Elegant Solution

Paul Robertson

Description

Robertson's Latest Mix of Rich History and Deadly Murder For young Leonhard Euler, the Bernoulli family have been more than just friends. Master Johann has been a demanding mentor, and his sons have been Leonhard's allies and companions. But it is also a family torn by jealousy and distrust. Father and sons are engaged in a ruthless competition for prestige among the mathematical elites of Europe, especially the greatest prize: the Chair of Mathematics at the University of Basel, which Johann holds and his sons want. And now, their aspirations may have turned deadly.Lured into an investigation of the suspicious death of Uncle Jacob twenty years ago, Leonhard soon realizes there's more at stake than even a prominent appointment. Surrounded by the most brilliant--and cunning--minds of his generation, Leonhard is forced to see how dangerous his world is. His studies in mathematics have always been entwined with his thoughts on theology, and now, caught in a deadly battle of wills, he'll need both his genius and his faith to survive.

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 19 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441262752
• Langue: English

Extrait

© 2013 by Paul Robertson
Published by Bethany House Publishers
11400 Hampshire Avenue South
Bloomington, Minnesota 55438
www.bethanyhouse.com
Bethany House Publishers is a division of
Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan
www . bakerpublishinggroup . com
Ebook edition created 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN 978-1-4412-6275-2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Lookout Design, Inc.
Author represented by The Steve Laube Agency
It has been among my greatest Pleasures to teach the ancient Subjects of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy to a new Generation of Scholars, and in so doing, continue the unbroken Enterprise of giving to the Future the immense Treasure that has been received from the Past.
So, Martin, Bryan, Sarah, Owen, Justin, Chris, Elizabeth, Matt, Nate, Shana, Ben, Hannah, Zach, David, Katherine, Carina, Jesse and all the others; and Ellen, Greg and Jeff; and all my own teachers; and Lisa: this book is dedicated to you.
I believe that, if there was no other proof, that because of Mathematics, I would still believe in God. I’ll let Leonhard tell you why.
. . . eternal, immortal, invisible . . .
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Ash Gate
2. The Boot and Thorn
3. The Death Dance
4. The Oscillating Hourglass
5. The Barefoot Church
6. The Holbein Chamber
7. The Outer Wall
8. The Eadem Medallion
9. The Triple Seven Leaves
10. The Remembered Meteor
11. The Reciprocal Squares
12. The Physics Election
13. The Logarithmic Spiral
14. The Sealed Stones
15. The Tree, Throne, and Candle
16. The Lost Hour
17. The Iron Casket
18. The Value Pi, Squared, and Divided by Six
19. The Deluge
About the Author
Books by Paul Robertson
Back Cover
1 The Ash Gate

O f dust is man made, and to dust man returns. So I sat, watching for the dust of men returning.
I was on a hillside above Basel. My Master Johann had me on an errand to watch for the return of his sons from Italy. It was late on a spring day; the sky was exactly blue, cut at the edge of the world by sharp white mountains. The fields were perfect green, engraved by the Rhine. And finally, around the side of my hill was an airy indistinctness. Dust.
That was my signal, but I waited to be sure: that it was dust raised by the coach from Bern. Once I saw the coach, drawn by four horses, I ran down the hill toward the city; I loved to run. I was first by minutes to the gate at the city Wall. The coach wouldn’t stop there. It was bound for an inn and stable inside.
I waited there anyway. The gate was the Ash Gate and was only passed with burning. Ashes were the symbol of renunciation; the passage of any gate was renouncing one side to enter the other. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust, the coach came into view.
The road passed over the moat on a causeway and through an arch beneath a high, narrow stronghold. The coachman had his horses at a fast pace. I knew the man; he’d been driving the route for centuries. He waved to me. Then his coach, like an arrow on the straight road, shot over the bridge and pierced the gate. I followed through it.

Immediately inside, the Ash Street was hedged with houses, in unyielding and uninterrupted lines. Always in Basel the doors would be closed and the windows curtained. That afternoon the street was empty and the coach hardly slowed. I was just as quick and kept with it. The street soon ended in another moat and Wall and gate. This was the inner Wall and the old city, and a short distance inside was the coach’s destination and destiny. I reached the tavern as it did.
There was a large public market square here, one of the few open spaces in Basel where its people would be found outside their homes. The inn waited on one side, and across from it stood the blunt face of an ancient church, the largest in Basel, even bulkier than the cathedral. The tavern was the Boot and Thorn; its opposite was called the Barefoot Church.

