4
The Oscillating Hourglass
Late enough in the evening that Grandmother was already in bed, and the only light was my desk candle shining, and the only sound was the scratching of my quill and rustling of my papers, a lantern came into my street and then a fist to my door. I thought it might be the Night Watch. The church bell finished eleven tolls as I opened the door to see a dim lantern held out and a dimmer Cousin Gottlieb behind it.
“Leonhard. I want you.”
“To come?”
“Yes,” he said, impatient. “To come.”
It had become a chill evening but I didn’t stop to find a coat. I only took my brown hat from the peg, and the key, and I left and locked the house.
“Where do you want me?” I asked.
“To the inn,” he answered, and I followed and waited to hear why. The houses were more closed than when I’d walked home from the Boot and Thorn earlier, and it was back to there that we went. In the Barefoot Square, near enough the tavern door to be in its fiery glow, Cousin Gottlieb stopped and asked, “Did you bring paper?”
“No.”
“That’s a poor start. You’ll need it.”
“What would I write?” I asked.
“I’m questioning the innkeeper. You’ll write it down.”
“That’s why you brought me?”
“Why else do you think?”
I’d thought nothing else, but not that, either. “I’ll remember what you say and I’ll write it when I get home. I’ve a good memory. Will that do?”
“It’ll have to do. Now, where’s the man?”
He might have been anywhere under that roof. I looked into the Common Room for him first. It was emptier and quieter than before and I heard familiar voices, but not his. “Not in there. Maybe in the kitchen or the stable or a cellar.” Charon the cat listened.
“Find him, then. Why else do you think I brought you?”
I was wondering that somewhat more. But I went hunting and found him first shot and brought Cousin Gottlieb into the kitchen. The Common Room was lit by fire; the kitchen was consecrated to it. The hearth was the biggest in Basel, stretching the whole wall and all ancient stone. Four fires had space in it. All the pots and cauldrons were blackest, and the ironmongery of spits and braces and hooks that held them in the flames was blacker. Everything had been heated in such innumerable fires then cooled to bone by hours as immeasurable as the kettles that nothing was left but essence and hardness. And of everything Gustavus was the hardest, standing in the center pillar-like, Hephaestus in the pits of Olympia.
Cousin Gottlieb took a chair. Kitchen maids as tough and heated as the stews they were stirring ignored us. They were chopping meat and their cleavers flashed and the table shook with every blow. Cousin Gottlieb ignored them.
“What do you want, Master?” Gustavus asked in his voice of coals.
“I am Inquisitor,” he answered like dust, and then I knew why he wanted his questions recorded. The council had chosen him to manage the Inquiry. I felt very sorry for him; and I felt sorry for Basel.
“What are your questions?” Gustavus bowed his head in respect. He knew the Inquisitor’s power. And Gottlieb knew it, too.
“Who was Knipper?”
“He was a man.” His answer wasn’t frivolous but profound.
“What was his life?”
“To drive his coach.”
“Why did he die?”
“Because his life ended.”
Cousin Gottlieb preferred proper beginnings. He found these answers satisfying. “Was he family to you?”
“He was no kin.”
“Was he to anyone?”
“Only he would know.”
“Then we won’t. And you employed him?”
“We were partners.”
“And the other inns, as well?”
“The four inns. We had an arrangement.”
“What are the four inns?”
“The Broken Shield in Strasbourg. The Fiery Arrow in Freiburg. The Roaring Lion in Bern. This.”
“Who’ll drive the coach now?”
“Someone else.”
“Do you grieve that he’s dead?” I doubted Gottlieb was asking after the innkeeper’s well-being.
“No.” And for the first time, Gustavus answered more than he was asked. “He was ill-tempered. I’ll be glad for a less troublesome driver.”
“Did you see him the evening when he came in from Bern?”
“I saw him.”
“What did you see of him?”
“That he’d come.”
“And who killed him, then? Was it Willi?”
“Ask him.”
“He’s in jail in Strasbourg. It was someone here in the inn who killed Knipper. This is where he was seen, and where the trunk was, and where he was put in the trunk. Whose trunk was it?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the trunk.”
“It’s at the Watch barracks. Did it belong to one of the passengers?”
“Ask them.”
“They’re not here. Who carried the trunks to the rooms?”
“Willi did.”
“And who carried them back to the coach in the morning?”
“Willi did.”
“Was the trunk ever opened?”
“I don’t know.”
“To put him in it, it was,” Gottlieb said. “Did it come on the coach? Was it from Basel instead? Was it anywhere besides the inn? Was Knipper anywhere besides the inn? Tell me everything you know!”
“I haven’t seen the trunk. I know nothing of it.”
“Would you, if you did see it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I haven’t seen it, either, yet.” Gottlieb fell silent and his silence lasted more than a minute. I waited patiently, and Gustavus, not patient or impatient, just stood. The cooks never stopped. The cleavers, lifted high, fell to the table and cut by their own weight. I didn’t know what beast it had been, four-legged surely, and the women seemed to have no end to their hewing. “Who were the passengers in the coach when it left?”
“There were two, a man and a woman. The same that came.”
“Where were they bound?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Why do you know so little?”
“Because I’m no fool.”
“It’s knowing little that makes a man a fool.”
“No, Master. Fools aren’t made, they’re born. And only a fool wants to know more than what’s needed.”
“There’s more that I need to know. Go to the Barracks and look at the trunk, then tell me what you know of it. And learn something of it, and Knipper, and the passengers, and what passes under your roof, innkeeper. It begs imagining that you know so little.”
