An Elegant Solution(54)

“What was it, Daniel?” I asked.

“I won’t say.”

The next pause was mine. “Was it anything evil?”

“Evil . . . ?”

“That you agreed to.”

“Not that I agreed to, no. I wouldn’t have. And that’s a point, too, that I didn’t. And it’s done. Even whether he did it or not. It might not have been.” He tried to laugh. “It wasn’t anything a man would be thrown into the river for! Not what I agreed.”

“What was it?” I asked again.

He was sober again, and finished. “Leonhard, it’s best not said. There’s much to think about and I will.”

“I will, too.”

“Don’t. There’s no use.”

I think neither of us was much satisfied. Mistress Dorothea had asked me to watch for regret and remorse. I wasn’t sure yet whether I’d seen any.



I sat late, through two candles, writing in silence about sound and waves. I’d been writing this thesis for very long now: two years. The scratch of my pen came to seem like thunder to me in the quiet night. With every sentence I also heard Huldrych’s arguments against my ideas, and I wished I could answer him. Only when I could argue back did I know that there was some strength in my ideas. He was like the hammer that put force behind the chisel, forcing elegance out of my coarse and ill-formed proposals.

Finally I put the quill aside and closed the ink. I dressed for bed. I didn’t know the time. Last, I looked across my bookshelf for which volume I’d have for my Saturday. It was hard. I was still diminished. It would take time to re-grow. I picked the Ars Conjectandi and extinguished the light.



My sleep was short but restorative and I woke to my Saturday morning more at peace. I was out to the well in good time, and I chose a different fountain than the Barefoot. At home again, I felt the Saturday morning buoyancy lifting me. It was like I had hold of some hourglass that didn’t whip with the waves.

My grandmother found me more talkative, and she was, also. “What were you writing last night?” she asked, and that was a sign that she wanted to just hear me chatter. I was always writing and to her, one thing was mostly the same as another.

“I was disserting,” I said. “It’s still on sound and waves in the air.”

“And what in particular?”

“On what a wave is.”

And I said it eagerly enough that she had to ask, “And what is it, Leonhard?”

“I think it is a Mathematical equation.”

“And how can it be?”

“I don’t know if the wave is the equation or the equation is the wave. But this is what I’ve written, that the equation is the law that the wave must obey.”

“Sound must obey laws? Like men must? And who gives laws to the air?”

“I think God does.”

“And do they follow His laws?”

“Yes,” I said, and firmly. “In every circumstance they do. They aren’t unrighteous.”

“Where do they learn the laws?” She was teasing my words, but I think they were interesting to her.

“They don’t learn. They just follow. The laws are invisible.”

“You see so many invisible things, Leonhard.”

“It’s only because there are so many,” I said.



Then I was in my room and I read Uncle Jacob.

The subject was conjecture, chance, probabilities. To throw dice, what was expected? The cube would fall on one side of six, and any was as likely as any other, though only one would land upright. And throwing it again, there was still the same chance. Landing a three twice made the chance of another three no greater or less. But it was still unlikely to land threes thrice. What did chance mean? And how could chance be, when all the universe was ordered and clockwork? Did God choose which side would land?

I’d read the Ars Conjectandi a dozen times at least. I could have written out good stretches of it from memory. And now, though it’s prideful of me to say, I could place it only in the middle of Mathematical writing. Leibniz, DesCartes, Newton, and others were still above it. But it had hints. The book couldn’t have included all that Master Jacob thought, or even wrote. So I looked, as I read, for what had been written but not in these pages; I looked for the invisible writing.

Master Gottlieb had written the book from Master Jacob’s notes. Perhaps he had them still. It would have been more likely that Master Johann had those notes, but that also seemed most unlikely. It would not have been Jacob’s wish that his rival brother come into possession of them.

Instead, my thoughts turned in a spiral to another place the papers might have been. Most likely they had been gathering dust. Great amounts of dust, for many years. And then they were somewhere else.