The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch
Simon would gladly have indulged in unchaste love last night, but during his rendezvous with Magdalena later on in a secret corner by the town wall, she had only wanted to talk about Goodwife Stechlin. She, too, was convinced of the midwife’s innocence. Once he had tried to touch her bodice, but she had turned away. At his next attempt the night watchman had discovered them and sent them home. It was way past eight o’clock in the evening, and at that time young girls were no longer allowed out on the streets. Simon had the feeling of having missed a crucial moment, and he was not sure if luck would soon bring him another. Perhaps his father was right and he should keep his hands off the hangman’s daughter. Simon was not sure if she was only toying with him or whether she really cared for him.
Jakob Kuisl couldn’t fully concentrate on his work that morning either. While Simon sat there sipping weak beer and staring out the window, he mixed a salve of dried herbs and goose fat. He kept putting the pestle aside to fill his pipe. Anna Maria, his wife, was out in the field, and the twins were rollicking under the kitchen table, a few times almost knocking over the mortar. He scolded them and sent them outside into the yard. Georg and Barbara trotted off, pouting, but knowing full well that their father could not stay angry at them for long.
Simon leafed through the well-thumbed book the hangman had lying open on the table. Simon had returned two of his books and was eager to learn new things. The tome before him was not necessarily going to provide that. Dioscorides’s De materia medica was still the standard text of the healing arts even though its author, a Greek physician, had lived in the days of our Savior. Also at the university in Ingolstadt they were still teaching his methods. Simon sighed. He had the feeling that humanity was running in place. So many centuries and they had not learned anything new.
He was still surprised that Kuisl owned this book as well. In the hangman’s wooden chest and medicine cabinet there were over a dozen books and innumerable parchments, among these the writings of the Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen and newer texts on the circulation of blood or on the location of organs in the body. Even such a recent text as Ambroise Paré’s Writings on Anatomy and Surgery in a German translation was among them. Simon did not believe that any Schongau citizen owned more books than the hangman, not even the court clerk, who had a reputation as a great scholar in town.
As Simon leafed through the Greek’s text he wondered why he and the hangman could not simply leave the case of the midwife alone. Probably it was precisely this rejection of the obvious, this continuous probing prompted by curiosity, that created a bond between them. That, and a good portion of obstinacy, he thought with a smile.
All of a sudden his finger stopped on a page. Next to a drawing of the human body there were drawings of a few symbols for alchemistic ingredients. One of them showed a triangle with a squiggle below.
It was the old symbol for sulfur.
Simon knew it from his university days, but now he remembered where he had last seen this symbol. It was the symbol that the linen weaver Andreas Dangler had shown him, the same symbol that his foster child Sophie had drawn in the dirt in their backyard.
Simon pushed the book across the table to Jakob Kuisl, who was still crushing herbs in the mortar.
“This is the old symbol I told you about! The symbol Sophie drew! Now I recognize it again!”
The hangman looked at the page and nodded.
“Sulfur…the stink of the devil and of his playmates.”
“I wonder if they really…?” Simon asked.
Jakob Kuisl chewed on his pipe. “First the Venus symbol, and now the symbol for sulfur…well, it is strange.”
“Where did Sophie learn such symbols?” Simon asked. “Only from the midwife. She must have told her and the other children about them. Perhaps she did teach them witchcraft after all.” He sighed. “Unfortunately we can no longer ask her about it, in any case not now.”
“Nonsense,” the hangman growled. “The Stechlin woman is no more witch than I am. The children probably discovered the symbols in her room, in a book, on vials, bottles, who knows where.”
Simon shook his head. “The symbol for sulfur maybe,” he said. “But the Venus symbol, the witches’ symbol? You said yourself that you’ve never seen such a symbol in her house. And if you had, then she would be a witch after all, wouldn’t she?”
The hangman continued crushing the herbs in the mortar even though they had long been ground into a green paste.
“The Stechlin woman is no witch, and that’s that,” he growled. “Let’s forget about her, and instead find the devil who is going through our town and kidnapping the children. Sophie, Clara, and Johannes, they’ve all disappeared. Where are they? I’m sure that when we find them we’ll also find the solution to the puzzle.”
“That is, if the children are still alive,” mumbled Simon. Then he became lost again in his reveries.
“Sophie did see the devil. It was down by the river,” he said finally, “and he asked about the Kratz boy. Not long after that, the boy was dead. The man was tall, he had a coat and a hat with a feather in it and a scar across his face. Also he is said to have had a hand made of bone, at least that’s what the girl thinks she saw…”
Jakob Kuisl interrupted him. “The serving girl at Semer’s inn also saw a man with a skeleton hand in the lounge.”
“True,” said Simon. “That was a few days earlier, together with a few other men. The maid said they looked like soldiers. Then they went upstairs to meet someone there. But who was that?”
The hangman scraped the paste from the mortar into a jar, which he sealed with a piece of leather.
“I don’t like it when soldiers hang around our town,” he growled. “Soldiers only bring trouble. They drink, they rob, they destroy.”
