5
The Barefoot Church
In black and white I wandered the streets. Others did, also. In the Market Square, beneath the Town Hall’s festal brick, the stalls were very crowded. Farmers sold their vegetables, grains, and rustic wares. Goliath was there, with a grindstone, sharpening customers’ cutlery. Near him, David was selling wool and slings, keeping count of his business with smooth stones. Demetrius sold his silver, Paul his tents and Lydia her purples, though Basel had no imperials to want them. There was a commotion as someone upset some tables of moneychangers, but I walked on.
I came to the Barefoot Square. Lithicus was on his scaffold, chiseling, and I watched him awhile and thought of spirals. Then I stepped over a white threshold into the Barefoot Church and sat on my customary bench.
The Church of Bare Feet was the oldest church in Basel. It wasn’t the first established, but it had been the most sturdy.
The Black Death had come to Basel nearly four centuries ago. It had first come to Italy and spread like the ripples on a pond, always moving, always outward. In a year it reached to Basel. Once it did, nothing could stand against it. Death danced in Basel.
The citizens of the city were, of course, greatly confused, and terribly frightened. Soon an accusation was made: the Jews, who lived in Small Basel, were dying at a lesser rate. That was unfortunate for them. It was taken as proof of their guilt. They were assumed to be poisoning the wells and causing the epidemic.
On a day in January, with the sickness at its height, and despite many pleas on their behalf by the town leaders, the general population, incited by the trade and craft guilds, gathered the Jews together and rowed them to a wood barn on a small island in the Rhine. The barn was burned and the six hundred souls in it. The victims were left unburied, their cemetery destroyed and their synagogue turned into a church. Their 140 children were not included in the flames, and were raised as Christians. Basel was not alone in this, at least. Many cities in Europe reached the same conclusions. In Strasbourg, the next month, two thousand Jews were killed. Of the Christians in Basel, it was the Bare Foot Friars and their church that strove hardest to prevent the massacre. Their defiance of the popular will placed them in great danger themselves.
But they’d withstood the anger. They had a deep foundation in their faith.
Eight years later an earthquake shook Basel. All the accounts spoke of terrible devastation, and greater in Basel than any other city, though it was felt from London to Berlin to Rome. It was a great woe, and so soon after the plague. Houses were broken to rubble, the Walls were damaged, and every church in the city fell. All but one. The Barefoot Church had a deep foundation. Besides, it was held from above.
This Barefoot Church stood then, and stood now, like Daniel’s hourglass. I walked back to the door to look out on the Barefoot Square, and it surely was pitching and rolling like a sea, and the people in the Square oblivious to their motion. I took a step out and felt the momentary dislocation, as stepping from a dock to a boat. Then all seemed still and normal. But I knew it wasn’t; the Square was still spinning, and I was just spinning with it. If somehow the church was to be found one morning in a different part of the city, I would be sure that Basel had moved, not the church. As I stared at its solid, still, white walls, I felt again the movement beneath my feet.
I had a book in my pocket. I was surprised to find it there, and then I remembered: It was Boccaccio, the volume I’d borrowed from Master Desiderius, put there the last time I’d worn my coat. Boccaccio wrote in Italy in the time of the plague:
How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfasted with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world! The condition of the people was pitiable to behold. They sickened by the thousands daily, and died unattended and without help. Many died in the open street, others dying in their houses, made known by the stench of their rotting bodies. Consecrated churchyards did not suffice for the burial of the vast multitude of bodies, which were heaped by the hundreds in vast trenches, like goods in a ship’s hold and covered with a little earth.
The plague has returned many times since the first terrible appearance. The last outbreak in Basel had been only thirty years ago, though there had been single deaths more recently. The latest great outbreak in Europe was Marseilles just five years ago. The news had been that a hundred thousand died. More than war and siege, Black Death was the greatest fear of Europe’s cities. The most severe laws applied to it to prevent its spread. Even the clothing and bed-clothing of a victim must be burned; there have been reports of how even a tatter of a sheet could start a contagion, and even years after its owner had died.
