An Elegant Solution

by Paul Robertson

  “Gustavus employed Knipper, he and fellow innkeepers in the four cities, and he knew Knipper as well as any man.”

  “I don’t know who killed him,” Gustavus said. It would have been a fearless man to challenge him. And Gottlieb had no fear, but also no need to challenge.

  “Gustavus met Knipper and his coach, and no one saw Knipper after that,” Gottlieb said. “On the next morning Knipper wasn’t found to drive his coach. Gustavus sent the coach to Freiburg with the boy Willi driving it. The corpse of Knipper was packed in a trunk among the luggage. Is this all true?”

  “I know nothing of it to be false,” Gustavus said.

  “And Willi put the trunk on the coach?”

  “Ask him.”

  “Ask him.” Gottlieb said more in long silence than words would have. “He can’t be asked. You’re finished. Sit down.”

  Gustavus returned as heavily as he’d come, and his boots sounded like axes against a tree. Huldrych was trembling, very visibly. Gustavus stood for a moment in front of the Physics Master watching him, then sat between the brothers Daniel and Nicolaus.

  “Yes,” Gottlieb said once more. “Willi must be asked, but he is in Strasbourg.”

  “He was arrested,” Caiaphas said, like a rasp on the wood of the room. “He brought a corpse into the city, which is against our law.”

  “And you have brought a corpse into Basel,” Gottlieb answered. “Which is against our law.”

  “I was returning it!”

  “Returning. So you have proof that the coachman was a corpse when he left here.” Before there could be an answer, Gottlieb said, “I summon next Masters Daniel and Nicolaus, who were passengers on Knipper’s last drive.”

  Nicolaus was always averse to public attention. In Daniel’s company, he was never the center of it. He was hardly noticed beside Daniel’s jaunty brilliance. “Go ahead, Cousin,” Daniel said. “Have at it.”

  “Have care,” he was answered.

  “Have it over with.”

  “These two were also last to see Knipper,” Gottlieb said. “Their arrival in Basel was well anticipated.”

  “As is our departure, by some.”

  “The date of your arrival was known. The date of your departure is only imagined.” That, for a moment, left Daniel without a reply.

  “But why is this important?” Caiaphas said, interrupting again. “It isn’t important.”

  “You’re a poor judge of importance,” Nicolaus said. As always when he chose to speak, it was unexpected, and far more in that heavy and formal room. “In particular your own.”

  That affront was a lightning bolt. It was as if the air had been pulled from everyone’s lips, and a soundless vacuum had been created. That made the next words even greater.

  “My sons’ arrival in Basel was very important.” Master Johann’s voice was like the Rhine: broad, deep, unstoppable, and difficult to cross. No one could say anything beyond that statement, least the sons themselves.

  “These two,” Gottlieb said, “returned to Basel, well-known in advance. Upon their arrival the coachman was murdered, and the stable boy who could tell more of it has been withheld from us. For what reason did you return?”

  “What reason?” Daniel said, and he may have been daunted. The question was pointed, the tip of the spear that Gottlieb was holding toward him. Or he may not have been daunted. “I hadn’t seen my family in two years. Why wouldn’t I have returned to my family and city?”

  Nicolaus was silent.

  “I think there was another reason,” Gottlieb said.

  “Think what you wish.”

  “I want to know the reason.”

  “It’s not important!” Caiaphas said. “Go on to something else.”

  “And I want to know, as well, why the reason is important to you, sir,” Gottlieb said to Caiaphas, “that you don’t want it known.” He waited a few moments. Daniel and Nicolaus waited, one patient and one not. Caiaphas didn’t answer. Then Gottlieb said, evenly and plainly, “Then I summon Magistrate Caiaphas before this Inquiry to answer my questions.”

  “Me?!” Caiaphas did stand, but in his own authority and anger. “Me? I will never answer to you! What insolence!”

  “I am Inquisitor,” Gottlieb said, still very evenly. “For my term, I have every authority in Basel. And this is Basel.”