“Speaking of destruction…” said Simon. “Schreevogl told me the night before last that not only is the Stadel destroyed, but on the same evening someone was at the building site for the leper house. Everything was razed to the ground there. Could that too have been the work of the Augsburgers?”
Jakob Kuisl dismissed this with a wave of the hand. “Hardly,” he said. “They’ll only welcome a leper house here. Then they hope that fewer travelers will stop in our town.”
“Well, then perhaps it’s wagon drivers from somewhere else who are afraid of catching leprosy in passing by,” remarked Simon. “After all, the trade route runs not far from the Hohenfurch Road.”
Jakob Kuisl spat. “Well, I know plenty of Schongauers who are just as afraid of that. The church wants the leper house, but the patricians are against it because they fear that business travelers will stay well clear of our little town…”
Simon shook his head. “And yet there are leper houses in many large cities, even in Regensburg and Augsburg…”
The hangman walked over to the apothecary’s closet to put away the jar. “Our moneybags are cowardly dogs,” he told Simon over his shoulder. “Some of them come and go regularly here at my house, and they tremble when the plague is still in Venice!”
When he returned he was carrying a larchwood truncheon about the length of his arm over his shoulder and grinning. “We need to take a closer look at that leper house in any case. I get the feeling that too many things are happening all at once for it to be a coincidence.”
“Right away?” Simon asked.
“Right away,” Jakob Kuisl said, swinging his truncheon. “Perhaps the devil is making his rounds out there. I’ve always wanted to give him a good thrashing.”
He squeezed his massive body through the narrow door opening to the outside, into the April morning. Simon shivered with cold. It wouldn’t be surprising if even the devil were afraid of the Schongau hangman.
The building site for the leper house was located in a clearing right next to the Hohenfurch Road less than half an hour’s travel from the town. Simon had watched the workmen more than once as he passed the site. They had already set the foundations and raised brick walls. The doctor remembered
Simon recalled how the priest had often mentioned with pride in his sermons during recent months the progress being made on the construction. In building the leper house, the church was fulfilling a long-held wish: it had always been its basic mission to care for the poor and the sick. Besides, the highly contagious lepers were a danger to the entire town. So far they had always been shunted off to the leper house in Augsburg. But the Augsburgers had enough lepers of their own, and lately they had only reluctantly accepted more. Schongau didn’t want to plead for their help in the future. The new leper house would be a symbol of municipal independence, even if many in the council were opposed to its construction.
Not much was to be seen now of that once-busy building site. Many of the walls had collapsed as if someone had rammed them as hard as they could. The truss was now a sooty skeleton reaching up to the sky, and most of the wooden scaffolds were smashed or burnt. A smell of wet ashes hung in the air. An abandoned cart loaded with wood and barrels was stuck in a ditch at the side of the road.
In one corner of the clearing there was an old well made of natural stone. A group of craftsmen were sitting on the edge, staring in complete bewilderment at the destruction. The work of weeks, if not months, was destroyed. The construction had been a living for these men, and their future was now uncertain. As of yet, the church had not said what was going to be done.
Simon waved at the workmen and walked a few steps toward them. They eyed the physician with suspicion while continuing to chew on their bread. The doctor was obviously interrupting their meal, and they had no intention of wasting their short break on a chat.
“It looks pretty bad,” Simon called out as he walked toward them and pointed toward the building site. The hangman followed a few steps behind him.
“Do you know who did it?”
“And what business would that be of yours?” replied one worker, spitting on the ground in front of them. Simon recognized him as one of those who had tried a few days earlier to crash the keep to get at the midwife. The man looked over Simon’s shoulder in the direction of Jakob Kuisl. The hangman smiled and rolled the truncheon back and forth on his shoulder.
“Greetings, Josef,” said Kuisl. “How’s the wife? In good health? Did my concoction work?”
Surprised, the others looked at the carpenter who had been hired by the town as site manager.
“Your wife is sick?” one of them asked. “You didn’t say anything about that.”
“It’s…nothing serious,” he growled and looked at the hangman as if seeking his help. “Only a little cough. Isn’t that right, Master Kuisl?”
“That’s right, Josef. Would you be so kind as to show us around?”
Josef Bichler shrugged and walked off in the direction of the collapsed walls. “There isn’t much to see. Follow me.”
The hangman and the physician followed while the other workmen remained at the well, talking to one another in hushed voices.
“What’s wrong with his wife?” asked Simon in a whisper.
“She no longer wants to go to bed with him,” said Jakob Kuisl as he surveyed the site. “He asked the midwife for a love potion, but she wouldn’t give him one. She thought that was witchcraft. So he came to me.”
“And you gave him?”
“Sometimes belief is the best potion. Belief and clay dissolved in water. There have been no complaints since then.”
Simon grinned. At the same time he could not help shaking his head over a man who wanted to see the midwife burned as a witch and at the same time ordered magic potions from her.
In the meantime they had reached the foundation of the leper house. Parts of the once six-foot-high walls had collapsed completely, and stones were scattered everywhere on the ground. A stack of planks had been thrown over and set on fire, and in some places smoke was still rising.