There was no anger in what he said, or even suspicion. It was just a statement. Gustavus nodded. “Yes, Master.”
“Magistrate Caiaphas is here?”
“He is staying here.”
“Why has he come?”
“For his own reasons.”
“Why for Knipper, and not for anything else for all these years? All the years Knipper drove, he never brought Caiaphas. It was Knipper not driving that brought him. There are reasons, his own, you say. I’d like to know them. Do you know them?”
Gustavus only said, “They are his.”
“It would be worth an Inquiry to learn them,” Gottlieb answered. “Tell him I’ll see to him tomorrow, and to have his reasons ready. Tell him the questions will be harder than last time we met. You know they will be, keeper, so tell him. And the boy who drove the coach from Strasbourg?”
“He’ll be in Knipper’s room, Master. His name is Abel.”
“I’ll see to him now.”
I’d never seen Knipper’s garret at the Boot and Thorn. In it, I still didn’t see it. I saw a bed of planks with a straw pallet, and a floor of planks, and a shadow everywhere else, and a candle on a stump table. On the bed was Abel, sitting, not as hulking as Willi, but strong like any stable hand with yellow hair like straw and a block jaw and angry blue eyes like bruises, and he wasn’t glad to be wakened. But Gottlieb had no regard for the man’s sleep.
“I have questions,” he said.
“I won’t know your questions,” Abel said. Caiaphas’s speech had been jagged like broken ice, and Abel’s was jagged like gravel.
“You’ll know them. Are you from Strasbourg?”
“I know that and I am.”
“Did you know Knipper?”
“I knew him.”
“What’s the inn in Strasbourg?”
“The Broken Shield.”
“Who keeps it?”
“Dundrach’s the keeper.”
“Were you there when the coach came in? Did you unload it?”
“I unload the luggage and carry it.”
“You took down the trunk?”
“I did, and was all I did, and set it by the coach wheel.”
“Who opened it?”
“It was opened and Knipper was in it. It’s no matter who opened it.”
“Who opened it?”
“I didn’t.”
“Did Dundrach?”
“No.”
“Whose trunk was it? Which passenger?”
“None of them opened it. It was none of theirs.” Abel’s shoulders were hunched and his head tilted like he was expecting a blow, but I saw that he might be ready to give one, as well. If he were to strike Gottlieb, as Inquisitor, it wouldn’t go well for him. Gottlieb himself showed no anger, though not patience, either. But he leaned forward, closer toward Abel, held him in an unblinking gaze, and said, “Did Caiaphas open it?”
“What if he did?”
“Why him? Why was it a magistrate who opened an unclaimed trunk? It should have been the innkeeper.”
“I’m not saying he did.”
“You’ve been told not to. By whom?”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Dundrach? Or Caiaphas himself then. What did he tell you?”
“Old Vulture? Nothing. Nothing to me.”
“Why was the driver from Basel arrested?”
“For bringing a corpse into the city.”
“Who ordered that arrest?”
“Old Vulture, and ask him why.”
In the bare candlelight, Gottlieb seemed less and drier than ever; but dead wood was harder than green. He stared at the sullen lout for minutes, longer than he’d been silent with Gustavus. Abel seemed to sense there was danger to himself.
“Vulture,” Gottlieb said. “Magistrate Caiaphas, you mean.”
“You’ll be away in the morning, to Bern.”
“I’m to Bern, then back, then to Strasbourg, and I’ll never be here again, if they whip me I’ll still never be here again.”
“You’ll have whipping. The Masters you have are easily displeased. You won’t have Caiaphas on your trip to Bern, though. He’ll stay for the Inquiry.”
“Ask him your questions. I won’t answer any.”
“Tomorrow I’ll ask him.”
We traced our path backward to the kitchen, which was empty of life now but for its fires. Gottlieb stopped there to think. “Is Daniel still here?”
“I heard his voice when we came in.”
“I want him next.”
I followed up the corridor to the Common Room. Daniel’s voice cut through the room, as it always did. A near hour had passed from Gottlieb’s knock on my door. It was already late enough that the candles were yawning. The fire was intense but withdrawn into its hearth. I felt Cousin Gottlieb was uneasy beneath the weight of the beams.
Dice were rolled from a cup onto a table, and that sound turned my eyes toward Daniel, still there, and Nicolaus, and I saw them for the second time that evening. They hadn’t moved but most other of the men had left. Daniel looked up to see Gottlieb, and me with him, and smiled his most mischievous smile; he’d been waiting.
“Leonhard,” he said. “What’s this I see? Are you being tainted? Beware, beware!”
Gottlieb answered for me. “You’ll beware.”
“If you don’t corrupt me,” I answered Daniel myself, “nobody can.”
“That’s a challenge, then. But what’s the purpose of this? I’m placid and smug, and I’ve no use for an interruption.”
“You’ll make use,” Gottlieb said. “I’ll want answers from you.”
“You? You! Brutus has made you his Inquisitor, and you’ll use the weight of that to bother me? Isn’t there a better use for Olympian authority?”
“The Council appointed me.”
“At his wink and nod. So, cousin, what will you pretend you need to know from me?”
“It’s an odd chance that the driver dies after he drives you.”
“Inference and induction, and that’s not Logic. Shouldn’t you know that?” There was an energy in Daniel’s voice that meant more than just wheedling and sparring. “Beside, you’d have reason to murder the driver who brought me home. I wouldn’t.”