  “I will not answer to you.” Caiaphas slowly sat back into his chair, and leaned farther back into it. “I will not answer to you. Foucault.”

  “Yes, sir?” The gendarme could hardly breathe, but he understood threat, and he knew to answer with threat. His hand was on his sword. The Sergeant-at-arms of the Day Watch answered with a hand on his pistol.

  “You saw Knipper that last hour, just as Gustavus did.” All attention was drawn from the Magistrate of Strasbourg to the one of Basel as Faulkner spoke, to Daniel. It was another profound assertion of right. Faulkner didn’t ignore the conflict that had erupted in the Council chamber; he overrode it. “What did you see of the coach driver?”

  “He opened the coach door,” Daniel answered, and respectfully. “But I wasn’t concerned with him after.”

  “Knipper was seen nowhere besides the inn?”

  “All the testimony on this is agreed,” Gottlieb said, leaving Caiaphas aside for the moment. But with his glance, he showed that the battle would soon be rejoined. Then suddenly, he turned to me. “Clerk, please refer to your notes. Tell us whether Knipper was seen anywhere else. Anywhere else besides the Inn. Was he? When? By whom?”

  I was still unrecoverd from my fear of swords and pistols, and this question muddled me much more. I looked in my notes, which told me just what I’d written in them. I’d been asked a question and I could only answer truthfully. I coughed to clear my voice. “The testimony—”

  But Master Huldrych had stood. Everyone could see now how tremulous he was, how anxious and fearful. His hands and arms were shaking. His face was white and drained and sagging. “Help him,” Gottlieb said. Daniel and Nicolaus were closest and they took him at either side and replaced him into his chair and then moved to give room. The chamber leaned toward him, all quiet. Dorothea was behind him, loosening the collar of his shirt. And Old Gustavus having stepped out to face him, knelt, and stared into his eyes.

  Huldrych stared back. He whispered, very quietly but I heard, “Is it? I’d thought it wasn’t.”

  “It is,” Gustavus answered. He’d heard also.

  I heard because I was beside him. I can run quickly and I had. When I heard him sigh, I knew what he knew. I put my arm around his shoulder and laid my head on his robes, above his heart, holding him dearly. Old Gustavus said, to him and Gottlieb and the Council and magistrates and audience, and to me, “Black Death.”

  “This is what I feared,” Gottlieb said, with anger, and staring at Caiaphas.

  And I heard Huldrych’s heart’s last beat.

  7

  The Outer Wall

  They’ve buried him already,” I told Grandmother. Lunch waited on our kitchen table but I wouldn’t eat it. “It was to get him away, out of the Walls. They don’t want it to spread. They carried him straight out from the Council Room.”

  “What did each one in the room do?” she asked.

  “There was fear,” I said. “Like smoke and it hid everything. The mayor called the Watch to take him out, and Gustavus went with them. Everyone was frightened, and Daniel most. And Master Johann only sat and watched. He was still there when I left. Mistress Dorothea hurried Little Johann out, but then she was back right away. Nicolaus wasn’t scared, but he left quickly. I didn’t see him go.”

  “And Caiaphas?”

  “He just stood and walked out as if it was nothing, but kept his gendarme close with him.”

  “What did you do, Leonhard?”

  “I cried.”

  “And now?”

  I still was.

  Later I went out of the city, looking for respite. Huldrych was old and to my discredit, I’d known impatience wi
th him. But I’d been so fond of him, too. He’d been always patient with me, even when he’d doubted my ideas. I wasn’t ready for him to die. I wished at least he’d lived until I was older.

  I had my place on the hill, and my sky and warm low sun. All that was, was at peace. I waited, wanting peace for myself. But for all the calm that was around, none came to me. Instead, my own disquiet spread out from me, running down the hill and on wing to the sky, until I saw what was really surrounding me: a foaming, blowing turmoil, and nothing at rest. There was no hourglass pivoting to stay still. Nothing was still. Where could the storm reach? The far mountains were so distant that they should have been invisible.

