The Hangman's Daughter (3 page)

The knocking had now become a regular hammering. Simon hastened downstairs and flung the door open. Outside was one of the tanners who worked down at the river. His name, Simon remembered, was Gabriel. The physician knew him from an earlier occasion. He had put his arm in splints last year, when he had gotten himself into a drunken fight at St. Jude’s Fair. Simon put on an official mien. He knew what he owed to his profession.

“What’s the matter?”

The tanner regarded him suspiciously. “Where is your father? There’s been a bad accident down on the Lech.”

“My father is over at the infirmary. If it’s urgent, you’ll have to make do with me or with the barber.”

“The barber’s sick himself…”

Simon furrowed his brow. He still was regarded only as the physician’s son here in town, even though he had studied medicine in Ingolstadt and had been his father’s assistant in treating all possible ailments for almost seven years now. In recent years he’d even cured people on his own. His last case had been a dangerous fever. For days and days he’d applied cold ankle wraps and poultices to the cooper’s little daughter and administered a new medication to her: a powder of ground-up yellow bark that came from the West Indies and was known as “Jesuits’ Powder.” The fever had indeed subsided and the cooper had been grateful enough to pay two guilders more than his due. And still townspeople didn’t trust him.

Simon gave the man in front of him a defiant stare. The tanner shrugged, then turned to walk away. Over his shoulder he cast a disparaging glance at the physician.

“All right, come along then, if it isn’t too late already.”

Hurriedly, Simon followed the man and entered Münzstrasse along with him. It was the day after Saint George’s, and most tradesmen had already opened their first-floor shops hours ago. Saint George’s Day was also when maids and farmhands entered service on the farms surrounding Schongau. Accordingly, a great number of people were already about in the streets. On the left, clanging noises emerged from the blacksmith’s shop where an alderman’s horse had just been shod. The butcher next door had just slaughtered a pig, and thin rivulets of blood were trickling between the cobblestones, so that the physician had to step over them with one long stride in order not to soil his new leather boots. A few yards farther, a baker was selling fresh bread. Simon knew that it must be full of husks and would crunch between the teeth when you chewed it. Only the aldermen could afford real white bread these days, and only on special holidays.

And yet, Schongauers had to be glad to have anything to eat at all in that eleventh year after the end of the Great War. In the last four years, crops had twice been practically annihilated by hailstorms. In May of last year, a terrible rainstorm had caused the Lech to flood, and the town mill had been washed away. Since then, Schongauers had to take their grain to Altenstadt or even more distant towns to be ground, which, of course, was more expensive. Many fields in the nearby villages were left fallow, and farms lay abandoned. A third of the population had died of the plague or hunger in the past decades. Those who could, kept livestock in their houses and lived on cabbage and turnips from their own kitchen gardens.

As they crossed the market square, Simon cast a glance at the Ballenhaus. It used to be a warehouse and now served as a town hall and council chamber. It had once been the pride of the town when Schongau was rich, on a par with towns like Augsburg, and the wealthiest and most powerful merchants in the Holy Roman Empire had come and gone there. The little town on the Lech, where ancient trade routes intersected, was once an important trading place for all sorts of goods. But the war had put an end to all that. The Ballenhaus was in a state of decay: plaster was crumbling off the walls, and the entry gate hung crooked on its hinges. This time of murder and robbery had made Schongau poor. What had once been a rich, handsome town in the Pfaffenwinkel part of Bavaria had become a camping ground for unemployed mercenaries and other vagrants. After the war came famine, disease, cattle plague, and hailstorms. The town was finished, and Simon didn’t know if it could pull itself together one more time. And yet the burghers had not given up. On his way through the Lech Gate going down to the river, Simon looked at a colorful hustle and bustle. Wagon owners were driving their ox carts up the steep incline toward the market square. Over in the tanners’ quarter, the chimneys were smoking, and down by the riverbank women were busy with their washing, emptying troughs of dirty water into the raging Lech. Schongau, high on its hill, was enthroned above the forests and the river, peering almost like a proud matron toward Augsburg, its older and more powerful sister. Simon had to smile. No, this city would not go under. Life went on, despite all the dying.

At the landing, a large crowd had assembled.

Simon heard murmuring voices and again and again the laments of a man. He crossed the bridge and turned to the right, toward the storage shed, which was built right against the pier. With some difficulty he pushed himself through the throng until he reached the center of the crowd.

