An Elegant Solution Read online

  © 2013 by Paul Robertson

  Published by Bethany House Publishers

  11400 Hampshire Avenue South

  Bloomington, Minnesota 55438

  www.bethanyhouse.com

  Bethany House Publishers is a division of

  Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

  www.bakerpublishinggroup.com

  Ebook edition created 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-6275-2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.

  Author represented by The Steve Laube Agency

  It has been among my greatest Pleasures to teach the ancient Subjects of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy to a new Generation of Scholars, and in so doing, continue the unbroken Enterprise of giving to the Future the immense Treasure that has been received from the Past.

  So, Martin, Bryan, Sarah, Owen, Justin, Chris, Elizabeth, Matt, Nate, Shana, Ben, Hannah, Zach, David, Katherine, Carina, Jesse and all the others; and Ellen, Greg and Jeff; and all my own teachers; and Lisa: this book is dedicated to you.

  I believe that, if there was no other proof, that because of Mathematics, I would still believe in God. I’ll let Leonhard tell you why.

  . . . eternal, immortal, invisible . . .

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. The Ash Gate

  2. The Boot and Thorn

  3. The Death Dance

  4. The Oscillating Hourglass

  5. The Barefoot Church

  6. The Holbein Chamber

  7. The Outer Wall

  8. The Eadem Medallion

  9. The Triple Seven Leaves

  10. The Remembered Meteor

  11. The Reciprocal Squares

  12. The Physics Election

  13. The Logarithmic Spiral

  14. The Sealed Stones

  15. The Tree, Throne, and Candle

  16. The Lost Hour

  17. The Iron Casket

  18. The Value Pi, Squared, and Divided by Six

  19. The Deluge

  About the Author

  Books by Paul Robertson

  Back Cover

  1

  The Ash Gate

  Of dust is man made, and to dust man returns. So I sat, watching for the dust of men returning.

  I was on a hillside above Basel. My Master Johann had me on an errand to watch for the return of his sons from Italy. It was late on a spring day; the sky was exactly blue, cut at the edge of the world by sharp white mountains. The fields were perfect green, engraved by the Rhine. And finally, around the side of my hill was an airy indistinctness. Dust.

  That was my signal, but I waited to be sure: that it was dust raised by the coach from Bern. Once I saw the coach, drawn by four horses, I ran down the hill toward the city; I loved to run. I was first by minutes to the gate at the city Wall. The coach wouldn’t stop there. It was bound for an inn and stable inside.

  I waited there anyway. The gate was the Ash Gate and was only passed with burning. Ashes were the symbol of renunciation; the passage of any gate was renouncing one side to enter the other. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, the coach came into view.

  The road passed over the moat on a causeway and through an arch beneath a high, narrow stronghold. The coachman had his horses at a fast pace. I knew the man; he’d been driving the route for centuries. He waved to me. Then his coach, like an arrow on the straight road, shot over the bridge and pierced the gate. I followed through it.

  Immediately inside, the Ash Street was hedged with houses, in unyielding and uninterrupted lines. Always in Basel the doors would be closed and the windows curtained. That afternoon the street was empty and the coach hardly slowed. I was just as quick and kept with it. The street soon ended in another moat and Wall and gate. This was the inner Wall and the old city, and a short distance inside was the coach’s destination and destiny. I reached the tavern as it did.

  There was a large public market square here, one of the few open spaces in Basel where its people would be found outside their homes. The inn waited on one side, and across from it stood the blunt face of an ancient church, the largest in Basel, even bulkier than the cathedral. The tavern was the Boot and Thorn; its opposite was called the Barefoot Church.

  The coach halted. Knipper, the coachman, dropped nimbly from his box to the cobblestones as a lout from the inn was already scrambling upward toward the luggage. From the Beginning, Knipper had driven that coach. He brought Erasmus to Basel and Oecolampadius and the Reformation; he brought Holbein and Paracelsus and the Renaissance. Knipper took Charlemagne through to Rome, Caesar conquering the Gauls crossed the Alps with Knipper, and Hannibal crossed the other way with his elephants in the luggage rack; and Knipper’s horses, I knew, were named by Adam.

  “I know who you’re for!” he bellowed to me. He was a boisterous and cantankerous man, quick to answer, agile, and a dead shot with his pistols. A coach driver had to be all those. “They’re in there safe and sound!” His hair was short and all white, though it would shine like silver in the sun, and he had no beard.

  “Their father’s wanting them,” I said.

  “As I value my life, I won’t keep that man waiting,” Knipper answered in a suddenly low voice, and then back louder, “So let’s get them out!” He gave the handle a twist and the door a wrench, and opened it onto a black cave. From that shadow the passengers emerged.

  The first was a tiny old woman who descended the step with her bonnet bobbing like a pecking bird; the next was a wide man who swayed on his small feet like a swinging sack of wool. I let them both pass.

  Then a shoe buckle, and shoe, and stockinged leg, were planted on the step, and a three-cornered hat and white wig bowed low beneath the low door, and I knew I had my man. The whole accordion unfolded.