“I would have done it then before he brought you, not after; and after he had I’d have every reason to keep him alive to take you back away.”
I had heard plenty of Gottlieb’s speech, in the lecture hall and in the parlor, and I heard a note I hadn’t before. But Daniel knew it, and he approved.
“That’s clever, cousin. I like an answer with wit. There was a time when you were known more for it.”
“There aren’t many who know it.”
Daniel nodded to that. “It’s a street of dunces we walk.” He leaned back and put space between them. “But it’s time, Cousin. What are you after?”
Gottlieb leaned forward and closed the space. “Why did you come back to Basel?”
“It’s my family here.” He answered it quickly, with a shrug, “That’s why you left. I want to know why you came back.”
“And that’s what Brutus wants,” Daniel said. “To know why I’ve returned, and he’ll use the Inquisition to find out.”
“That’s not an answer to my question.”
“It’s an answer to mine. If I don’t answer yours, will you torture me?” He laughed. “Brutus wouldn’t let that.”
“You fully deserve it.”
“We shouldn’t any of us get what we deserve, should we? What would you get, Cousin? Not a Chair, I think.” It was very difficult to tell how these words were spoken; but it seemed something like a horse race, with the riders each straining to pull ahead of the other. With this last word, though, the race ended.
Gottlieb only said, “Who murdered the coachman Knipper?”
“Is that how you’ll do your inquisition?” Daniel said, and now with contempt. “What’s the logic in asking bald questions? If I knew, wouldn’t I have said already? That doesn’t need an Inquisitor.”
“Unless you knew and wouldn’t say.”
“Then I’d have a reason to not say it, and I wouldn’t answer you. Two premises, opposite, that both lead to the same end, and so it might be either.” He rolled his dice. “That’s logic. Are you learning from him, Leonhard? Is that why you’re here?”
“I’m just to hold the red hot irons for him,” I said.
“He’d do it,” Daniel said to me. “He would but for Brutus telling him not to.”
“You’d rather have torture than be humble and answer me,” Gottlieb said. “And you still haven’t. Do you know who killed him?”
“Sure I do.”
The dribble of light from the open doorway was stopped as Gustavus entered. He took a place behind the counter and nodded to the woman there to be finished. She seemed glad to be. Though the room was near empty, there were still hundreds of eyes on us: all the tankards on all the shelves, high and low, and all were staring directly at us. If we’d moved, their gaze would have followed.
“Who killed him, then?” Gottlieb said.
“Huldrych.”
“Daniel!” I said. “Don’t mock.”
“Why not? If that old artifact is cleared out of the Physics Chair, someone better could have it. I say it was Huldrych that did Knipper in.”
“You’d accuse him to have him executed?”
“You think I’d kill to get a Chair?” Daniel said. “Maybe I would. I wouldn’t be the first in the family to do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Or the second, either. What bargain did you make for yours?”
“I wouldn’t bargain,” Gottlieb said.
“You didn’t win it by chance.”
“Prove that I didn’t.”
“Deny that you didn’t.” Daniel leaned into the sudden silence. “Deny it? You don’t.”
But Gottlieb only said, “I never bargained.”
“What happened to the missing Logic Chair? What was his name? Grimm. And now you have his Chair. That was the last Inquiry, wasn’t it, Cousin?”
“Which Chair are you trying for now, Cousin?” Gottlieb replied.
“Perhaps Logic again.”
“It’s taken.”
“The lord giveth,” Daniel said, “and the lord taketh away.”
“Don’t use scripture for malice,” I said, “or the Lord’s name.”
“Not that Lord,” he said, glancing up. It was hard to imagine heaven in any direction from that room. “I mean the one here who has a real say over the Chairs.”
Gottlieb was done with Daniel’s bitter stream. “Was the trunk on the coach from Bern?”
“I don’t count luggage.”
“Where did it come from?”
“I don’t ask it questions, either!”
“Did you see it anywhere?”
“I haven’t seen it at all.”
“What did you see of Knipper?”
“I was too taken with nostalgia at the sight of my dear home to notice coach drivers.”
“Why is there an Inquisitor?” They were Nicolaus’s first words I’d heard that evening, and they were an ox to throw a cart out of its ruts. Gottlieb and Daniel both shot their heads around to look at him.
“Because the Magistrate of Strasbourg demands it,” Daniel said. “And because Brutus finds it useful.”
“No,” Nicolaus said. “Why is there an Inquisitor?”
I understood his meaning. “Because the world has unanswered questions,” I said.
“And why’s that?”
“So that we’ll answer them.”
“Are you an Inquisitor, Leonhard?” Nicolaus asked.
“That kind, I’ll always be,” I said.
“Choose fit questions, then.” Whatever Nicolaus’s purpose had been, he was done with it. Daniel waved away those airy thoughts with his own advice to Gottlieb.
“I’ll tell you where to look, if you’re genuine in solving this,” he said. “There’s one man who has any answers.”
“Who’s that?”
“You know.”
“You think your father is the murderer?” Gottlieb said. “You think he crushed a skull with his books and papers? Knipper was never in the house, and your father never left it. None of us did. It’s our family who’re the only ones I know couldn’t have killed him.”
“But there’s no one outside our family that’s scheming enough,” Daniel said. “I’ll wager you, Cousin, that I solve this before you do.”
“You’ll neither be first.” Nicolaus stood, and looked at me. I stood to follow his lead. “Or even first to bed.” And that ended their joust. But Daniel held back in the hall, and Gustavus was there with him as we left, and Nicolaus stayed also, keeping watch on his brother.