The coach halted. Knipper, the coachman, dropped nimbly from his box to the cobblestones as a lout from the inn was already scrambling upward toward the luggage. From the Beginning, Knipper had driven that coach. He brought Erasmus to Basel and Oecolampadius and the Reformation; he brought Holbein and Paracelsus and the Renaissance. Knipper took Charlemagne through to Rome, Caesar conquering the Gauls crossed the Alps with Knipper, and Hannibal crossed the other way with his elephants in the luggage rack; and Knipper’s horses, I knew, were named by Adam.
“I know who you’re for!” he bellowed to me. He was a boisterous and cantankerous man, quick to answer, agile, and a dead shot with his pistols. A coach driver had to be all those. “They’re in there safe and sound!” His hair was short and all white, though it would shine like silver in the sun, and he had no beard.
“Their father’s wanting them,” I said.
“As I value my life, I won’t keep that man waiting,” Knipper answered in a suddenly low voice, and then back louder, “So let’s get them out!” He gave the handle a twist and the door a wrench, and opened it onto a black cave. From that shadow the passengers emerged.
The first was a tiny old woman who descended the step with her bonnet bobbing like a pecking bird; the next was a wide man who swayed on his small feet like a swinging sack of wool. I let them both pass.
Then a shoe buckle, and shoe, and stockinged leg, were planted on the step, and a three-cornered hat and white wig bowed low beneath the low door, and I knew I had my man. The whole accordion unfolded.
“Daniel!” I said. I hadn’t seen him in the two years since he’d fled. He was dressed beyond sere Basel’s tastes in a wine silk coat and ruffled collar. Italy and aging had done their work on him.
“Leonhard!” he answered, and I knew from his smile that his cheerfulness was unchanged. He shook my hand vigorously. “Well met!” He’d hardly put himself on solid ground when another hat and another wig followed. But his brother Nicolaus was a very different fish.
Brothers contrast as bells do: near the same and discordant the more alike they are. Daniel and Nicolaus both had their father’s large, brooding eyes in their mother’s long and narrow face. Daniel achieved this well, fixing the world with the stare of a philosophic hawk; in Nicolaus the effect was perplexing, something like a furious sheep. At the age of thirty, Nicolaus had the gentle rounding of affluence, more than the still sticklike Daniel and taller. Daniel was just twenty-five, seven years my senior.
In temperament, the common inheritance from their father was their eternal curiosity and from their mother, a piercing perception. But two other traits from their parents were odd crossed. Daniel thrived on conversation, having his mother’s love of talking and his father’s care at hearing. Nicolaus had the reverse: his father’s dislike of speaking and his mother’s disdain for listening. The parents had been compatible. The brothers, a torture to each other. They still had a strong fraternal fondness, though: a common enemy had made them allies.
“Blasted long ride,” Nicolaus said.
But Daniel was shaking my hand eagerly. “How have you weathered these two years?”
“Very well,” I answered.
“And the Brute?” he asked, and I knew his aversion to his father was also unchanged. Master Johann was the most opposite among mankind of an unthinking animal, and Daniel among mankind most knew that.
“As well as ever.”
“I feared as much! But he won’t live forever, will he? He’ll have to die sometime.”
“We all will,” Nicolaus said. “But who’ll carry the baggage?”
“That’s the lot of the living, to carry what’s left behind by the dead,” Daniel said.
Yet Nicolaus, who was lean with words, would use one sentence to say more than one thing. He’d meant the luggage from the coach. “The boy’s hired to bring it to the house,” I said, “and the driver, too.” Knipper himself was already unloading the first bags, and Willi, the hulking tavern lout, was bringing out a cart. “We’re to go on right away.”
“We’re to go right away? Then I’ll stop right away. Join me in the Boot and Thorn for a cup, Leonhard.”
“Not I.”
The innkeeper had come out to watch us, and he and the coachman had whispered words. That man was earth and fire to Knipper’s wind and fire, and I’d seen many sparks between them. Then Knipper took the first bags into his hands.
“Perhaps in the church for a kneel, then?” Daniel said to me. “That’s what you’d rather.”
“I’d rather get you to the Master’s house.”
“And be at it,” Nicolaus growled.
The first street toward Master Johann’s house from the Square was the Contention Alley, and it was well named for what it was leading us to. I had a quick sight of Knipper turning the corner ahead of us, while the brothers were looking back at Willi tugging heavy trunks onto the cart. Then we were off, and the march to Master Johann’s house was short and sharp.
In the minute of walking, I asked Daniel about Italy. It was really to hear about himself, and my ears were quickly filled. Daniel had been my close friend in the first lonely years I was in Basel away from my own parents. He and his brothers had been brothers to me, and Daniel the most. I’d grieved when he left. I’d grieved for why he’d had to leave. I’d worried he would never return.
Nicolaus was silent, of course. He hadn’t lived in Basel in the year