The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch
“Stechlin, you witch. Come out, or we’ll set your house on fire!”
The midwife could see the men outside through the broken door. They were raftsmen and wagon drivers; she knew many of them by name. Most of them were the fathers of children she had brought into the world. Now their eyes had a bestial glare; they sweated and screamed and hammered on the door and the walls. Martha Stechlin looked around like a hunted animal.
A window shutter splintered, and the massive head of Josef Grimmer, her neighbor, appeared. Martha knew that he had never forgiven her for the death of his wife. Was that the reason for the uproar? Grimmer brandished a piece of the window frame studded with nails.
“I’m going to kill you, Stechlin! I’ll kill you before they even burn you!”
Martha ran to the back door. This gave onto a small herbal garden that lay directly behind the city wall. In the garden she realized that she had trapped herself. The houses to the left and right reached right up to the city wall, which was itself a good ten feet up to the parapet walk, too high to reach the top.
Directly by the wall was a small apple tree. Martha Stechlin hurried to it and climbed into the branches. From its top, she might possibly escape onto the parapet.
Once more she could hear the sound of breaking glass in her house, and then the garden door was broken open. In the doorway stood Josef Grimmer, panting and still holding the nail-studded lath in his hand. Behind him other wagon drivers pushed their way into the garden.
Martha Stechlin scrambled up the apple tree like a cat, higher and higher, until the twigs were as thin as children’s fingers. She grabbed the edge of the wall and tried to reach the safety of the battlements.
The branch broke.
With bleeding fingertips the midwife slid down the wall and into a wet vegetable patch. Josef Grimmer came up to her and raised the lath for a death-dealing blow.
“I wouldn’t do that.”
The wagon driver looked up to see where the voice had come from. On the battlements, directly above him, stood a massive form dressed in a long coat full of holes and a broad-brimmed, soft hat sporting a couple of ragged feathers. The man beneath this hat had black unkempt hair and a full beard that had not been touched by a barber for a long time. The battlements threw a shadow, so that there was little to see of his actual features except a huge hooked nose and a long clay pipe.
The man had spoken without taking the pipe out of his mouth. Now he held it in his hand and pointed to the midwife, who was crouched and panting by the wall underneath him.
“Killing Martha isn’t going to bring your wife back. Don’t make yourself miserable.”
“Shut up, Kuisl! It’s none of your business!”
Josef Grimmer had himself under control again. Like all the others, he was at first astounded that the man up there had been able to approach without anyone noticing. But the moment of surprise was over. Now he wanted to take his revenge and nobody was going to stop him. With the lath still in his hand, he slowly approached the midwife.
“That is murder, Grimmer,” said Kuisl. “If you strike now, I’ll be very happy to put the noose round your neck. And I promise you, you’ll die slowly.”
Josef Grimmer stopped. He turned hesitantly to his companions, who were obviously as uncertain as he was.
“She’s responsible for my son’s death, Kuisl,” said Grimmer. “Go down to the Lech and see for yourself. She put a spell on him and then stabbed him. A Satan’s mark she wrote on him.”
“If that’s true, why didn’t you stay with your son and send the bailiff for Martha?”
All of a sudden Josef Grimmer realized that his dead son must still in fact be down by the river. In his hatred he had just left him lying there and had hurried after the others. Tears came to his eyes.
With an agility that nobody would have suspected of him, the man with the pipe in his mouth climbed over the balustrade of the parapet and leaped down into the garden. He was taller by at least a head than all others there. The giant bent down to Martha Stechlin. She could now see his face quite close above her, the hooked nose, the wrinkles like furrows, bushy eyebrows, and deep-set brown eyes. The eyes of the hangman.
“Now you will come with me,” whispered Jakob Kuisl. “We’ll go to the court clerk, and he will lock you up. That’s the safest thing for you at the moment. Do you understand?”
Martha nodded. The hangman’s voice was soft and melodious, and it calmed her.
The midwife knew Jakob Kuisl well. She had brought his children into the world, both the living and the dead…Most often the executioner himself had lent a hand. Occasionally she bought from him potions and poultices to cure interrupted menstruation or unwanted pregnancies. She knew him to be an affectionate father who adored his youngest children, the twins, above all else. She had also seen how he laid the noose round the necks of men and women and pulled away the ladder. And now he’s going to hang me, she thought. But first he saves my life.
Jakob Kuisl helped her up, then looked around at the bystanders expectantly. “I’m taking Martha to the keep now,” he said. “If she really has anything to do with the death of Grimmer’s son, she will receive her just punishment, I can promise you that. But until then, leave her in peace.”
Without another word the hangman seized Martha by the scruff of the neck and pushed her through the middle of the group of silent raftsmen and wagon drivers. The midwife was quite sure he would make good on his threat.
Simon Fronwieser panted and cursed. He felt his back slowly getting damp. It was not sweat that he felt there, but blood, which had soaked through the sheet. He would have to resew his coat; the stains were all too clear on the black fabric. And the bundle across his shoulders was getting heavier with every step.