I would often be awake late reading, and it never tired me. But standing in the Barefoot Square, at only about midnight, I was yawning and nodding. “I’ll want you tomorrow,” Cousin Gottlieb said.
“When will you?”
“Come to my door at noon. Have what you’ve heard written by then for me.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’ll have it all.”
“Just the first. The innkeeper and the driver. Not the last.”
I stumbled home. Night in Basel was the dwelling of soft sounds and faint smells, and gentle brushings in the dark, all unseen. I unlocked my own door and saw a light in the kitchen. My grandmother was at the table in her nightdress.
“I’m back,” I said.
“I saw your bedroom open and empty.”
“Cousin Gottlieb came for me. He’s Inquisitor and he has me for his clerk.”
This was a stark statement of news that was important to both our home and our city. Grandmother breathed a sigh. “Then you’ll be part of the Inquiry.”
“I’ll only be secretary. I have to write what I heard tonight.”
“What did you hear, Leonhard?”
“I’ve heard about Knipper and his driving, and I’ve seen his room in the Boot and Thorn, and I’ve heard that the last anyone saw of him was at the inn that evening unloading the coach.”
“That was after he came to Master Johann’s kitchen?”
“No, Grandmother. The last he was seen at the inn was before that.”
“You saw him, Leonhard. You told me you had. And you told me also that a black trunk was on the floor there, which is the trunk he was brought back in.”
“I told you truthfully,” I said.
“Tell Master Gottlieb.”
“Then Master Johann’s family would be accused.”
“Master Gottlieb is part of that family. He’ll use wisdom in it.”
“It wasn’t any of them.”
“It’s Master Gottlieb’s task to find who did.”
“It won’t be him or Daniel who’s first to solve it,” I said. “Nicolaus told them that. And that’s not Master Gottlieb’s true task. His questions were for something else. I don’t know what.”
And then I went upstairs and started writing as Gottlieb had told me to do. I had a good memory, though I was very tired of the day.
I’d wanted to wake early on Wednesday but my bed was very comfortable. It was nearly sunrise before I pulled myself from my covers. I endured my grandmother’s disapprobation and hurried to get her water, and I made sure to get it from the Barefoot Square. The coach was there in the morning light, but no light shone on glowering Abel already in the box, and Fritz from the inn was pushing luggage onto the rack. None of the bags and trunks was larger than a hound.
Nothing withstood Abel’s whip and the thunder of those hooves; yet he’d have to return. Less than nothing could withstand the immutable rhythm of those roads from Basel south and north. Knipper was everlasting but finally died. Yet even death wouldn’t stop the ancient law that the coach would leave for Bern on Wednesday and then come back, and that the coach would leave for Freiburg and Strasbourg on Friday and then come back. The coach was a pendulum, hung from history and swung unending through its path. Even the Magistrates of two cities only planned their Inquiry within pendulum swings.
Like Basel, Strasbourg was also a University city. Yet as Master Desiderius said, its University was much less prestigious. Not always, though: The school was planted with Martin Luther himself as one of its founders when he took refuge there. The city also joined the Reformation and became one of its centers, like Basel. It had the first printing presses in France, sent by Gutenberg. And it had its own great reformer, Martin Bucer, as great a man as Basel’s Oecolampadius. It was a rival to Basel and a mirror.
But forty years ago the city, having for centuries been a free city, as Basel still was, was annexed by Louis the Fourteenth, and Strassburg became Strasbourg. The Protestants weren’t persecuted and exiled as the Huguenots had been, but the Cathedral was given back to the Pope and now the city was known as Catholic. The University was carefully un-reformed and lost what luster it still had. It was certainly an advance for Desiderius when he left Strasbourg for Basel. And though the annexation was military and by force, it was the great Reformed University, unlikely as it seemed then, that pushed and convinced the city into giving up its independence. Certainly in Basel, only the University would have the prestige and force to bring about such a transition.
Though Wars of Religion had ended, the Wars of Philosophy now raged, less violent and more literate. Strasbourg was Cartesian, while Basel was not. Strasbourg was also a Rhine city, but not on the Rhine. It was a mile from the bank on a small tributary river. And if a man in Strasbourg wished to cross the Rhine by carriage, with his horses’ hooves on a dry road, he would need to come the eighty miles to Basel.
For the greatest difference was that Strasbourg had no Rhine bridge.
I was still thinking of pendulums as I came to Mistress Dorothea’s kitchen. I watched her broom swing, and a hanging pot sway, and a clock hand swirl, and a ripple in the washbowl swim, and the sunlight through the window walk; all of them in motion repeating. I thought about how words went out and echoes came back, how word went out and consequence came back. How ideas went out and change came back, how something unknown could go out, and a death come back.
Wondering how anyone could stay unmoving in that storm, I came to the front sitting room to take wood to its fireplace. I found Daniel there musing; and his reverie was also oscillatory. He was standing and in his hands was a small table. He gripped it firmly, and the table flew up, and around, and down, like a bird wheeling and circling. Some odd mechanism was on the table but not falling off as the table flew. He saw me and cried, “Leonhard! You’ll drown!”
“In what?” I said and dropped my wood on the hearth.
“In the waves and wind!” He leaned to one side and to the other and his table rode high and low, a ship in a storm. “It’s a rare tempest about you here and you’re walking on water.”
“Peace, then, Daniel,” I said, “and be still. What sea are you in?”