As I watched the Square, I imagined the city’s frailty in the face of such illness. As I did, the paving stones before me began a slow circle inward toward their center. I stepped quickly back into the church. Their motion accelerated and I held tight to my unmoving foundation. The Square became a Charybdis. Everything in it was pulled down into the center. The buildings tore loose from their moorings and began their descent. Only the Barefoot Church, and the Boot and Thorn, and the Old Walls were grounded firm and held firm.
I shook off the vision. The Square returned to its old form; risen, changed and yet the same, though I still had the image of the wide spinning left in my mind. I kept it in my mind. A whirlpool was a Logarithmic spiral.
I put my foot on the paving stones and they held firm. I walked across the Square to the Old Wall and the Coal Gate and called up into the scaffolding. “Oh, Lithicus!” To dust I was returning: the whole paving under the gate was covered in fine, gray stone dust.
“You?” was answered. His face appeared white from the shadow like a cherub or monster of carved stone.
“I’ll ask you about spirals,” I said.
“Ask nothing about them,” he said.
So I asked nothing. I dragged my boot through the dust on the ground, circling. “That’s the spiral you made for Master Jacob,” I said.
I wiped the dust smooth and drew again, as I’d seen in the whirlpool. From the center and out, but growing and widening. “That’s what they said they wanted.”
“It’s no difference from the other!” he said, “but that it’s poor and wanton for a spiral.”
“There’s no complaint against you, Master Stonemason,” I said, “and no fault in your craft. But this is a spiral, too, and the truth is, it’s the better one.”
“Then they’d have shown it to me before instead of after.”
“They should have. Who was it that gave you your instructions?”
“Now, look, you! You’ve asked enough. You’ve asked enough! I’ve done nothing but what I was told, I was told nothing but what I had to do it! I’m no one to do anything else.”
“Then there’s no fault to you,” I said. “They said a spiral, and you carved it. Only what you were told.” I tipped my hat to him, and I think it was then that he saw it was three-pointed, and fully comprehended that I was in a scholar’s gentleman costume.
“As you say, Master,” he said, very sullenly.
“And Lithicus,” I said. “Is it still the same stone in the arch you’re repairing?
“No, Master. There’s more to do. The cracks are deeper than they’d first looked.”
I finally walked my last steps home. In my room, I could feel again the sliding and twisting of the house and streets. It was my books that were stable and gave me a reference to my own motion. But suppertime was nearing and I had to turn my back on them and undress my solemnity and return to plain brown. But in doing that, I felt again the whipsaw movement of not being anchored fast. I changed myself many times in a week from near-gentlemanly student to near-commoner. But it wouldn’t always be. My ship would have to come to port someday, and there were many docks on just the Rhine. Nicolaus had been to Italy, and Daniel to Heidelberg, at my age.
There was a principle in Mathematics called Elegance. It described a statement or a proof that was exactly right: not only correct, but also complete, and yet simple, encompassing every necessity for its meaning but nothing else. It was seldom that life was elegant. Mine own seemed to have become complex, burdened with disconnections and incompletions and particularly, on my head, this hat.
I’d left my wig on my own head while I dressed and I was a strange sight, in plain wool brown with a pompous top; but now was the moment to put the wig off, and I’d hesitated for the reason of the hat. My old hat was still in Gottlieb’s keeping for lack of any other place to have put it when I stood at his door, and my neglect at retrieving it. The tricorne was still crowning me and I wasn’t sure it should crown my wood head, which had more common sense and fewer pretensions.
I decided the wood wouldn’t mind and I put them all together. Now I was in the presence of a gentle-stump, and I was honored. As I studied it, respectfully of course, I knew I felt more comfortable and proper that the emblem of wisdom and respectability and maturity was on that head and not mine. Mine wasn’t ready.