  The dust, when I saw it, floated thick above the trees that hid the road. I hadn’t even thought of the coach returning. I held my hillside. Inside the Walls they’d be waiting for it. The Day Watch would have orders about it, though I didn’t know what they would be. I didn’t want to be any part of the coach and the crowds, so I walked around the Walls away from the Ash Gate, and to the Stone Gate. I wanted stone permanence, stone hardness.

  Still, I came to the Barefoot Square only as the coach did, led by two officers of the Day Watch, and heard the tale the crowd was gossiping, that the coachman Abel had refused to come in to a plague city and the Watch had taken him under guard. Even as I stood with the gawkers I saw them escorting him into the inn. The coach was brought round to the front door and met by Gustavus and Fritz.

  Fritz tossed down baggage from the rack as if it were rocks, then dropped like a stone himself to the ground. Gustavus caught the pieces as he opened the coach door. Abel gave no thought to the sweating, gasping horses or the tumbled, bruised passengers. He pushed ahead of his guards and into the inn and anyone could hear him bellowing for his supper. Gustavus said nothing. He unhitched the horses and handed them to Fritz, then he pulled the coach by his own hand to its place in the front of the stable tunnel.

  Abel had entered Basel again under protest and by threat of harm. He’d known of the plague because black pennants were already flying above the gates, and I saw the notice hammered to the troubadour pole in the Square’s center. It ordered that illness be reported, and that any sick person was to be brought to the Barefoot Church for the Physicians to see and they were empowered to put anyone out of the city who was deemed to have the contagion. I’d seen in the Council’s Law Code what would be printed in later notices, if they were needed: how corpses were to be collected, how their death-bedding was to be burned, and on, even to the laws regarding estates that were forfeit because no heirs were surviving. All those laws had been kept through centuries and called out as necessary like funeral dress.

  Lieber the bookmaker hurried past me with a bundle under his arm. “What are you printing today?” I asked him.

  “More of those,” he said, meaning the notice on the pole.

  “But you’re a book printer.” He’d always left cheap broadsides to lesser printers.

  “Plague laws,” he said. Those required that every printer produce these notices if the Council instructed. Much of common life was upended by the plague.

  I left the Square. Not by a street, but through a doorway and into the Barefoot Church.

  The falling sun in the west was on the face of the building. No direct light came in the high hall, just diffused glowing. My bench was still and I could feel that the church was still firmly held by heaven and wasn’t moving. It couldn’t be moved.

  The Inn had its own foundation deep into the earth and couldn’t be loosed from it. Between earth and heaven, the Barefoot Square was stretched taut and Basel rocked by waves as a boat tied to two different piers. Someday the tension would become too great and the Square would tear loose from one side or the other. Or the city would tear in two between them.

  I stayed a very long time there.

  I rose early Friday morning; it wasn’t morning but still night. My grandmother never woke while I dressed and took my water buckets and went out. I heard a single declaration from the clock in Saint Leonhard’s, so I only knew it was half past an hour, but not the hour. There was no moon. It must have been after three. There was no dawn. It must have been before five.

  I heard muffled, quietly drawn wheels and hooves. The Barefoot Square was formless and void. I waited at the edge until I could see the coach at the door of the inn. The horses somehow knew to be soundless. Their breathing was little more audible than it was visible. But one of them smelled me and whinnied. Abel, hard lout he was, still could quiet a horse with a whisper, and I heard him do it.

  Voices in the door were crashing bells to the silence of the Square, but they were only murmurs. I could hear sullen displeasure from the passengers pulled early from bed and herded to the open coach, and the coach door closed but not latched. The luggage was already on the roof. I walked closer, hidden only by darkness in the openness. The horses knew I was there. I came close enough and stopped. Then we were all waiting. It was far earlier in the morning than the coach was ever readied, which showed how far more urgent was its reason to leave.

  Silence and dark made time slow. The long minutes went by, but they were only minutes. Finally there were two voices and I listened. One was like coals and one like sparks. I couldn’t hear their words, only their heat.