The wagon driver Josef Grimmer was kneeling on the wet planks, bending over a blood-smeared mass. His broad back blocked Simon’s view. Simon put his hand on Grimmer’s shoulder and felt that the man was shaking. His face was stained with tears, and he was deathly pale. Only some time later did the man notice the physician behind him.

His voice cracked as he hurled his curse in Simon’s face. “Look what they’ve done to my son! They stuck him like a pig! I’ll kill them! I’ll kill them all!”

“Who?” Simon asked softly. But the wagon driver had turned to his child again, sobbing.

“He’s talking about the Augsburg wagon men,” a man near him murmured. Simon recognized him as a member of the wagon drivers’ guild.

“There’ve been quarrels with them lately,” the man continued, “because they had to hand over their loads to us. They say we’d put some of the cargo aside for ourselves. Josef has picked a fight with those up there at the Stern.”

Simon nodded. He had had to bandage a few broken noses himself after the brawl at the inn. Many fines had been imposed, but that only increased the hatred between the wagon drivers of Augsburg and those of Schongau. There was an ancient ducal ordinance that the Augsburgers were permitted to transport cargo from Venice or Florence only as far as Schongau. From there, the Schongauers were to take over. This transportation monopoly had long been a thorn in the flesh of the Augsburgers.

Gently, Simon led the grieving father to the side. Some of his friends from the wagon drivers’ guild joined him. Then he bent over the boy.

So far nobody had bothered even to remove the child’s wet shirt. Simon ripped it open, revealing a ragged landscape of stabs. Someone must have slashed at the boy in an insane rage. Light-red blood was oozing from a fresh, sizable cut at the back of his head. Simon assumed that the boy had been trapped between the floating logs. His face was black-and-blue, but that, too, could have been done by the logs. The gigantic trunks developed a tremendous power in the stream and could crush a person like a piece of rotten fruit.

Simon put his ear to the boy’s chest. Then he took a small mirror and held it under his broken, blood-smeared nose. No breath was to be seen. The boy’s eyes were wide open. Peter Grimmer was dead.

Simon turned to the bystanders, who were watching him in silence. “A wet cloth,” he demanded.

A woman handed him a linen rag. Simon dipped it in the Lech and wiped the boy’s chest clean. When he had washed off all the blood, he could count seven stabs, all of them around the heart. But despite the deadly wounds, the boy hadn’t died at once. Gabriel the tanner had told Simon on their way down to the landing that the child had been murmuring to himself until just a short while ago.

Simon turned the boy on his belly. With a vigorous tug he ripped open the shirt on the back as well. A groan went through the crowd.

Beneath one shoulder blade there was a palm-size sign of a kind that Simon had never seen before—a washed-out purple circle with a cross protruding from the bottom:

For a moment, there was total silence on the pier. Then the first screams rose. “Witchcraft! There’s witchcraft involved!” Somebody bawled: “The witches have come back to Schongau! They’re getting our kids!”

Simon passed his fingers over the sign, but it couldn’t be wiped off. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Its dark color made it look like a demonic sign.

Josef Grimmer, who until then had been leaning on a few friends, staggered toward the corpse of his son. He regarded the sign briefly, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Then he shouted to the crowd, “He has that from the Stechlin woman! The midwife, the witch! She painted that on him! She killed him!”

Simon remembered that lately he had indeed seen the boy at the midwife’s place several times. Martha Stechlin lived up at the Küh Gate right next to the Grimmers. Ever since Agnes Grimmer had died in childbirth, the boy had often turned to her for consolation. His father had never forgiven Stechlin for failing to stop his wife’s hemorrhaging. He held her responsible for his wife’s death.

“Quiet! We don’t even know whether…”

The physician tried to shout down the furious howling of the mob, but in vain. The name Stechlin spread across the pier like wildfire. Already some people were rushing across the bridge and up to the town. “The Stechlin woman! The Stechlin woman did it! Run for the bailiff; let him get her!”

Soon nobody was left on the pier except Simon and the dead boy. Even Josef Grimmer, filled with hate, had followed the others, and only the rushing of the river could be heard.

Heaving a sigh, Simon wrapped the body in a dirty linen cloth that the washerwomen had left behind in their hurry and shouldered the bundle. Stooped over, puffing and panting, he wended his way toward the Lech Gate. He knew that only one man could help him now.