A true Mathematician must be a gentleman, so I would need to wear that hat. But someday.
That evening I ate supper with my grandmother. “Must you attend the Inquiry tomorrow morning?” she asked. Inquiries were respected and approved of in Basel, yet they made a thin fear like frost that chilled the city.
“Yes, Grandmother. I’m only a clerk. I won’t be even noticed.”
“What has Master Gottlieb learned?”
“I don’t know. He knew much more before his questions than I knew even after them.”
“You asked your own questions, also. Why are spirals important to you?”
“Because they’re marvelous. They are to any Mathematician.”
“That you ask a stonemason about them?”
“Master Jacob chose a spiral for his epitaph, and someone chose a spiral to mark the trunk. They were different spirals. But now I know they were meant to be the same.”
“What does that mean of the trunk? That it belonged to Master Jacob?”
“I believe it did. I believe he’d chosen the Logarithmic spiral as his emblem.”
“Then why was it a different spiral on his epitaph?”
“The stonemason didn’t know there were different types of spirals and carved the wrong one. And I didn’t want to ask him much about it, Grandmother. He seems very vexed and angry at the mention of it, and suspicious, even after twenty years.”
Thursday morning dawned chill. Light was latecoming and when it came, from just the edge of the sky, the streets hid behind the houses’ long shadows. Only the open square of Bare Feet welcomed radiance. I was there as usual to get water, and the face of the church, all white, was in silhouette of the sun rising behind it. But I saw an amazing light in it, as if it was glowing of its own. Then I saw across the Square that the Boot and Thorn, with the sun direct on it, was all dark. The church had its light. I didn’t know how the inn was able to spurn the sun and the church embrace it. I went in the church, through its gleaming door.
Saint Leonhard’s parish, which both my father and grandfather pastored, and of which my grandmother and I were part, was a church I closely loved. The Church of Bare Feet was different and I loved it just as well. There was something both less and more personal about it. It was the visible of Saint Leonhard’s that was dear to me; the servants of the church and families who worshiped there. It was the invisible of the Bare Feet that drew me to its benches.
Beyond the brilliant front, the church inside was dim, but only so that the light through the windows could be immense and eternal, entering with vast strength and stepping down from heaven onto the receiving floor and laying hands on the willing walls. I’d seen it many mornings but never like it was this morning.
The light walked toward me slow and stately as a king. It touched the bench two ahead of me, and that plank seemed to shake from it. Outside, the sun was seeming to rise of its own in the sky, but it truly seemed that those steps down the aisle were the motive, and the sun was pulled through the window by them. They came to the row just ahead of me and I heard a sigh, or a gasp, and I stayed as still as I could and waited.
Somewhere in Bern Knipper’s coach was standing in front of an inn or was already a storm driven toward Basel. In Basel’s inn, brooding black across the Square, Caiaphas the magistrate like a barb was pierced into Basel’s skin. In the Watch barracks, Knipper was undisturbed and beyond the disturbance he was the center of. I could see them all, those three: the coach, Caiaphas, and the corpse. The bench ahead was filled with gold whiteness and that purity was coming toward me. And there was something else I saw: my Master’s house, and my Master’s presence inside it, like a fixed stone that the waves of turmoil could only break against.
“Leonhard!” It was Daniel, just come in. “It’s never hard to find you, even if no one else would be where you’d be. I need you, and quick.”
I hesitated; the light was inches away.
“Now, quick, fast!” he said. “Come!”
“I’m coming,” I said and I stood. Daniel needed me.
“What do you want?” I asked, running, and already halfway to his house. I still had buckets in my hands! He was already dressed in his finest.
“For you to hurry.”
We were quick to the Munster Square and his front door, and most of the water I’d pulled spilled on the streets behind us. I left the buckets and what was left in them at the door, and we both bowed our way in. “I’d have been here in an hour.”