  Blacker than the night, making it light in contrast, black robes issued from the Boot and Thorn, and black boots and coat. Abel opened the coach door and the robe stood in front of it to climb in. The boots braced to help steady the high step.

  “Magistrate Caiaphas,” I said. His foot had already been lifted. He set it down and very slowly turned. Gustavus beside him had his eyes on me. Then Abel unveiled a lantern and its single beam struck me and everything else was perfect black.

  “Master Leonhard. What are you doing here?” Caiaphas said. Immediately he’d known me. His voice and words would have scratched rock.

  “I’m getting water.” I held up my buckets.

  “What do you want of me?”

  “Only to wish you well,” I said.

  “That?” he said. “What, nothing more?”

  “Not for myself, sir. Will Willi be allowed back?”

  “I’ve no use for him. But you, in poor peasant clothes. Is there nothing you want from me?” The words were bent up at the end like a hook.

  “No, sir.”

  “Soon you will.”

  “Only for now, sir, that you have a safe journey and Godspeed.”

  “Speed from here!” he answered in his sudden screech. “I leave my curse on this city! Curse it to the desolation of plague, and speed on its journey there.” He took hold of Gustavus’s arm and entered into the coach. The door closed on him. Abel climbed to the box and held his lantern out and whipped the horses. They leapt from statues to gales, and sparks shot from the stones under their shoes. The coach pitched and almost fell. Then it flew across the Square fast and loud as cannon shot.

  The words had struck hardest. I’d taken them full force. But they’d been blocked and captured and exhausted, kept from reaching the Square and the city, and that had been my intent. The Church of Bare Feet behind me had held me firm, I’d felt it.

  So the day had started, I alone in the Square, and through the dark, Abel driving like a mad bull and the roads forsaken before him.

  At home, my grandmother said nothing, and only watched me do my chores as she did hers.

  With such little sleep, my arrival in Master Johann’s kitchen was subdued and my appearance depressed. But I thought I’d had more rest than Mistress Dorothea. She had even less of her usual manner, and an odd stare at me, too.

  She was only sitting at the table. She had a knife in her hand and potatoes in a bowl, but they were waiting. There was no motion.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Oh, Leonhard. Yes, good morning.”

  My first job is always to tend to the fire and the wood settle, and I saw the hearth was cold. “Should I start the fire?”

  “Yes. Thank you. I
see that I haven’t.”

  There was no kindling brought in. I went to the yard to bring some sticks and then set to igniting. The wood was dry and there were still a few embers. I had a flame quickly, and two split logs against it to catch, and when I turned back, Mistress Dorothea was still in her chair, still holding her knife, and still. So I went up to her and set my knee on the floor to lower myself to her height, and asked her, “Are you well, Mistress?”

  “I’m not ill,” she said.

  “You’re not well,” I was bold to say.

  “There’s little well.”

  “There’s plague in the city.”

  “I don’t fear that, Leonhard.”

  “You don’t? Everyone does.”

  “Master Johann says it’s not to be feared, not yet. If it should be then we’ll leave Basel.”

  “Is there something else, then?” I asked.

  “The hub and the spokes,” she said.

  This was a proverb in Basel. It meant, a family was like a wheel. The children were the spokes and the mother was the center. She held them in place, and felt the ruts and stones that any of them struck. The father wasn’t mentioned but I thought he was the axle, and all the weight he carried was also pressed onto her. So, she was admitting to me that it was her family that was not well. I waited and the kitchen was the most quiet I’d ever known it with its Mistress present. “If you see regret,” she said, finally. “Or grief, Leonhard. If you see remorse or regret, I’d like to know that you have.”

  I nodded.

  “And if it’s penitence or repentance, even more I’d like to know. Anywhere you see it.”

  “I’ll tell you. I think there’s much I regret myself.”

  But later, when Mistress Dorothea was upstairs, Little Johann came into the kitchen. “What did you mean?” he asked, kneading his dough. “What do you regret?”

  I made light of it. “Where were you listening from?” He hadn’t been in the kitchen when I’d said it.