Candlelight filled Michael's private chamber, and parchments and sketches covered the wooden table. Night had settled over the Morea, and Clermont Castle had gone quiet.
The room no longer looked like a despot's study. Against the far wall stood a board of planed oak, blackened with lampblack, and on it, in chalk, the Greek alphabet in neat rows, each letter drawn a hand tall. Beside the letters he had ruled straight lines into columns, a box for each task, figures and dates in the boxes, half of them rubbed out and written over. The carpenter had built the board without asking what it was for. The steward had needed three days to find chalk soft enough to write with, and had muttered that no scribe in the Morea worked standing up. The chambermaids would not touch it. One had seen the rows of letters, crossed herself, and now the kitchens said the Despot wrote charms on his wall.
Michael sat alone at the table, quill in hand, reworking his designs for the printing press. The designs had cost him his evenings for some time now. He remembered the principles, but what the years had worn away were the details: how the type was locked so it could not shift, in what order a man inked, laid the sheet, and pulled. There was nothing to consult. So he worked from the principles down, reasoning out what memory refused. Twice he had woken in the dark with some small piece returned, and had lit a candle to draw it before it faded. The first sketches had come out like furniture, a table with a screw through it. He had scraped them clean and begun again. George was still in Constantinople, hunting artisans and supplies. Until he returned, there was time to lay the groundwork. When the men and materials came, he meant to be ready.
Every few days now he met quietly with Dimitrios the carpenter and Nikolaos the blacksmith. The screw had been settled at the first meeting. Every olive press in the Morea turned on one, Nikolaos said. Give him the measurements and he would cut it. What stopped them, meeting after meeting, was the type. Letters of metal, small as a fingernail, each the same as the last, thousands of them. Dimitrios had taken to turning the sketches sideways, as if a different angle might explain them. The frame at least was simple. Seasoned oak, Dimitrios said, not green, or the whole thing would twist inside a year, and he knew where to find beams that had sat drying for years.
He set down the quill and looked at the board, at the Greek rows he had spent weeks on. The plan had always been Greek. Scripture and the classics, for the clergy and the better families of the Morea.
Then a thought struck him. Wrong alphabet.
He knew that kind of thought and trusted it. Which books sold and which sat on the shelf until they yellowed. What the buyer wanted, not what the seller loved. He had seen men ruin themselves stocking what they loved. The rule held here too. Go where the readers are.
George's last letter had given him numbers. A plain handwritten Gospel book in the City sold for forty ducats. An illuminated psalter, even double that. He counted the men in the Morea who could pay such a price. It did not take long.
The West was different. Every cathedral, every monastery, every university from Bologna to Paris read Latin, copied Latin, paid for Latin. He caught himself thinking that the market for Latin was huge.
There was his brother too. He courted Rome, talked of union. A press in the Morea turning out Latin scripture would say more in Rome than a season of embassies.
He stood, took the chalk, and under the Greek wrote the Latin letters, row by row. Then he stood back. Two alphabets on one wall.
He returned to the table and drew the alphabet large, then again a size smaller, then smaller still, and marked the middle row. That one. Big enough for candlelight, small enough to spare the paper. The shapes mattered too. The handwritten books he had seen were dense and angular, letters crowded shoulder to shoulder, every stroke as black as the next. Handsome, but hard on the eye. He drew his rounder and plainer, with air between them and small feet at the ends of the strokes. Times New Roman, as near as memory served. He wondered, idly, whether he could keep the name. Why not. He was the one introducing it now, and no one could dispute the claim.
For the first book there was no question. A Latin Bible. The one text every buyer in the West wanted, priced by hand-copying at what only bishops and merchants could pay. But to set a Bible in type he needed a Bible, a full and correct Latin text, and there was not one in Glarentza. The nearest sure copy sat in Patras, with the Catholic bishop there. Venetian Patras. He turned that over for a moment. A Greek despot writing to a Latin bishop for scripture would raise an eyebrow somewhere, and eyebrows in Patras reported to Venice. But there was no faster road to a clean text, and the request could wear scholar's clothes. The letter could be written tonight, framed as learned curiosity, the kind no churchman refuses to flatter.