“That’s an hour too late.” He took my arm in a tight grip, as if he was above a horrible drop, and I was a tree and his only hold. He pulled me into the dark entrance and to the stairs, more and more urgent.
“What is it?” I said. We scrambled up one floor. He didn’t seem afraid, just determined and frenzied. We climbed a second floor. “What do you want of me?”
We came to the hallway I knew well, but only from Saturdays. This wasn’t Saturday and the hall was decidedly different: it was not a place I should have been.
“Knock on that door,” he said.
It was my door, but not mine when it wasn’t Saturday.
“As if your life depended on it!”
“But who is in—” There was no finishing that question. Daniel beat on the door himself. The house shook with the pounding, enough to wake anyone in it.
“Just break it up,” he said.
He beat again, enough to wake the next house.
“Just stop them,” he said.
The echoes died. In the terrified silence I heard a chair scrape. There were footsteps. The handle rattled and the door opened with an angry jerk.
I was face to face with Master Johann.
And Magistrate Caiaphas was seated at the table behind him.
And Daniel was vanished.
It was a difficult moment. Master Johann was confused to see me as I was to be there at all.
“Master Johann,” I said. I mustered enough confidence to seem that I knew my purpose.
“Yes? What is it?” He was still bewildered, which I knew would last at most very briefly more. But I thought for a moment that he was also distracted, and I realized I was, also, by the third presence.
“I was sent . . .” I didn’t know which word would come next from my lips. I listened closely to hear it. “For Magistrate Caiaphas. I’m sorry—”
My apology was unnecessary, and even unheard. The name I’d uttered had been like a pistol shot. The Magistrate sprang to his feet and Master Johann turned to him in irritation. “Who knows you are here?”
“No one!” he said. “Who sent you?”
“Who sent you, Leonhard?” Master Johann repeated.
I didn’t know who’d sent me. I only knew who’d brought me, but that name wouldn’t be any help. “The Inquisitor,” I said. “I’m his clerk.”
Caiaphas was shaken. “How did he know I was here?”
“I went to the Inn—”
“The innkeeper told you?”
I was more a spectator to my own words even than the other two. “I asked in the stable and a boy said he’d seen you.”
“Tell the Inquisitor that Magistrate Caiaphas would not speak with you,” Magistrate Caiaphas said to me. “Tell him that you asked at the Inn and were sent away.”
“But Master Gottlieb—” I began, and was very glad to be interrupted.
“Tell him only that! Only that!”
I looked at Master Johann, who had stood back from the conversation. He frowned, then sighed. Then he nodded.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“And you must go,” Johann said, and I thought he meant me, but he was speaking to Caiaphas.
“We have not finished.”
“I have finished,” Master Johann said. “Your Inquiry will be held as you demanded. I will not stop it.”
“I want it stopped.”
“It is too late. I will not stop it.”
Caiaphas was shaking in anger. “The truth is perilous for you—”
“And for you, sir. You should not have demanded an Inquiry before learning more. I will manage it.”
“Else, I will act!” Caiaphas said loudly. Then he seemed to notice again that I was there. “If I must act, I will,” he said quietly. He looked at me. “Give that message to your Inquisitor,” he said. “I will act.”
He swept past me. I was pushed back, and I thought to make my own retreat in his wake. But my Master caught me with his eyes.
“Leonhard.”
“Yes, Master.”
He had not forgotten I was there. “Master Gottlieb sent you.”
“Master Johann, I—”
“You will be at the Inquiry today.”
“I will, sir.”
“Use wisdom.”
It was unclear what he meant. The last thing at that moment I felt was wise. “Yes, sir.”
“And this moment will not be discussed again.”
That seemed only somewhat more clear. “And I’m sorry to have knocked so loudly—”
“Did you?” he said, and I didn’t know how to answer. “I know the lion by his paw.” Then he closed the door.
“Masterful!” Daniel said. Exactly as the door closed, he was present again. “Pure mastery! Oh, I knew you were the man. That was wit, to throw in Cousin.”
