An Elegant Solution(37)

“I know what was in it. I want to know when it was taken. You should have been watching it, Huldrych.” That Master couldn’t answer, besides that it seemed he didn’t know the answer, because he was choking and gasping. I’d been fearful of the dust and held my sleeve over my mouth. Gottlieb had stepped back from the cloud.

I took Master Huldrych’s hand and led him back from the doorway. “But who’d want it?” he asked, finally, when he could.

Gottlieb shook his head. “That’s all. We’re finished.” We would have left Huldrych there, regaining his breath, and the hallway gray and clouded, but he still seemed weakened. I stood with him a moment and Gottlieb waited.

In that moment the air cleared. “I’m right now, Leonhard,” Huldrych said.



In the street, I didn’t know where we would go and I waited to be told our destination. I still had plenty of paper and ink. “Who is next?”

Gottlieb only stared at the wall opposite and the many figures on it. “Next? I don’t know who will be next.” He was still contemplating the wall. “There is no coach driver in the Dance.”

“There’s a peddler.”

“That’s closest. He goes town to town and lives in none. And there,” he pointed, “is an innkeeper, and there a laborer, and there an Academic, and there a gentleman. And there a Magistrate, or what they had of them in those times. The Black Death took them all.”

“What did Master Huldrych mean about the Black Death?”

“Something he shouldn’t have remembered. There is no one else for us to question,” he said, in answer to my first question. He’d meant it completely: We were finished. I wondered myself, looking at the wall, which of the characters I might be.

“Master Gottlieb?” I said. “What was in the trunk? Where did it come from?”

He might have dismissed me and my audacity, and I could see that his gaze wasn’t on anything near, especially on me. But he did focus back and said, “It is no coincidence that it should appear just as my cousins have returned from Italy.”

“But . . . why was Knipper put in it?”

“That must not be a coincidence, either.” And that was a dismissal and his plain answer to me that he would not answer me. I wasn’t finished trying.

“There weren’t many replies to your questions. Did you learn anything from them?”

“Not from the questions. From the trunk. Now hand me your papers and go. The Inquiry is tomorrow and you’ll appear with me.”

“Is there anything I need to do?”

“It’s already done.” And I think he meant more than just the notes that I’d given him. But I still tried once more.

“Can you tell me, sir, why you returned back from Italy yourself?”

His answer surprised me, not least that he even answered, or answered plainly. He gave me a curious look that reminded me of the one wink he’d given Daniel the night before. “For a Chair in Basel, of course.”





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.