Simon crossed the Lech Bridge with his awkward burden and turned to the right into the tanners’ quarter. As the physician entered the narrow lanes, he at once smelled the acrid odor of urine and decay, which pervaded everything. He held his breath and trudged past frames as high as a man, between which sheets of leather had been hung out to dry. Half-tanned animal skins even hung from the balcony railings, giving off their penetrating stench. A few apprentices looked down inquisitively at Simon and his bloodstained bundle. It must have looked to them as if he was taking a slaughtered lamb to the hangman.
At last he left the narrow alleys behind him and turned left up the path to the duck pond to the executioner’s house, which stood under two shady oak trees. With a stable, a big garden, and a shed for a wagon, it was quite an impressive property. The physician looked around, not without a feeling of envy. The executioner’s profession might be dishonorable, but still one was able to make a decent living from it.
Simon opened the freshly painted gate and entered the garden. It was April, the first flowers had already appeared, and everywhere aromatic plants were springing up.
Mugwort, mint, lemon balm, stinkwort, wild thyme, sage…the executioner of Schongau was known for the herbal riches of his garden.
“Uncle Simon, Uncle Simon!”
The twins, Georg and Barbara, scrambled down from the oak tree and ran with loud cries to Simon. The physician was their friend, and they knew that he was always ready for a game or a romp with them.
Anna Maria Kuisl, aroused by the noise, opened the front door. Simon looked at her, smiling a little stiffly, while the children tried to jump up on him to see what he had in the bundle over his shoulder. Although she was just about forty, the hangman’s wife was still an attractive woman, who with her raven-black hair and bushy eyebrows looked almost like his sister. Simon had often asked himself if she was not a distant relative of Jakob Kuisl’s. Since executioners were regarded as dishonorable and could only marry burghers’ daughters in exceptional circumstances, their families were often closely related by marriage. In the course of centuries whole dynasties of executioners had formed, and that of the Kuisls was the largest in Bavaria.
Laughing, Anna Maria Kuisl came out to meet the physician, bu
“Georg, Barbara! Go and play behind the house. Uncle Simon and I have something to talk about.”
The children, grumbling, disappeared, and Simon was at last able to enter the room and lay the corpse on the kitchen bench. The cloth in which it was wrapped fell to the side. When Anna Maria saw the boy, she uttered a cry.
“My God, that’s Grimmer’s boy! What in the world has happened?”
Simon took a seat next to the bench and told her the story. Meanwhile Anna Maria poured him some wine mixed with water from an earthenware jug, which he drank in great gulps.
“And so you need my husband now to tell you what happened?” Anna Maria asked, when he had finished. Shaking her head, she kept on glancing at the boy’s body.
Simon wiped his lips. “Exactly. Where is he?”
Maria shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t tell you. He went up to the town to the blacksmith’s to get some nails. We need a new closet, you know. Ours is full to the bursting point.”
She glanced once more at the bloody bundle on the kitchen bench. As the wife of the hangman she was more than accustomed to the sight of corpses, but the death of a child always moved her. She shook her head. “The poor lad…”
Then she seemed to come to herself again. Life went on. Outside the twins romped about noisily, and little Barbara screeched at the top of her lungs. “It would be best if you wait for him here,” she said, getting up from the bench. “You can read a bit while you’re waiting.”
The hangman’s wife smiled. She knew that Simon often came just to leaf through her husband’s dog-eared old books. Sometimes the physician made up some rather feeble excuse for going down to the hangman’s house to look up something.
Anna Maria gave the dead boy one more compassionate glance. Then she took a woolen blanket from the closet and laid it carefully over the corpse, so that there was nothing more to see in case the twins came in suddenly. Finally she went to the door. “I must see what the children are doing outside. Help yourself to the wine, if you like.”
The door closed and Simon was alone in the room. The hangman’s living room was large and spacious and took up almost the entire ground floor of the house. In the corner there was a large stove, which was stoked from outside in the corridor. Next to it was the kitchen table, and above it the executioner’s sword hung on the wall. A steep staircase led from the passage to the upper room, where the Kuisls and their three children slept. Next to the oven was a low, narrow door, which led to another room beyond. Simon ducked under the lintel and entered the holy of holies.
On the left stood two chests in which Jakob Kuisl kept everything needed for executions and torture—ropes, chains, gloves, but also thumbscrews and pincers. The rest of this threatening arsenal was owned by the town authorities and was kept in the tower, deep down in the dungeons. Next to the chests, the gallows ladder was leaning on the wall.
But Simon was looking for something else. Almost the whole of the opposite wall was taken up by an enormous closet that reached to the ceiling. The physician opened one of the many doors and looked into a confused mass of bottles, pots, leather bags, and vials. Inside the closet, herbs were hanging to dry; they smelled like summer. Simon recognized rosemary, goat’s rue, and daphne. Behind a second door were countless drawers, labeled with alchemical signs and symbols. Simon turned to the third door. Behind this were piled old dusty volumes, crackling parchment rolls, and books both printed and handwritten—the hangman’s library, collected over the course of many generations, ancient knowledge, completely different from what Simon had studied in the course of his many dry-as-dust lectures at the university in Ingolstadt.