And I was still shaking and it was difficult to move my muscles even to turn to face him. “Daniel, I’m the one thrown. What lunatic scheme was this?”
“That’s no matter, now it’s over. Come along, get downstairs before the beast comes out of his lair.”
“No matter?” I let him pull me to the stairs and down them. I was more concerned with breathing again. “How can you say that? Look, Daniel,” I said as we reached the dark hall where just some crack of light was cutting through the door and air, “I’m near dead of fright and you’re saying it’s no matter. What were they doing in there that you’re so desperate to stop?”
“I wasn’t desperate to stop. Not ever.”
“You weren’t?! Yes you were! What were they talking about?”
“How would I know?” Daniel said. He was calm now, joking as his usual self. “I can’t hear through walls, can I?”
“Then why did you want me to interrupt them?”
“I wouldn’t have done, would I? There’s no cause for either of them to know I even knew they were there.”
“But you were. You wanted it stopped.”
“It’s no matter now, I said.” He put his arm on my shoulder and put the most calming comfort into his voice and eyes. “Leonhard, there’s nothing to even remember about it.” He opened the door and the light of the Munster Square, slowly filling from the low rising sun, came billowing in. It was full morning now. “See, here’re your buckets. Just get them filled and be on with your day. You’ll be back for Mother’s chores?”
“I will.”
“Then hurry, you’ll be late to it. And the Inquiry! It’s no day to be late for anything.”
He was right on that, and I didn’t waste more time talking. I took my buckets. They were empty from the running and spilling, and I was feeling empty and spilled, too.
I came to the Barefoot Square. The sunlight had moved on. It wouldn’t be shining into the church window as it had been. But then of a sudden I was caught in a white circle, so bright I had to turn my eyes from it. The sun was reflecting from a window, concentrated lens-like on just me.
When I returned a half hour later to my Master’s house I saw only Mistress Dorothea, and she whipped me and her maid girl with work. But before I was done she paused, and I paused.
“That’s enough. Be away, Leonhard, for your true day’s work. There’ll be hard tasks, to make chopping wood seem like play.”
“I’m to go to Master Gottlieb next.”
“Do as he bids. I’ll be at the Inquiry myself.” No function of the University would suffer a woman to attend, but the intricacies of Basel’s laws and traditions allowed matriarchs of Mistress Dorothea’s position to attend the public events of the Town Council. “I’ll see if you shirk your duties.”
She knew I wouldn’t, though.
I left that house and kitchen for the streets. It was still mid-morning but the time would pass and noon would come. As I walked, the clocks rang through their hours; hours waiting in line since the beginning, entering, walking past, and exiting to where they would remain until the end. The designated hour was in place to take its turn and I had to be ready. In Basel, though, even time was changed.
The city had Basel Time. Stand outside the city until the sun is highest, and it was noon. Faint chimes from far off village clocks would confirm this. But enter any gate and walk to the Munster Square. The journey would seem to only take a few minutes, but the shadow of that same sun fell on the sundial at well after one o’clock. The Cathedral’s dial was the Master of time in Basel and it bowed to no clock carried in from outside. If an outside clock disagreed, that one was wrong, even if it had been set by every church warden in Europe.
It might be that the city Walls have had some effect on time, and when a traveler passed through a gate, an hour of his life would be taken. Some people have wondered what happened to the hour lost at the gate. I’d found from experience that it’s not lost, it was just kept for safekeeping, a ransom held against a visitor’s good behavior. When the visitor left, the hour would be regained from hiding. A man born in Basel would find this reversed. He’d be given an hour when he left the city, but must surrender it to return.
Others claimed that there wasn’t an hour lost or changed, just that the clock was kept to a different time. This was more than true, though. It was kept to a different time. Anyone in Basel knew that the city was not fully attached to the world around it. It had a different time and was a different place. The city was tied to some other foundation than the countryside, and the time was a telltale that it was a different world.
