The Book of Air and Shadows - Michael Gruber [29]
I answered that he was a client of mine, and they asked me when I saw him last, and I said the first time was the last time, and then they asked if I knew why anyone would have wanted to harm him. I said no, but also that I didn’t know him all that well, and I asked them why they’d come to see me. They said they had found a binder agreement in his room in a residence hotel on upper Broadway that Columbia keeps for visiting faculty, at which point I asked them had anyone harmed him? They said that someone had visited him in that room on Sunday night, tied him to a chair, and, apparently, tortured him to death. They asked me what I was doing Sunday night, and I told them about Ingrid.
Tortured to death. They didn’t supply any details and I did not pry. I recall being shocked but, and this was strange too, not surprised. I neglected to tell the police about the package he had given me, for I considered that it was none of their business, not, at least, until I had taken the time to examine it myself.
THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (3)
So we began & I found I had a head for this worke—the numbers stuck hard as Latine never did. I learnt me what is twice two, twice three &c until sixteen sixteens & he expounded & I did fix it in my mynde how to figure therebye using but a pensille & paper: & also Division, as if a man wished to packe 2300 jarres twelve to a boxe how many boxes to be builded & what left in the last one alle figured with no board. He gave me besides a booke which was a wonder to me named DISME: or the Art of Tenths by a Dutchman Simon Stevins, & although you will be hard put to understand Nan I will any way tell you that Disme is a kind of Arithmeticke consisting in Characters of Cyphers; whereby a certain number is described & by which also all accounts which happen to humane affayres, are dispatched by whole numbers, without fractions or broken numbers. When I had shewed I was master of that he let me looke into his Euclid lately englished by Billingsley Lord Mayor of London. Which I ate as foode to a stervyng man or lyke one bounde in fetters, of a sodden set free. Beside this he instructed me in the art of the quadrante & other philosophickal devises that were I thinke ne’er seen on Fish Street before & taught me to make plats to scale from measoures wee took with quadrante & chaynes: also the elements of astronomick figuringe such as takynge Latitudes from the sun & divers stars: mee that when I began I sweare I knew not a Latitude from a cheese. So it was a greate thinge for me to accomplish this who had been accounted a slugg at schole.
This all in one sommer my twelft year: but now my father seeyng this taxed us sayyng what shal you not only be idle thyselfe but also tayke my clerke into idlenesse with thee? But Mr Wenke stod his grownde lyke a man quoth he sir this lad you have is as apt at the Mathematicks as any I have seen: in some few moneths he has learned near all I have to teach hym & will shortly exceede me. He, that is my father, saith how will this Mathematicks sell me more iron? Mr Wenke then says what I have taught the boye will grately spede the workynges of accountes, and to me saith, do you shew