An Elegant Solution(109)

I looked more closely at the marks on it. They made most of a square. The square was just the size of the stone I’d held that day in the Barefoot Square.

I held it to different angles, and close to my candle light. Then I saw that my hat’s journey had been even more astonishing than I’d realized.

It had been crushed between two arch stones, and not just in the falling of the arch. It had been placed between the stones.

And if it had only been the hat between the stone, and not any mortar, then the arch would have been weakened. When Lithicus had loosened some other stone close by, there would have been no friction where this hat had been.

The arch would have fallen because my hat had been set in it.

I still believed Little Johann’s word of how the hat had been accidentally lost. So the peculiarity remained, but it was not only remarkable. It was wicked. And it was a challenge. And there was an enemy.

I was staggered by it.



Though a restless sleep on my bed intervened, the next morning found me again in the door of the Barefoot Church. Willi didn’t know I was watching as he led the horses and carriage out into the Square and put piled baggage that had two black trunks into the rack, and neither did Rupert even know me at all as he came out of the inn with his face bright with firelight and conspired with Gustavus, who also knew nothing of my observing.

But Caiaphas knew I was there as the coach door was held for him and he climbed in, pausing and knowing and staring straight into the shadow that hid me. He seemed satisfied that I was there.

The carriage crossed the Square to the Coal Gate and I felt pulled after it. When it was gone I was somehow out in the middle of the Square. I crossed on to the Boot and Thorn and looked in. There was a yellow light from a lantern down the hall and from the Common Room the red fire glare was both intense and dim. I stood looking in. It was empty, I thought, but then on a near table was a bundle, the size of a footstool. I looked at it closely. It was rectangular like a small trunk, wrapped in heavy cloth, and tied with string.

“That is for you,” Gustavus said. Of course he was there, also.

“What is it?”

“Take it.”

“Is it to be returned?”

“Tomorrow evening it is to be returned.”



The parcel was heavy as wood for its size but not solid. Its shape shifted in my hands as I struggled home with it. So I knew what it was, and I feared what it might be. I left it on my desk as I did my grandmother’s chores, then Mistress Dorothea’s chores.

I finished in Mistress Dorothea’s kitchen, under the eye of Little Johann with his bread dough. “This is a big house,” I said. “How well do you know it?”

“I know it,” he said.

“Do you know its hiding places?”

“I know them.”

“There’s one I want to see, if I can. It would hold a good-sized box, so big.” I measured for him with my hands, that size of a footstool.

“I only know where they are. I don’t know what’s in them or how big they are.”

“Could you see if any are empty?”

“I never look in them. I only know where they are.”

“I think one has been newly emptied,” I said.

“I’ll find which one,” he said.

And back in my room, the package was still there as I dressed, and when I left at nine thirty for the University.



Several hundreds could sit in the University lecture hall. It was filled, and more. The Professors and Deans and Officials I’d called on the day before were seated uncrowded in the front, attending each other as peers and familiars. Upward and back the lesser in rank grew greater in density. It was all very black, with wigs and collars of white, and the scarlet, azure, and other brilliant stripes on the robes of the chief birds were brighter for their contrast.

And the room was mighty. It wasn’t somber and accusatory, as the Town Council Chamber was; Master Holbein never set foot here. It wasn’t similar to any church, lofty and plain like the Barefoot Church, or grand and heavy like the Munster, or beautiful like close-by Saint Martins; no friars or almsgivers had ordained it. It was secular to itself and holy to itself, not of the Boot and Thorny earth or the Barefoot heaven. It was something in between.

Beside me was Daniel, and beside him was Nicolaus, and even Little Johann was crowded in. But not Mistress Dorothea, of course, for no woman has ever passed the portal of learning into that room. Daniel was in a froth, gibbering, then stony, then mopping sweat. It seemed hardly a reasonable time to mention to him the letter for him I now had.

“I know the nomination will come,” he said. “It’s certain. Certain, at least.”

“You’re certain?” Nicolaus asked. It might have meant that Daniel was certain of the conclusion, or that the conclusion was certain for Daniel.