There was a battle fought two hundred years ago in the Swabian war, within sight of the city Walls, between the Swiss and the Emperor Maximilian. Men from Bern and Zurich and Solothurn were in danger of defeat when reinforcements from Lucerne arrived with trumpets and shouting, bursting from the forest and routing the mercenary Germans. The people of Basel just watched from their Walls. The war was outside their Walls and so it wasn’t theirs. They hosted the armistice and treaty afterward to conclude the war, and took the opportunity to secede themselves from the Empire to join Switzerland. But they still kept all the gates, north and south, guarded. The city was really no more part of the Swiss than it was of the French or the Germans. The world was outside their gates, and so it wasn’t theirs.
And the time that was outside their gates wasn’t theirs, either. They had their own.
What else was different inside and outside? What was greater than the Walls? Even Basel couldn’t have one Mathematics inside its Walls, different than the Mathematics outside. No war, no clock, no machine, no plague, no death could change it. That alone made Mathematics beautiful and mysterious. There were other laws, laws of good and evil, laws beyond men, that again Basel couldn’t change. What from outside Basel could Basel’s Inquiry find the truth of?
I’d stood on the Wall of Small Basel, farthest northeast in the city, and listened to the Munster bell sound twelve, then faint moments later heard the clock in Riehen five miles away answer with eleven. In Riehen, I’d heard that church, just outside my parents’ house and where my father is pastor, sound three, and then I’ve walked out into their garden to hear the Munster clock’s dim four.
But I listened to distant clocks for another purpose than contemplating the separateness of Basel. Knowing the distance and the time between Basel and Riehen, I’d calculated the speed that sound moves through the air. Even sound had laws to obey.
But now the bells were tolling for Knipper. It was his time. He was neither in Basel nor outside it.
I stopped in the Barefoot Church to think a moment, and pray, but only briefly. And when I came out into the Square, Daniel was coming out of the Boot and Thorn opposite me. He almost turned away but then his compulsion to talk overcame and he came over. He was jittery and tense.
“Now Leonhard,” he started, “for this Inquiry.” He was the most changeable man, all different from his morning cockiness, different again from his morning urgency.
“What is it you want, Daniel? I won’t interrupt anything else for you today.”
“Why would I ever want you to? But look here, there is something I want of you. You’ve been with Cousin and all his questions, and I know you talked with Old Huldrych. Do you think he would really have had a part with Knipper? What was it that Gottlieb asked him?”
“For that, you’ll have to ask Master Gottlieb yourself. You know that.”
“I won’t, and you know that. But you can tell me what his questions were. If there was anything he didn’t want known, he wouldn’t have let you know it yourself. So there’s no reason that you shouldn’t tell me.”
“And no reason that I should, and so I won’t.” Then I thought perhaps I saw a pattern to Daniel’s eagerness. “But I don’t think Master Huldrych is guilty of anything, and I doubt Gottlieb thinks that, either. So he won’t be thrown from his Chair into the river, if you’re hoping that.”
“Not in the river, at least.”
“Daniel,” I said, “You already have a Chair in Padua.”
“No. I’ve given it up.”
“You’ve resigned it?” I hadn’t known. “But you said you might go back to it.”
“I haven’t even told Nicolaus yet. I’m done with Italy.”
“But why?”
“I wrote a paper,” he said, and grabbed my shoulders in sudden passion. “It is genius. You’d say it is. Anyone would! And the Dean tore it in pieces. The very sheets.”
“Why, Daniel?” I was incredulous. “How could he?”
“He said I had strayed from Mathematics. My Chair was in that subject and I was to remain within it.”
“What was the subject of the paper?”
“Hydraulics. The motion of fluids.”
“What did you write?” For a moment, Italy receded. I was very interested in Hydraulics.
