An Elegant Solution(40)

Beyond the brilliant front, the church inside was dim, but only so that the light through the windows could be immense and eternal, entering with vast strength and stepping down from heaven onto the receiving floor and laying hands on the willing walls. I’d seen it many mornings but never like it was this morning.

The light walked toward me slow and stately as a king. It touched the bench two ahead of me, and that plank seemed to shake from it. Outside, the sun was seeming to rise of its own in the sky, but it truly seemed that those steps down the aisle were the motive, and the sun was pulled through the window by them. They came to the row just ahead of me and I heard a sigh, or a gasp, and I stayed as still as I could and waited.

Somewhere in Bern Knipper’s coach was standing in front of an inn or was already a storm driven toward Basel. In Basel’s inn, brooding black across the Square, Caiaphas the magistrate like a barb was pierced into Basel’s skin. In the Watch barracks, Knipper was undisturbed and beyond the disturbance he was the center of. I could see them all, those three: the coach, Caiaphas, and the corpse. The bench ahead was filled with gold whiteness and that purity was coming toward me. And there was something else I saw: my Master’s house, and my Master’s presence inside it, like a fixed stone that the waves of turmoil could only break against.

“Leonhard!” It was Daniel, just come in. “It’s never hard to find you, even if no one else would be where you’d be. I need you, and quick.”

I hesitated; the light was inches away.

“Now, quick, fast!” he said. “Come!”

“I’m coming,” I said and I stood. Daniel needed me.



“What do you want?” I asked, running, and already halfway to his house. I still had buckets in my hands! He was already dressed in his finest.

“For you to hurry.”

We were quick to the Munster Square and his front door, and most of the water I’d pulled spilled on the streets behind us. I left the buckets and what was left in them at the door, and we both bowed our way in. “I’d have been here in an hour.”

“That’s an hour too late.” He took my arm in a tight grip, as if he was above a horrible drop, and I was a tree and his only hold. He pulled me into the dark entrance and to the stairs, more and more urgent.

“What is it?” I said. We scrambled up one floor. He didn’t seem afraid, just determined and frenzied. We climbed a second floor. “What do you want of me?”

We came to the hallway I knew well, but only from Saturdays. This wasn’t Saturday and the hall was decidedly different: it was not a place I should have been.

“Knock on that door,” he said.

It was my door, but not mine when it wasn’t Saturday.

“For what?”

“As if your life depended on it!”

“But who is in—” There was no finishing that question. Daniel beat on the door himself. The house shook with the pounding, enough to wake anyone in it.

“Just break it up,” he said.

He beat again, enough to wake the next house.

“Just stop them,” he said.

The echoes died. In the terrified silence I heard a chair scrape. There were footsteps. The handle rattled and the door opened with an angry jerk.

I was face to face with Master Johann.

And Magistrate Caiaphas was seated at the table behind him.

And Daniel was vanished.

It was a difficult moment. Master Johann was confused to see me as I was to be there at all.

“Master Johann,” I said. I mustered enough confidence to seem that I knew my purpose.

“Yes? What is it?” He was still bewildered, which I knew would last at most very briefly more. But I thought for a moment that he was also distracted, and I realized I was, also, by the third presence.

“I was sent . . .” I didn’t know which word would come next from my lips. I listened closely to hear it. “For Magistrate Caiaphas. I’m sorry—”

My apology was unnecessary, and even unheard. The name I’d uttered had been like a pistol shot. The Magistrate sprang to his feet and Master Johann turned to him in irritation. “Who knows you are here?”

“No one!” he said. “Who sent you?”

“Who sent you, Leonhard?” Master Johann repeated.

I didn’t know who’d sent me. I only knew who’d brought me, but that name wouldn’t be any help. “The Inquisitor,” I said. “I’m his clerk.”

Caiaphas was shaken. “How did he know I was here?”

“I went to the Inn—”

“The innkeeper told you?”

I was more a spectator to my own words even than the other two. “I asked in the stable and a boy said he’d seen you.”