Josef Bichler crossed himself as he looked down on the destruction. “It must have been some kind of devil,” he whispered. “The same one that murdered the little ones. Who else knocks down entire walls?”
“A devil or a couple of strong men using a tree trunk,” Jakob Kuisl said. “This one there, for instance.” He pointed to a thick pine trunk with its branches removed lying in the clearing not far from the north wall. Tracks in the dirt revealed how it had been dragged from the edge of the wood to the spot and from there on to the wall. The hangman nodded. “They probably used it like a battering ram.” They climbed over part of the destroyed wall into the interior of the structure. The foundation had been smashed at several points as if someone had gone wild with a pickax. Slabs of stones had been pushed to the side and clumps of clay and pieces of brick were scattered around. In places the debris reached as high as their knees, so that they sometimes had to climb over heaps of rubble. It looked worse than after an attack by the Swedish forces.
“Why would someone do anything like that?” whispered Simon. “That’s no longer vandalism, that’s blind destructiveness.”
“Strange,” remarked Kuisl, chewing on his cold pipe. “Tearing down the walls would really have been enough to halt the building. But here…”
The carpenter looked at him anxiously. “I’m telling you…the devil,” he hissed. “Only the devil has such power. Look at the chapel next to it—he crushed it with his fist as if it were a piece of paper.”
Simon shivered. Now at noon the sun was trying to dissolve the morning mist but it couldn’t quite do that. The mist still hung in thick clouds over the clearing. The forest, which began only a few yards behind the building site, could be seen only dimly.
In the meantime Jakob Kuisl had stepped out again through the masonry archway. He kept searching around in front of the western wall fragment and finally stopped. “Here!” he called out. “Clear tracks. Must have been four or five men.”
All of a sudden he stooped down and picked something up. It was a small black leather pouch, no larger than a child’s fist. He opened it, looked inside, and then sniffed it. A blissful smile brightened his face. “First-rate tobacco,” he told Simon and the carpenter, who had both come closer. He rubbed the brown fibers into crumbs and deeply inhaled the aroma once more. “But not from around here. This is good stuff. I’ve smelled something like this up in Magdeburg once. For this stuff, traders got themselves slaughtered like pigs.”
“You’ve been to Magdeburg?” asked Simon softly. “You never told me about that.”
The hangman quickly stuffed the pouch into his coat pocket. Without answering Simon’s question he walked toward the foundation walls of the chapel. Here, too, there was nothing but destruction. What had been walls were toppled over, forming small stone mounds. He climbed one of them and gazed all about. His mind seemed to be still on the pouch he had found. “Nobody smokes that kind of tobacco around here,” he called down to the other two.
“How would you know?” asked the carpenter sourly. “All of this devil’s weed smells the same!”
The hangman was torn from his thoughts and looked down angrily at Josef Bichler. As he stood there on the mound of stones surrounded by clouds of mist, he reminded Simon of some legendary giant. The hangman pointed his finger at the carpenter. “You stink,” he shouted. “Your teeth stink, and your mouth stinks, but this…weed, as you call it, is fragrant! It invigorates the senses and tears you from your dreams! It covers the entire world and lifts you into heaven; let me tell you that! In any case, it’s much too good for a peasant numskull like you. It comes from the New World, and it is not meant for any old nitwit.”
Before the carpenter could answer, Simon interrupted, pointing to a mound of wet, brown earth just next to the chapel. “Look, there are tracks here too!” he shouted. The mound was indeed covered with shoe prints. With a last angry look the hangman climbed down from the mound and examined the tracks. “Boot tracks,” he said finally. “These are soldiers’ boots, that’s for su
“The devil’s clubfoot,” hissed Josef Bichler.
“Nonsense,” growled Kuisl. “If it were a clubfoot, then even you would be able to see it. No, the man is limping. He probably got a bullet in his leg during the war. They took out the bullet, but the leg has remained stiff.”
Simon nodded. He could still remember such operations from his days as an army surgeon’s son. Using long, thin grasping pincers, his father had burrowed into the wounded man’s flesh until he finally found the bullet. Pus and gangrene had often developed afterward, and the soldier would die within a short time. But sometimes all went well, and the man could go back into combat, only to come back to them with a stomach wound the next time.
The hangman pointed at the mound of moist earth. “What is the clay doing here?” he asked.
“We use it to plaster the walls and the floor,” the carpenter said. “The clay is from the pit by the brick hut behind the tanners’ quarter.”
“This property here belongs to the church, doesn’t it?” Simon asked the carpenter.
Josef Bichler nodded. “Schreevogl, the old codger, willed it to the church shortly before he died last year, and the young heir wound up with nothing.”
Simon remembered his conversation the day before yesterday with Jakob Schreevogl. That was more or less what the patrician’s son had told him. Bichler grinned at him and poked at something that was stuck between his teeth.
“It sure bothered the young Schreevogl,” he said.
“How do you know that?” asked Simon.