“The forces, the flows and rates, the pressures. All of it. It’s what I’ve been doing in Italy. Oh, it was beautiful!”
“But that’s all Mathematics.”
“But the fool claims that Mathematics is a Logical Philosophy, and Hydraulics is a Natural Philosophy, and not to be bewildered into each other.”
I was even more amazed. “Daniel. You had equations . . . pages of them . . . and he tore them?” It was beyond belief; I was nearly crying at the thought. “But you have copies?”
“It’s easy enough to write them again.” He shrugged off his grief, and also mine. “I’ve already done most of it. But for that I wouldn’t stay. I resigned on the spot. And it was a relief.”
“And you haven’t told anyone?”
“None. You’re the first. I don’t want the Brute to hear it.”
“Well, I won’t tell him. And Daniel, there are other Universities.”
“Leipzig? Konigsburg? I know you wouldn’t say Groningen, not to me. But none of them are Basel.”
“Then outside of German states. Paris. It’s more than equal to Basel.”
“In Theology. In Latin. Not in Mathematics. Not now.”
“There must be somewhere else that’s worthy of you.”
He thought for a moment. “There’s Russia. You said it yourself! That I might ride to Russia.”
“I was joking.”
“But don’t you know, Leonhard? The Tsar is beginning a University.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s a grand endeavor. A new academy in Saint Petersburg, and the patron is Peter the Tsar himself.”
“That would be excellent!” I said strongly. “Daniel! You’d be part of the beginning.”
“I would be.” But then he shrugged off the thought. “But Russia . . . it’s barbarian. I might be in America, for being so far.”
“But Saint Petersburg! All that’s said about it! It’s a marvel.”
“If they wrote me,” he said, “I might think more. But I won’t beg.”
“Would they write?”
“The Chair of Physics in Padua, Romini, received a letter. And I’ve heard of others.”
“You’re well known, Daniel,” I said. “And young. They would invite you.”
“And when I win the Paris prize, then even more! But Russia.” He shook his head. “No, I want Basel.”
“But there are no Chairs open.”
He almost answered me. The words were so close out of his mouth I should have heard something of them. But he caught them back. “Not yet,” he said.
“Or anytime soon.”
“If we need to act, we will.”
I could only stare at him. “You’ve been talking with Magistrate Caiaphas.”
“Him? You’re mad, Leonhard. What would I want with him?”
“You didn’t want your father to talk to him before you had.”
“You’ve got business to attend!” he said in answer. “The Inquiry’s only an hour off and you’re key to it!”
“Daniel—”
“And Cousin is pure spite, so he’s requiring me to be part of it, too. To the Chamber, and bring your hot irons.”
And he was pure confusion. I gave him up and went on. He was right, that I had business to attend. I had to change to black and white.
Thirty minutes later, the usual preparations of stocking and coat and buckle were accomplished. With all the pomp I could muster, I put on my wig and my wig put on its tricorne and grandly together we entered my kitchen. Grandmother was waiting and her two-edged sword was in her hand.
She was pleased with my straight back and honorability, but her sharp eyes searched me for pride. Of course, all that I had quickly withered. That was good. I knew it would be a hard fought day and I needed all my focus and no distractions.
“That will do,” she said. “Do you know what’s to be said at the Inquiry?”
“No one does. Gottlieb’s been silent. I don’t think he knows at all who killed Knipper.”
“Is that what the Inquiry is for?” She knew it wasn’t.
“No. But I’m not sure what it is for. Everyone believes that Magistrate Caiaphas has some reason.”
“Truth will come out anyway. It won’t be hidden forever.”
“I hope it does come out.”
“There’s truth that you’ve hidden, Leonhard.”
“When I know what the truth is it will come out. But I have to hide it now.”
“Will harm come of that?”
“It may. Harm will certainly come if I don’t hide it. Scandal and accusation would be attached to Master Johann’s family.”
“And if you are asked for the truth?”
“I would never lie, Grandmother.”