  “Daniel!” I said. I hadn’t seen him in the two years since he’d fled. He was dressed beyond sere Basel’s tastes in a wine silk coat and ruffled collar. Italy and aging had done their work on him.

  “Leonhard!” he answered, and I knew from his smile that his cheerfulness was unchanged. He shook my hand vigorously. “Well met!” He’d hardly put himself on solid ground when another hat and another wig followed. But his brother Nicolaus was a very different fish.

  Brothers contrast as bells do: near the same and discordant the more alike they are. Daniel and Nicolaus both had their father’s large, brooding eyes in their mother’s long and narrow face. Daniel achieved this well, fixing the world with the stare of a philosophic hawk; in Nicolaus the effect was perplexing, something like a furious sheep. At the age of thirty, Nicolaus had the gentle rounding of affluence, more than the still sticklike Daniel and taller. Daniel was just twenty-five, seven years my senior.

  In temperament, the common inheritance from their father was their eternal curiosity and from their mother, a piercing perception. But two other traits from their parents were odd crossed. Daniel thrived on conversation, having his mother’s love of talking and his father’s care at hearing. Nicolaus had the reverse: his father’s
dislike of speaking and his mother’s disdain for listening. The parents had been compatible. The brothers, a torture to each other. They still had a strong fraternal fondness, though: a common enemy had made them allies.

  “Blasted long ride,” Nicolaus said.

  But Daniel was shaking my hand eagerly. “How have you weathered these two years?”

  “Very well,” I answered.

  “And the Brute?” he asked, and I knew his aversion to his father was also unchanged. Master Johann was the most opposite among mankind of an unthinking animal, and Daniel among mankind most knew that.

  “As well as ever.”

  “I feared as much! But he won’t live forever, will he? He’ll have to die sometime.”

  “We all will,” Nicolaus said. “But who’ll carry the baggage?”

  “That’s the lot of the living, to carry what’s left behind by the dead,” Daniel said.

  Yet Nicolaus, who was lean with words, would use one sentence to say more than one thing. He’d meant the luggage from the coach. “The boy’s hired to bring it to the house,” I said, “and the driver, too.” Knipper himself was already unloading the first bags, and Willi, the hulking tavern lout, was bringing out a cart. “We’re to go on right away.”

  “We’re to go right away? Then I’ll stop right away. Join me in the Boot and Thorn for a cup, Leonhard.”

  “Not I.”

  The innkeeper had come out to watch us, and he and the coachman had whispered words. That man was earth and fire to Knipper’s wind and fire, and I’d seen many sparks between them. Then Knipper took the first bags into his hands.

  “Perhaps in the church for a kneel, then?” Daniel said to me. “That’s what you’d rather.”

  “I’d rather get you to the Master’s house.”

  “And be at it,” Nicolaus growled.

  The first street toward Master Johann’s house from the Square was the Contention Alley, and it was well named for what it was leading us to. I had a quick sight of Knipper turning the corner ahead of us, while the brothers were looking back at Willi tugging heavy trunks onto the cart. Then we were off, and the march to Master Johann’s house was short and sharp.

  In the minute of walking, I asked Daniel about Italy. It was really to hear about himself, and my ears were quickly filled. Daniel had been my close friend in the first lonely years I was in Basel away from my own parents. He and his brothers had been brothers to me, and Daniel the most. I’d grieved when he left. I’d grieved for why he’d had to leave. I’d worried he would never return.

  Nicolaus was silent, of course. He hadn’t lived in Basel in the years I’d been here, but for the last two that Daniel had been away, Nicolaus had lived in Bern and been a frequent visitor to his father’s house. When I did get him to talk, he was worth listening to, and had been kind to me in his own way.

  Two quick streets brought us to the second of Basel’s open spaces. The bare Munster Square was much different from the market square of Bare Feet. The brick Munster, Basel’s cathedral, was more daunting than the old white church, taller, and sharper. The plaza was less square than rectangular and too holy for the sellers and moneychangers. Its houses were larger and fewer, and the largest and fewest was my Master’s. Daniel must have had painful memories to see it. But as we came into that square, and in sight of that house, I knew Nicolaus, and even Daniel, felt that delight, universal to men, of homecoming. I knew it well from the occasions I saw my own father’s house.

  I considered the house of Master Johann to have been at least as much as it should. It was close by the University, three dun stories high and seven dark blue shuttered windows across, with a high pitched roof snarled by the gabled windows of two more stories within it.

  The doors of Basel were not entries but sentries. Even the grand entranceways of the town hall and the churches were kept closed to intimidate. My Master’s door was imposing, cut wide but a bit short. He entered it as a perfect fit. His sons, who were taller, bowed to pass. I commonly entered through the back alley and kitchen door where I could hold my head high.

  It was always blindingly dim inside that door. The hall was dark wood plank floor, darker paneled walls, and darkest beamed ceiling, which all sponged the air clean of light. We stood in the saturating murk, the sons and I, and their homecoming delight was de-lit. As for me, I found it comforting. There was other sight than by light.

