An Elegant Solution(18)

“Did you come to Basel to watch him?”

“I have reason, too. I am only the lion’s paw.” He smiled at me. “What reason do you have, Leonhard?”

“I don’t know. . . .”

He nodded to me and even tipped his hat, and our talk was over.



Late in the afternoon, just as the shadows of western houses were at the feet of eastern houses, I passed through the Barefoot Square on an errand. There had been many walls around Basel, of sod and wood and stone, but the oldest standing was the Old Wall, the inner wall built six hundred years ago. The New Wall was a century or two younger and enclosed three times the area. The Barefoot Square, between the church and the inn, had the inside of the Old Wall as one of its sides, and the Coal Gate as an entry; a man entering from Coal Street had the Boot and Thorn on his left and the Barefoot Church on his right. I called it the Half-Shod Gate.

The Wall and its gates, though deep inside the city now, were still maintained. On the key of the gate’s arch was a shield carved with a Bishop’s crook, which was Basel’s emblem, though there’d been no bishop since the Reformation. But the shield had cracked, sometime recently. I saw scaffolding up the side of the wall at the gate, and a workman repairing the shield. It was Lithicus. He saw me watching from below and set down his hammer. “Would you make this of paper?” he said.

“No. Nor any of the Wall.”

“Nor the houses, nor the church.”

“I’ll ask you a question,” I said. “I’ve looked at Master Jacob’s epitaph stone often, and I wonder if you remember its spiral.”

“Spiral? I remember it!” His countenance was instantly angry. “I remember it too well!”

“What do you remember?”

“That it’s a spiral and you won’t tell me it’s not.” And he was fearful, too.

“Oh, it is,” I said.

“Some say not, and they say what isn’t is.”

“What do they say is?”

“Stretched bendings that no one could carve.”

“Who says—” I began to ask, but exactly then I was knocked from my feet by a black stallion. I’d always been an inattentive fellow when I walked the streets, and I’d had practice enough picking myself up from collisions. A hand took hold of mine and pulled. It was Daniel, and his other hand still held the stallion’s rein.

“Keep an eye out,” he said, laughing.

“Or you keep an eye on me,” I said, and laughed with him. “And you had a good ride?”

“Wild and free,” he said. “And the innkeeper’s waiting for his horse, so I’ll take it to him.” In the doorway of the Boot and Thorn, Gustavus had his eye on Daniel, and I thought it was Daniel he was waiting for, and it was Daniel that he led into the inn.



Later, I was cast ashore into my grandmother’s kitchen, to a supper of fish and dark bread. I felt troubled, as I had Sunday morning before, and I asked my grandmother’s counsel. “Who is king in Basel?”

“You know that the town’s Council and its Mayor are all Basel has of a king, and the Magistrates are its judges.”

“I know those,” I said. “But who is king?” I was as unsure of the question as of the answer.

“Whose laws are followed is king,” she answered. “Whose laws do you see followed, Leonhard?”

There was a great deal to consider about laws. There were the city’s laws that lawyers read and the Magistrates judged on, and people obeyed these laws mostly, so the Council was a king. Also, there were laws of gravity that everyone obeyed, so the earth was our king; and laws of civility and custom that weren’t written but ruled us. There was an elegance that each law had its giver and its reason, wise or poor. And there were deeper laws of good and evil in which we chose our own Master. “God gives all laws, as are found in books; no man may change them: hate lies and love truth,” I said. “Grandmother, do you remember when Master Johann’s brother Master Jacob died?”

“I remember the man well.”

“Was it before or after Master Johann came back from Holland? I think it must have been close either way.”

“I don’t know. Jacob was alive and Johann was away, then Jacob was dead and Johann was here. It wasn’t told beyond that.”

“I think Knipper would remember that ride,” I said.

“Ask him when he comes with the coach tomorrow.”

“He didn’t go,” I said. “Gustavus had to send Willi with the coach. But I’d have to find him, and Gustavus couldn’t. Or maybe when Willi comes back, he can tell me if Knipper was still in Mistress Dorothea’s kitchen when he went for the trunk.”