“A sea of deception. Look what I have.” He set the table to safe harbor on the calm floor. It was an hourglass tied to it, with twine from the table legs knotted to the glass’s odd base. “See the sand? It’s about to run out. Now look.” From another, un-wavetossed table, he held another hourglass. “Identical. They both have kept the same time, one through the storm and one landlocked.” The last grains of sand did run through each at the same moment. I looked at the intricate base twined to the table. It was gimbaled and pivoted, and as I watched he tilted the table one way and another; the glass stayed upright. “See it? An hourglass that measures time evenly, even as a ship pitches. I had a blower in Padua make the glass for me, and a tinker make the frame to my design.”
It was an anti-pendulum, still while all else was moving. “Why did you make it?”
He was very intent on it. “For the Paris Competition.” He made an effort, for a moment, to seem as if it was trivial. But then he saw my grin, and no veil could have covered the bright light in his eyes and his own broad smile. “The problem this year,” he said, with passion, “is to tell how fast a ship moves against the water.” I knew this fervor in him. The only time that he was completely sincere and truthful was when he was in its grip, and it only sprung from his fascination with machines and their Mathematics: Daniel rendered childlike! “The captain throws out a log on a rope and measures how many knots on the rope the ship passes in a minute. But how can they measure the time? A time glass only keeps steady time if the ship is steady.”
“Until now,” I said.
“Yes, until now! Now a captain can have a glass that keeps steady in an unsteady world. Last winter I sent the plans to the Paris Academy. And a working model!”
“What was their response?”
He collapsed. Childish joy was brittle. “No response. I haven’t heard from them. The judging is complete, though. I’ll hear one way or another, and I know which way it will be.”
“Where would they have sent their letter?”
“Here.”
“Have you received any mail here?”
“Not a scrap.”
“None was waiting, either?”
“Not any.” Then the old Daniel returned, bright, shrewd, confiding. “And he wouldn’t, I know it. Not even him.”
“Your father, you mean?”
“Even he wouldn’t hold mail from me. It would come out soon enough, then he’d be in a real scandal.”
“Could there be any reason he would?” I asked.
“His strongest reasons are jealousy and spite. He couldn’t stand that I’ve won! He’d be in delirium.”
“But you say he’d never hold mail from you. And the winner of the Paris Competition is no secret. How will you hear who won? It would be in newspapers. There’d be more letters, too, from Societies.”
“I know it’ll come,” he said. “I want to hold that letter in my hand!”
“What will you do with it?”
He went cold, as cold as ice. “I’ll wave it under his nose, till he faints from the smell of it.”
An hour later, back at home and done with all the morning, I pictured the hourglass. To a man on the deck of a ship, it would seem it was the glass that was whirling and twisting; and to the glass, the man would be. And which would be right? Was there any true level to measure against? Or was every man the only measure of his own life? Everything would be shaken, and then maybe it would be plain what was fast and what was loose. I could hear a storm about me, with wind and rain, and saw its clouds and felt its cold and penetrating wet, even if the streets of Basel were sun-filled and pleasant. I wasn’t sure what was an anchor.
My grandmother gave me a warning as I left the house in proper black and white. “You aren’t too wise, Leonhard, as you might think, and you might be too clever.”
“I know that,” I said. “I don’t think I’m wise at all, and everyone’s more clever.”
As appointed, I awaited and met Cousin Gottlieb at his own front door at the hour of twelve. I’d been unable the previous night to present myself appropriately as the Inquisitor’s Assistant. Now, even properly black and white and with paper and ink, I still did not meet Cousin Gottlieb’s expectations.
He frowned at me from his door. “Is that all you have?” he asked. I knew what he meant.
“It is my only.”
He returned to his closet and then returned to me, and in his hand was an item I viewed with both awe and anxiety.
“Put this on,” he said.
I put my hand on my own hat. As it had always been, it was plain black with a wide round brim, turned up on either side, and projecting from my head front and back, as was proper for a student. I took it off. From Cousin Gottlieb’s hand, I received, and donned, a slightly worn but still unimpeachable tricorne. It sat on my wig emanating maturity, respectability, wisdom, and significance. I could feel it. My fellow students would laugh if they saw me, but nervously. There were consequences for mocking a gentleman.
“I will examine the trunk first,” Gottlieb said, though he was still examining me, weighing whether I could hold up my hat. My head had never had such a weight, and I hoped my brain was dense enough for the task. “It is at the Watch Barracks.”
So, to the Watch Barracks we went. This military hub of the city was on Martinsgasse, directly behind the Town Hall. It was once nearly a small castle, but years of peace had softened its castellation to mere heaviness. Narrow windows had been widened, wide towers lowered. The last real threat, two decades past, had been from France. Since then sharp edges had rusted and dulled some, but were still at hand and could be re-sharpened at need. The world wasn’t yet peaceful.
It was Simeon who took us past a mess hall, a sleeping hall, an armory of muskets and axes, a cell with thick bars, and a line of rusted suits of plate armor on stands and tired of standing, to a storeroom lit by high, tiny windows only a flying mouse could have got through. But there was enough light through them to see the black trunk, dull, heavy, and empty of both life and death, in the center of the floor.
I’d seen the trunk twice before, in Master Johann’s kitchen and in the Market Square, and both had been with Knipper woeful. Now it was without him, dusty, old, and black, and maybe as his coffin better than the box he’d had for burial. I tried to remember it on Mistress Dorothea’s stone floor; I thought it had been dusty there, also. Dust to dust. Gottlieb seemed turned to dust himself, staring at it. He took in a deep breath and it was a long time before he let it out.