Simon reached for a particularly heavy volume, which he often held in his hands. He ran his finger over the title. “Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis,” he murmured. A disputed book that was based on the idea that all the blood in the body was part of a perpetual circulation powered by the heart. Simon’s professors in Ingolstadt had laughed at this theory, and even his father had found it far-fetched.
Simon continued browsing. The Buch der Medicie, or Book of Medicine, was the name of a handwritten, poorly bound little book in which all kinds of remedies against illnesses were listed. Simon’s gaze was arrested by a page on which dried toads were recommended as a remedy against the plague. Next to it on the shelf was a work that the hangman could have acquired only recently. Das Wundarzneyische Zeughaus, or Surgical Armory, by Johannes Scultetus, the city physician of Ulm, was so new that probably not even the University of Ingolstadt had acquired it yet. Reverently, Simon let his fingers glide over the binding of this masterpiece of surgery.
“Pity that you have eyes only for books.”
Simon looked up. Magdalena was leaning in the doorway and looking at him brightly. The young physician couldn’t help swallowing. Magdalena Kuisl, twenty years old, was aware of the effect she had on men. Whenever Simon saw her, his mouth became dry and his head seemed empty. In the past few weeks, it had become worse, he always kept thinking of her. Sometimes before he fell asleep, he imagined her full lips, the dimples in her cheeks, and her laughing eyes. If the physician had only been a little superstitious, he would have supposed that the hangman’s daughter had cast a spell over him.
“I’m…waiting for your father…” he stammered, without taking his eyes off her. Smiling, she came up to him. She appeared not to have noticed the dead boy on the bench as she walked past, and Simon had no intention of bringing it to her attention. The few moments they had together were too precious to fill with death and suffering.
He shrugged and put the book back on the shelf.
“Your father has the best medical library for miles around. I’d be foolish not to use it,” he murmured. His glance wandered over her plunging neckline in which two well-formed breasts were apparent. He quickly looked the other way.
“Your father sees that differently,” said Magdalena and slowly came nearer.
Simon knew that his father considered the hangman’s books to be works of the devil. And he had often warned him about Magdalena. Satan’s woman, he had said.
And he who has dealings with the hangman’s daughter will never be a respected medical man.
Simon knew that there could be no question of a marriage with Magdalena. She was “dishonorable,” just like her father. But he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Only a few weeks before, they had danced together for a short time at St. Paul’s Fair, and for days this had been the subject of gossip in the town.
His father had threatened to beat him if he was seen with Magdalena again. Hangmen’s daughters married hangmen’s sons—that was an unwritten law. Simon knew it very well.
Now Magdalena stood in front of him and ran her fingers across his cheek. She was smiling, but in her eyes there was an unspoken grief.
“Do you want to come to the meadows with me tomorrow?” she asked. “Father needs mistletoe and hellebore…”
Simon thought he heard a pleading note in her voice.
“Magdalena, I…” There was a rustle behind him.
“You can very well go alone. Simon and I have a great deal to talk about. Now off with you.”
Simon looked round. Unnoticed by him, the executioner had entered the narrow room. Magdalena looked once more at the young physician and then ran out into the garden.
Jakob Kuisl gave Simon a piercing and severe look, and for a moment it seemed he might throw him out of the house. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth and smiled.
“I’m pleased that you like my daughter,” he said. “Just don’t let your father know about it.”
Simon nodded. He had often had angry words with his father about his visits to the executioner’s house. Bonifaz Fronwieser considered the hangman to be a quack. However, his son wasn’t the only person he was unable to dissuade from making the pilgrimage to the hangman; half the people of Schonga
He sold potions for gout and diarrhea, prescribed tobacco for toothaches, splinted broken legs, and set dislocated shoulders. His knowledge was legendary, even though he had never studied at a university. It was clear to Simon that his father just had to hate the executioner. After all, he was his toughest competitor and, in fact, the better physician…
Meanwhile Jakob Kuisl had gone into the living room again. Simon followed. The room immediately filled with great clouds of tobacco smoke—the hangman’s lone vice, but one that he cultivated intensely.
Pipe in mouth he went purposefully to the bench, lifted the dead boy onto the table, and turned back the blanket and cloth. He whistled quietly through his teeth.
“Where did you find him?” he asked. At the same time he filled an earthenware bowl with water and began to wash the face and chest of the corpse. He looked quickly at the dead boy’s fingernails. Red earth had collected under them, as if little Peter had been digging somewhere with his bare hands.
“Down by the raft landing,” said Simon. He related all that had happened up to the point where everyone had run up into town to take revenge on the midwife. The hangman nodded.
“Martha is alive,” he said, continuing to dab at the dead boy’s face. “I took her to the keep myself. She is safe there for the time being. Everything else will have to be looked into.”
As so often before, Simon was impressed by the executioner’s composure. Like all the Kuisls, he seldom spoke, but what he said had authority.
The hangman had completed washing the corpse. Together they examined the boy’s ravaged body. The nose was broken, the face beaten black-and-blue. In the chest they counted seven stab wounds.