Ink and paper were problems of their own. The scribes' ink would not do. He tried a drop on the flat of a knife. It beaded up like water on wax and wiped clean away. Type needed a thicker ink, lampblack ground into boiled linseed oil, black and sticky enough to hold on metal. The oil and the soot were easy enough to find. The right mixture was not. His first pots dried too thin, or too thick, like pitch. He kept trying, one pot at a time.
Paper he could buy from abroad, but it cost dearly and the quality was poor. Better to make it here. The Morea had rags in plenty, linen and cotton worn past mending, and rags beaten to pulp were what paper was made from. The beating needed a wheel. That was Apostolos, a miller with a strong one, who heard him out and grew curious about the whole business.
A knock at the door pulled him from his thoughts. Michael gathered the loose parchments into a stack and laid a book over them. "Enter."
The door opened, and Theodora stepped inside. "Still awake at this hour?" she asked with a faint smile.
"Time slips away when I am at these matters."
She approached the table, her gaze drifting over the sketches and notes. "The servants say you have been meeting with craftsmen. Every few days now."
"Repairs and improvements. There is always something on an estate this size."
Her eyes went past him to the board on the wall, the two alphabets in chalk. She looked at it a moment longer. "The maids will not go near that, you know."
"So I have heard."
Theodora picked up a parchment showing the drawings of a warehouse. "A new building?"
"A storage house. We will need the space before the next harvest."
She set the parchment back, but her eyes stayed on it a moment. "A great deal of drawing for a storage house."
"I like to be thorough."
"Mm," she said.
A brief silence settled between them. "And the festival?" Michael said. "I hope the preparations are not too burdensome."
"They keep me busy. A welcome distraction. The people could use something to lift their spirits."
"They could."
Theodora glanced around the room once more, the table, the board. "I did not mean to interrupt. I only wanted to see that you were not working yourself into the ground."
"I was finishing for the night."
"You were not," she said, without heat. She moved to the door, then paused at it. "You know, you speak of harvests and buildings as if you already know how they will turn out. Most men wait to see."
He could have told her then. It was a strange hour, and the castle was asleep, and she was standing in the doorway waiting for nothing in particular. "A man learns to guess," he said.
"Mm." She had a way of making the sound carry more than the word it replaced. "Good night, Constantine. Rest."
"Good night."
He waited until the corridor was quiet. Then he pulled the stack toward him, lifted the book and the warehouse drawings away, and slid the bottom sheets free. The musket, in pieces. The barrel drawn plain and long, the lock in its corner, each part on its own sheet, numbered. Dimitrios and Nikolaos had seen the press sketches and been left to guess at the rest. These they had never seen. The press was a secret with four men in it. This was a secret with one. He squared the sheets and slid them back beneath the warehouse plans.
He turned to the list he had been keeping and added to it.
The frame, the screw, the oil, the soot, the rags: all that the Morea could supply. What it could not, the merchants might. Lead and tin, as much as could be had at a fair price. Then antimony, and there he paused, because antimony would be the trouble. The apothecaries sold it by the jar, and he would need it by the sack.
Beneath the metals he set down the thing that mattered more than any of them. Not materials. Men. Die-cutters from the mint, seal-makers, fine hands from the goldsmiths' shops. Men whose trade was small letters in hard metal. George was hunting artisans in the City. With luck, he would bring a few of them south.
Michael then drafted the letter to the Bishop of Patras:
"Your Excellency,
I trust this letter finds you in good health. Travelers speak well of the library you keep at Patras, and I confess a scholar's curiosity about it. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss matters that could enrich our region's cultural and spiritual life. At your convenience, I would be glad to call on you.
Respectfully,
Constantine Palaiologos, Despot of the Morea"
He read it through once, sealed it, and set it at the corner of the table. Patras was a few days' ride. A rider could take it in the morning, winter or no. The list beside it would wait longer, for George and the spring sailing. One thing moving, one thing growing. It was a start.
As the candles burned low, he gathered the night's work. The musket sheets went to the bottom of the leather satchel, the press designs above them, and the satchel into the wooden chest behind the tapestry. He turned the key and heard it strike home.
Then he put out the candles, and paused at the door. In the dark the chalk had gone from the wall and the drawings from the table. He closed the door and went to bed.