CHAPTER
2

T
UESDAY
A
PRIL
24,
A.D
. 1659
N
INE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

M
ARTHA STECHLIN STOOD IN HER ROOM, DIPPING
her bloodstained fingers in a bowl of warm water. Her hair was matted, deep rings appeared under her eyes, and she had not slept for nearly thirty hours. The birth at the Klingensteiners’ had been one of the hardest this year. The child had been lying wrong. Martha Stechlin had smeared her hands with goose fat and felt deep into the mother’s body to turn the unborn child round, but it had slipped away from her again and again.

Maria Josefa Klingensteiner was forty years old and had already survived a dozen confinements. Only nine children had been born alive; five of them had not seen their first spring. Four daughters remained to Maria Josefa, but her husband still hoped for an heir. The midwife, feeling inside the mother’s body, had already established that this time it was a boy. It seemed to be alive, but with every hour that passed it became more likely that neither mother nor child would survive the struggle.

Maria Josefa screamed, raged, and wept. She cursed her husband, who mounted her anew after every birth like a randy goat, she cursed the child, and she cursed the Almighty. As dawn broke, the midwife was sure that the boy was dead. For a case like this she kept an old poker handy with a hook on the end that she could use in an emergency to pull the child out of the mother’s body like a chunk of meat, sometimes piece by piece. The other women in the stiflingly hot room, the aunts, nieces, and cousins, had already sent for the parish priest; the holy water for an emergency baptism was ready over the fireplace. But then, with a last scream from Mother Klingensteiner, the midwife succeeded in grasping the boy’s feet. He slid out into the daylight like a newborn foal. He was alive.

It was a robust child.
And probably the murderer of his mother,
thought Martha Stechlin, as she looked at Maria Josefa’s pale, panting body and severed the umbilical cord with her scissors. The smith’s wife had lost a lot of blood, and the straw on the ground was red and slimy. Her eyes were sunken like those of a corpse. But at least her husband had his heir now.

The birth had taken all night. In the morning Martha Stechlin prepared another strengthening decoction of wine, garlic, and fennel and washed the mother; then she went home. Now she was sitting at the table in her room and trying to wipe the weariness out of her eyes. About noon the children would look in on her, as they so often did recently. She herself could not have children, although she had brought so many into the world. It made the midwife happy that Sophie, little Peter, and the others came to visit her frequently, though she sometimes wondered what the children found to like in a forty-year-old midwife with her salves, pots, and powders.

Martha Stechlin felt her stomach rumble. She suddenly realized that she had eaten nothing for two days. After a few spoonfuls of cold porridge from the pot above the hearth, she wanted to tidy up thoroughly. She was missing something. Something which at all costs must not fall into the wrong hands. Perhaps she had just put it down somewhere…

Shouting was coming from the market square. At first it was only indistinct, a murmur of voices, quiet but menacing, like the angry buzzing of a swarm of hornets.

Martha looked up from her bowl. Something had happened out there, but she was too tired to go to the window and find out.

Then the shouts came nearer. Steps could be heard, people running across the paved market square, past the Stern Inn and into the narrow alley, up to the Küh Gate. Now Martha Stechlin could hear a name emerging from the confusion of voices.

It was her name.

“Stechlin, you witch! To the stake with you! Burn her! Come out of there, Stechlin!”

The midwife leaned out the ground-floor window to find out exactly what was going on, and a fist-size rock hit her directly on the forehead. Everything went black and she sank to the ground. When she came to herself she saw, through a mist of blood, that the door to her house was being forced open. With great presence of mind, she jumped up and threw herself against it. Several legs were trying to force themselves through the opening. Then the door fell shut. From outside came angry shouts.

Martha searched in her dress for the key. Where could it be? Someone was pushing at the door again. There, on the table next to the apples, there was something shiny. While the midwife held the door shut with her strong body, she fumbled, almost blind with blood and sweat, for the key on the table. At last she had it in her hand and turned it in the keyhole. With a squeaking sound the bolt slid into place.

The pushing from outside suddenly stopped, only to change after a few seconds into a furious hammering. Obviously the men were swinging a heavy beam against the door. Already the thin wood was splintering. A hairy arm appeared in the opening and felt for her.

“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, but when she noticed the bundle on his back, his warning glance, and his defensive gesture, she motioned to the children to leave.

“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.