtains and peered out. I squinted, but it was not one of Kaspar’s.

‘I have found a way we can raise the money,’ he said, without preamble.

A season had passed since our experiment in Dritzehn’s cellar. I had not meant it to, but sometimes time escapes all plan and reason. For three days afterwards I could not raise my spirits to even think about it. When the worst of my melancholy had passed, I no longer cared. I found other things to occupy me; I concentrated my energies on earning my living and maintaining my household. My stays in St Argobast became longer; Drach’s visits less frequent. The passion that had run so full in my veins had eased. Yet when Drach sent a boy to call me to this meeting, it had flooded back unbidden, as high as ever.

‘Tell me.’

‘There is a widow in this town named Ellewibel. She lives by the wine market.’

He paused, playing up the suspense. I humoured him. ‘Do you expect me to marry this widow for her fortune?’

‘No. But she has a daughter, Ennelin. Twenty-five years old and not yet married. If Ellewibel could find a husband to take her, the dowry would be immense. All the money we need to advance our art.’

I stared at him. He smiled, nodding, encouraging me to follow his train of thought.

‘That is the most preposterous idea you have ever suggested.’

‘Why?’

‘You know why.’

We had never spoken of the demon that possessed me. But from the moment we had shared our first drink in the Wild Man, he had surely known. He allowed me to wash his back in the river and watch him dress; when he stayed at my house we slept in the same bed wrapped together like an old married couple. Sometimes he allowed my hand to slide into the hollow of his hips, so I could lie awake and torment myself with possibilities. I never went any further. The demon had wormed itself into my soul so deep it had become a part of me, a tumour I could not remove without also destroying myself. Drach was different. I knew he did not desire me, but encouraged my cravings because he loved perversity, danger, the hair-thin ledge he walked along the cliffs of damnation. Perhaps, I begged God in the solitary hours of the night, because he loved me.

But now he was pitiless. ‘You are a bachelor of thirty-some years. You have an income, a house, a good family behind you. Why should you not marry this girl?’

Because I love you, I wanted to scream. But I understood that to say it would destroy everything.

‘If she is twenty-five with a substantial dowry, why is she still unmarried?’

He stroked my cheek with his finger, taunting me. ‘So uncharitable, Johann. She is probably a rosebud who has not yet opened.’

‘At twenty-five?’

‘Then perhaps she is as ugly as a two-headed mule.’ He shrugged. ‘You shouldn’t mind. When indulgences are pouring out of our press like wine, you can buy one to salve your conscience.’