“Open it,” he finally said. I knelt to do that, putting my black breech knee onto the plank floor, and the same dust. I had a tremor of nervousness as I put my hand to the latch, and I must have looked the same as the gendarme when he’d opened it. But it was empty. I lifted the lid and laid it back to the floor, and stayed bowing and close while Gottlieb inspected from above. Its open throat had little to say. There was no sign on the wood, either the strong frame or the smooth planed sides, of its last contents. But it wasn’t purely plain. “Is there a marking in it? In the back corner, on the left. At the bottom.” I’d already noticed there was. I looked closer. An emblem was branded into the wood.
“It is a spiral,” I said.
Gottlieb was displeased. “What type?” he said bluntly and as though he knew what the answer would be.
“Logarithmic.”
“That complicates greatly.”
I considered Logarithmic spirals superior to Archimedean, and I knew Gottlieb also must, so it must have been not the spiral itself that irritated him, but its implication. I put my finger on it and something rubbed off, not quite hard, and crumbly. I rolled a crumb of it over my thumb. Gottlieb was no longer watching me. He hadn’t been, much, since he’d seen the trunk. But at this point he was not at all.
A boot had stepped into the room and onto his thoughts; the gendarme of Strasbourg had arrived.
“I’ve been sent for you” were his first words. “Come immediately.”
Gottlieb only looked up at him from the trunk. Perhaps he truly had to pause and think what he would say, but certainly the hesitation was an affront to the soldier. Finally he said, “You were sent by your Magistrate Caiaphas?”
“Yes, of course!”
“What is your name?” Gottlieb had clasped his hands together behind his back, but made no other move.
Gottlieb nodded. “I have questions for Caiaphas. Take me to him.”
This presented Gendarme Foucault with a difficulty: To obey his own Master, he needed also to obey Gottlieb. When he finally managed a reply, it was simply, “You must come at once.”
But Gottlieb had him off balance. “Who opened this trunk in Strasbourg?”
“Magistrate Caiaphas did,” he said, before he thought to refuse.
“Caiaphas himself! Even the driver was afraid to admit that. Why did he open it? And why doesn’t he want that known?”
This was far beyond Foucault’s ability. He was a picture of confusion. “You must come!” he said at last. “At once!”
“Yes, take me to him,” Gottlieb said, and I only had time to close the trunk and run after them.
Many places in Basel were suitable for a Magistrate: the Town Hall; the wealthy homes of the great merchants, the grand Councilors, and the Deans and leading Chairs of the University; even the highest churches had very adequate guest quarters. Of course, no place in Basel was sumptuous. Instead, they were honorable and worthy. But the Boot and Thorn was not any of these. Caiaphas had chosen to be a protestant against Reformed Basel by exiling his person to a private room in an inn. At least Gustavus had done him the honor of not requiring him to share it with other travelers.
As we had been the night before, we were taken to somewhere within the pile of the inn that surely couldn’t have existed in real geometry. In and up and in more, all the time turning corners, I felt we must be in the middle of the Barefoot Square if all the distances and angles had been measured. But we were at a door in a narrow hall that had no other doors.
Foucault knocked on that door. “Your guard, Lord Caiaphas. I have brought the man.”
I thought the barracks where we were apprehended must have been Gethsemane. Foucault might have been better named Malchus. I determined myself not to deny that I knew Gottlieb.
“Then bring him in,” Caiaphas said.
Foucault opened the door as if it had been to an imperial chamber. He bowed and stood aside for Gottlieb to enter. The room was no better than any inn had in German or French lands. It was small with bare floor and walls; this had one window. Outside the window was a courtyard which must have been internal to the inn. I’d never seen it.
The only furnishings in the room were a plain chair and barrel table, and the huge bed. The bed was the reason for the room, and on Gustavus’s profitable nights it would hold three or four or five paying sleepers. It filled the space as law filled a courtroom. With Caiaphas present, in his wig and robe, the chamber became a tribunal.
“You are Gottlieb?” he asked.
“You are Caiaphas?” he was answered.
“You know that I am!”
“I do, and you know that I am, though it’s been twenty years since I saw you. I want to know why you have come to Basel.”
I anticipated the Magistrate bursting. He seemed to live in a state of anger. “I have come to require an Inquiry of you.”
“I am the Inquiry,” Gottlieb said. “You have some reason for wanting it, and it wants to know why. Why did you open the trunk?”
“Who told you that I did?” Caiaphas said, and Foucault answered by gasping.
Gottlieb pressed in. “Did you know what would be in it?”
“Your authority doesn’t run here,” he answered. “I am not answering questions.”
“I have authority in all of Basel.”
“You are not in Basel. When I am in this room it is Strasbourg.”
I looked out the window again. The roofs had a different shape than those in Basel, and the houses were darker colors and lower. It might have been Strasbourg.
“Then I will withdraw,” Gottlieb said. “The Inquisitor is required to stay within Basel.” He stepped back across the threshold into his own city, and through the doorway faced the Magistrate in his. “A corpse was sent to Strasbourg and I have been instructed to learn why. To do so, I must know the reason you have come here.”
Caiaphas stood, angered beyond his control. “My reasons have nothing to do with your Inquiry!”
“Basel, not you, appointed me. I am Inquisitor and I will ask my own questions. Why did you come? Why did you open the trunk? What is important enough to bring you here? I will have those answers.” Then his voice changed, less sharp but more pointed. “Twenty years ago we faced each other and you had the better of it.”
