The Rule of Four is a novel written by the American authors Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, and published in 2004. Caldwell, a Princeton University graduate, and Thomason, a Harvard College graduate, are childhood friends who wrote the book after their graduations.
The Rule of Four reached the top of the New York Times Bestseller list, where it remained for more than six months. The book was a no. 1 national and international bestseller and has been translated into more than 25 languages. It has sold more than four million copies worldwide, and as of 2007 was the best-selling debut novel of the decade. It is currently being developed by Warner Brothers as a feature film.
From the book
"Like many of us, I think, my father spent the measure of his life piecing together a story he would
never understand. That story began almost five centuries before I left for college, and ended long
after he died. On a night in November of 1497, two messengers rode on horseback from the shadows
of the Vatican to a church named San Lorenzo, outside the city walls of Rome. What happened that
night changed their fortunes, and my father believed it might change his own.
I never made much of his beliefs. A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every
father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person
he loves best in the world will misunderstand him. But my father, a Renaissance scholar, was never
shy about the possibility of rebirth. He told the story of the two messengers so often that I could
never forget it, try as I might. He sensed, I see now, that there was a lesson in it, a truth that would
finally bind us.
The messengers had been sent to San Lorenzo to deliver a nobleman’s letter, which they were
warned under pain of death not to open. The letter was sealed four times in dark wax, and purported
to contain a secret my father would later spend three decades trying to discover. But darkness had
fallen on Rome in those days; her honor had come and gone, and not yet come again. A starry sky
was still painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and apocalyptic rains had flooded the Tiber
River, on whose shores had appeared, old widows claimed, a monster with the body of a woman and
the head of an ass. The two greedy horsemen, Rodrigo and Donato, did not heed their master’s
warning. They heated the wax seals with a candle, then opened the letter to learn its contents. Before
leaving for San Lorenzo, they resealed the letter perfectly, copying the nobleman’s stamp with such
care that the tampering must have been impossible to see. Had their master not been a much wiser
man, the two couriers would surely have survived.
For it wasn’t the seals that would undo Rodrigo and Donato. It was the heavy black wax in which
those seals had been pressed. When they arrived at San Lorenzo, the messengers were met by a
mason who knew what was in the wax: an extract from a poisonous herb called deadly nightshade,
which, when applied to the eyes, dilates the pupils. Today the compound is used medicinally, but in
those days it was used by Italian women as a cosmetic drug, because large pupils were considered a
mark of beauty. It was this practice that earned the plant its other name: “beautiful woman,” or
belladonna. As Rodrigo and Donato melted and re-melted each seal, then, the smoke from the
burning wax took hold. Upon their arrival at San Lorenzo, the mason brought them to a candelabra
near the altar. When their pupils failed to contract, he knew what they had done. And though the men
struggled to recognize him through their unfocused eyes, the mason did as he’d been told: he took
his sword and beheaded them. It was a test of trust, his master said, and the messengers had failed."
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