  “Blasted dark in here,” Nicolaus said. Yet some ray of our presence had penetrated beyond the hall and above us there was motion. Starting in some far off corner but descending the stairs rapidly, the faint rattle became a jangle, then a clatter, and a glow came bobbing around the corner of the steps; and then appeared to us like a spinning clockwork the lady of the house, the Mistress Dorothea. Her black dress and white apron and bonnet blurred in the dusk and from her constant motion. Her candle, in hand at the length of one long arm, was an errant planet far from its sun. The other arm unfurled. “My babies!” she said. They braced themselves and were embraced. Nicolaus deftly took the flaming candle as it orbited by and the arms wrapped themselves around.

  There would be no escape until she released them, and she did not. They were showered instead by thunderstorms of words in all the languages of motherhood. They bore the soaking willingly and inevitably. No one could be offended by Mistress Dorothea, though one would be overwhelmed. She finally reached “Come, come, come,” in her flow and her arms still around the two captives, and with irresistible force, impelled them toward the sitting parlor adjacent to the front hall. I stayed behind rather than intrude on their intimate moment, and I was not alone.

  The light was gone from the steps but a shadow remained: a boy, or young man, standing where the stairs turned their corner. He had wide open eyes and a mouth closed as if it would never speak, and straight fair hair, and he was still not quite grown to the height of his brothers. This was Little Johann, the third brother of the three, fifteen years old and named for his father.

  “They’re both well,” I said to him. “Daniel even looks Italian in his silk coat.”

  He did speak. “Did he tell you how long he’ll stay?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “He hasn’t told us yet. There’re letters for him. From Paris and Russia.”

  “Russia?”

  “I saw them on Poppa’s desk.”

  “Is Master Johann coming down?”

  “When everyone’s had to wait long enough.”

  I still hesitated. There was no reason for me to remain, but I had a curiosity to watch the Master greet his sons. For all the time I spent in that house, I’d rarely sight him. I pictured him ponderously descending, pompous, portentous and proud. Just then, behind me, the front door opened.

  To compare what I’d just envisioned with what I now beheld: If my Master was a fresh, firm pumpkin, this was its collapsed, dried-out rind, similar in appearance but with all the energy drained. We comprehended Cousin Gottlieb.

  Gottlieb had grown up in Master Johann’s household and was nearly another brother, even having travelled with the family to Holland when Master Johann had held a position there twenty years before. Now at thirty-eight he had his own household. He was actually named Nicolaus for his paternal grandfather, as are many of his relatives, but had forever been called Gottlieb to avoid confusion.

  Gottlieb was an arid man. I bowed politely: I would not usually engage him in conversation for fear of desiccation. Mistress Dorothea drenched a listener and Cousin Gottlieb dried him out, yet I’ve been fond of him as I am of all the family. It’s an odd taste, but well founded, for they’re all worth knowing.

  “They dared come back, did they?” Gottlieb in his sharp, rasping voice.

  “They’re in there,” Little Johann answered.

  “I’d like to know why. And Uncle Johann?”

  “I hear him coming.”

  I had as well, and I knew it was time to be gone. There was more of the family in Basel, far more, but these were my Master’s closest.
Gottlieb was the prime cause for Daniel’s departure two years before, though the composite cause was Master Johann himself. The tinder in that parlor was stacked high awaiting the fatherly torch. Rather than walk boldly out the front door, I took the corridor to the kitchen and the back.

  In the kitchen was a remarkable sight. It was Knipper, the coach driver.

  In normal times I’d nod and wave to Knipper and keep my distance. He was explosive. But here he looked dangerous as a wet kitten. “Oh, you,” he said, seeing me, and mournfully. “You’ll help me, won’t you?”

  “Sure I will,” I said.

  “It’s that.” I’d certainly seen that as quick as I’d seen him. That was a black trunk, big as a man, weighing down the stone floor. “That goose Willi brought it from the coach and it’s not theirs. I should have stayed to be sure he only had the right ones. This one’s not meant for here.”

  “Should we carry it back?” I asked.

  “It’s too heavy.” Coach drivers were made of old oak roots; I’d never seen one wilted like this. He didn’t look able to carry a feather. “But I can’t leave it and have the Master or his sons see I’ve made fool with the luggage.” The dilemma had poor Knipper pickled. “Run back to the inn and fetch that knave and send him here and his cart.”

  “I’ll go,” I said, and it was even better reason to miss Master Johann’s grand entrance. I could ask the next morning if there’d been warm greetings or hot words. Knipper nearly thanked me to death, he was so relieved.

  I left Knipper there, with Master Johann’s family, and quick tracked back to the inn. The innkeeper pointed me to the stables without a word when I told him what Knipper was wanting Willi for. The tavern-boy was there, hammering some horseshoes into shape, and I rousted him. I asked if he wanted my help, but he didn’t. He was ox strong. That was as well, as by that time the firewood in my Master’s house was aflame, or already ashes. Ashes to ashes. I was ready to be home, glad to have seen Daniel and Nicolaus, and hungry for supper.