“Yet now you have what you wanted,” Caiaphas said, suddenly less angry.
“That has nothing to do with you.”
“What if it does?”
Gottlieb asked, slowly, “Is that why you’ve come?”
Caiaphas said, slowly, “It is one of my reasons.”
“The Inquisitor can only serve his own city. Not anyone else.”
“A servant doesn’t choose his Master!”
“The Inquisitor has only one Master, which is the Town Council of Basel.” He turned from the threshold border between cities and disappeared from our sight.
His repatriation had been too sudden, and I was still in the room. I realized I’d been abandoned, or I had abandoned my superior by not moving quickly with him, and I jumped to follow. But the border closed.
“Stop him,” Caiaphas said, and the gendarme blocked my way. I turned back.
“Yes, sir?”
“What are you writing?”
“I’m Master Gottlieb’s clerk,” I said. “I’m instructed to write his inquiries.”
“Where have I seen you before?”
“Yesterday evening, sir. You sent me to fetch a magistrate.”
“That was you?”
I’d been in brown. Now I was in black and white. It was as if a stone had become bread; neither could be trusted afterward. “Yes, sir.”
“What is your position?”
“I’m a student, sir.”
“In what?”
“Mathematics.”
The bread had become something else, I couldn’t tell what.
“I see. What is your name?”
“Leonhard, sir.”
I might have hoped that his questioning was only his habit and not for a reason. But my answer and my name were significant to him. “You are the one?”
“Sir?”
“You ordered the stablehand to put the trunk on the coach.”
“Not me, sir—”
“I am now aware of you, Master Leonhard.” He nodded to Gendarme Foucault. “Release him.”
So I did go. But I didn’t feel that I’d been released.
I made my labyrinthine way to the light of the front door. Gottlieb was there in silhouette. “What took you?” he asked me.
I’d only been a few words behind him in leaving the room, and I’d hurried to catch up, so I didn’t know how I could have more than seconds later reaching the Common Room. But it seemed that he’d been waiting a longer time. “Magistrate Caiaphas held me back.”
“Oh, he did?”
We came out into the sun of the Barefoot Square. The face of the Barefoot Church was whiter than paper. “He asked what I was writing in my notes.”
“And anything else?”
“What I was studying, and then who I was.”
“Now he knows who you are.”
“He had heard my name. What did you mean, that you’d met him twenty years ago?”
“On our return to Basel. We stopped in Strasbourg. How old are you, Leonhard?”
“Eighteen,” I answered.
“I was eighteen then.”
“You said he had the better of your meeting.”
“Just as he’s had the better of his meeting with you. That was how it started.”
“And he never answered any questions of yours.”
“He only wanted to see that I was who he thought, and I the same.” Then, without a pause, he said, “Next we will question Master Huldrych.”
“Daniel wasn’t genuine when he accused Master Huldrych. He was only mocking.”
“He might not have been.”
Master Huldrych did not have a housekeeper, and so his house was not kept. At other Masters’ houses, the students knocked and waited to be admitted. Students quickly learned to enter the house of Physics on their own. That was not for Master Gottlieb, however; we knocked, and with all the authority of the City of Basel. Repeated knockings and minutes were required until the Chair opened the door.
He tried to make sense of what he saw. First of me. “It isn’t class, is it? It isn’t Monday. I know it isn’t. Or Thursday. No.” Then of Cousin Gottlieb. “Gottlieb? A meeting of the faculty? But I don’t remember that one was scheduled. No.” Then of my hat. “Another Black Death? But no, that was you, Gottlieb, when Jacob died.” And then he nodded. “Another trunk, then?”
“No, no!” Cousin Gottlieb answered, suddenly very, very annoyed at Huldrych’s wandering. “I am here to inquire.”
“Oh? Inquire? About what?”
“Knipper.”
“Oh! Oh? Oh. ” He said each as its own full meaning. “Knipper?”
“Knipper.”
“You’re the Inquisitor, then, Gottlieb?”
“I am.”
“That’s an odd turn.” Huldrych stepped aside to allow us in. “What questions?” We passed with him through the tiny entry and into his lecture room. I’d sat there many times, but now it was upside down as Cousin Gottlieb stood while Huldrych sat. At least I was taking notes as I always did there. The room had a small window to the front. Windows in Basel were not meant to be seen through, only to allow in light, and that to a people who preferred dimness. There was another small window in the back, which must have looked out onto the river. I’d never seen it unshuttered.
Gottlieb continued to stare for a moment, and longer. Then he calmly, and even gently, asked, “Why was Knipper in Jacob’s trunk?”
“It’s odd if he was,” Huldrych said, not any surprised, though I was. “But was he?”
“I saw it. Why was Knipper in it?”
“He must have been, if you say he was. But why? That’s harder to say.” Huldrych looked slowly and mournfully to the floor. “And he can’t say, can he? He’s dead. I’d heard that. In the trunk? I don’t know why he’d be there.”
“How’d the trunk come to the Boot and Thorn?”
“To the Inn? It was there? Then it wouldn’t be here, would it? It wouldn’t. But I’m sure it is. I’ll look at where it is, or where it isn’t, if it isn’t.” He stood, as vague under his robe as the thoughts in his head. He moved, as ponderous as those thoughts. We went with him and he climbed the stairs to his laboratory.
I’d seen into this room a few times, looking for the Master when students were waiting for him, though I’d learned soon enough he was never in it. Only dust was. The many tables and their very many objects were coated with dust as a chicken with feathers, so that shapes were clear but softened and colors muffled. Master Huldrych looked about as if he’d never seen the room before.
“Who moved it?” Gottlieb asked and the dust rose just at the abruptness.
“I put it here,” Huldrych answered. That seemed to be the same as saying it wouldn’t move ever again.
“When, sir?” I asked. It wasn’t my part to ask questions, but I was quite amazed at the thought of any motion in that space.
“When I first had it.”
That was all I had the temerity to ask. But Gottlieb didn’t scowl. He pushed me on. “Ask him more,” he said to me, and I was thrust, in that moment, into the place of Inquisitor myself, and over my own Physics Master.
“When did you first have it?” I asked. But this was not the question I had been meant to ask.
“I know that already,” Gottlieb said. “Ask a better question.”
The day was Wednesday and in the morning, but I felt Saturday afternoon anxiety, as if Master Johann himself was testing me. I grasped for the better question, and Huldrych waited patiently for it. “Where did you put it in here, sir?”
“Well, just here, of course.” And he pointed. Of course we all turned to see where, including Huldrych himself, and the motion of his arm and our quick spin raised a strange new cloud of the omnipresent dust; and I was reminded of the cloud that followed Knipper on his last drive into the city. Light from the window opaqued the haze and all we saw for the moment was a solid block of golden, glowing air. Then it faded to translucent, and to transparent, and we were staring at a glow and a wall and floor, lit by the same light that had filled the dust, released. It was the far wall from the door. The floor against it was occupied by blank space, between a table on one side and a cabinet on the other. The trunk could well have sat there, as the emptiness was just the size of it, but the space was so heavily coated with the ever-dust that nothing could have been there for a very long time. “It was there,” Huldrych said. “I quite remember putting it.”
“Was that long ago?”
I’d already put myself forward into Gottlieb’s role. Now I tried an even bolder request. “May I go look?”
“Go?” Huldrych said. “Of course. Why shouldn’t you?”
That no one ever before had seemed a possible reason, at least no one in at least a half inch, with time measured in dust. But I put my foot deliberately forward and then again, and walked as slowly across the floor as if it were slick, thin ice. Clouds rose against me, disturbed from their sleep, and I was blinded. I paused and moved again, and finally I came close to where the trunk wasn’t. I stopped.
Years at least had passed since anything had held that place. I very slowly leaned down and in the dust I saw a line where the trunk’s edge had been. And even very faintly, I could perhaps see the press of feet placed wide in the brown and gold dust, and more faintly yet a shade of gray dust in those places. I moved my own feet back to the door. “It was there,” I said. “But it’s been moved long ago.”
“How long?” Gottlieb asked, of me, and Huldrych, and the dust. Huldrych answered.
“I don’t remember anyone coming for it. Not after you did.” Then he coughed. The dust was choking him.
“What was in it?” I asked.
“Just what’s always been in it,” Huldrych said, struggling to breathe. “You remember, don’t you?” he asked Gottlieb. He coughed again, more violently. “It’s the—”
“I know what was in it. I want to know when it was taken. You should have been watching it, Huldrych.” That Master couldn’t answer, besides that it seemed he didn’t know the answer, because he was choking and gasping. I’d been fearful of the dust and held my sleeve over my mouth. Gottlieb had stepped back from the cloud.
I took Master Huldrych’s hand and led him back from the doorway. “But who’d want it?” he asked, finally, when he could.
Gottlieb shook his head. “That’s all. We’re finished.” We would have left Huldrych there, regaining his breath, and the hallway gray and clouded, but he still seemed weakened. I stood with him a moment and Gottlieb waited.
In that moment the air cleared. “I’m right now, Leonhard,” Huldrych said.
In the street, I didn’t know where we would go and I waited to be told our destination. I still had plenty of paper and ink. “Who is next?”
Gottlieb only stared at the wall opposite and the many figures on it. “Next? I don’t know who will be next.” He was still contemplating the wall. “There is no coach driver in the Dance.”
“There’s a peddler.”
“That’s closest. He goes town to town and lives in none. And there,” he pointed, “is an innkeeper, and there a laborer, and there an Academic, and there a gentleman. And there a Magistrate, or what they had of them in those times. The Black Death took them all.”
“What did Master Huldrych mean about the Black Death?”
“Something he shouldn’t have remembered. There is no one else for us to question,” he said, in answer to my first question. He’d meant it completely: We were finished. I wondered myself, looking at the wall, which of the characters I might be.
“Master Gottlieb?” I said. “What was in the trunk? Where did it come from?”
He might have dismissed me and my audacity, and I could see that his gaze wasn’t on anything near, especially on me. But he did focus back and said, “It is no coincidence that it should appear just as my cousins have returned from Italy.”
“But . . . why was Knipper put in it?”
“That must not be a coincidence, either.” And that was a dismissal and his plain answer to me that he would not answer me. I wasn’t finished trying.
“There weren’t many replies to your questions. Did you learn anything from them?”
“Not from the questions. From the trunk. Now hand me your papers and go. The Inquiry is tomorrow and you’ll appear with me.”
“Is there anything I need to do?”
“It’s already done.” And I think he meant more than just the notes that I’d given him. But I still tried once more.
“Can you tell me, sir, why you returned back from Italy yourself?”
His answer surprised me, not least that he even answered, or answered plainly. He gave me a curious look that reminded me of the one wink he’d given Daniel the night before. “For a Chair in Basel, of course.”