The Hangman's Daughter (32 page)

Simon handed him the medicine.

“For you, only five pennies. However you must dissolve it in brandy, otherwise it has no effect. Do you have any brandy?”

Georg started to think. The physician thought that he would have to help him along, but then the bailiff’s face lit up.

“I can get some brandy. Over at the inn.”

Simon nodded and took the money.

“Good thinking, Georg. Run over there quickly. It won’t take you long to get back.”

Georg took off while the second guard stood undecidedly at his post. Simon looked at him pensively.

“Do you also have a cough?” he asked. “You look so pale. Any chest pains?”

The guard seemed to think it over, and then he looked over to where his colleague was just disappearing into the inn. Finally he nodded.

“Then go run after him, see to it that he gets more brandy,” said Simon. “Each of you must dissolve it in a goblet, better even, two goblets full.”

The bailiff’s sense of duty was wrestling with the prospect of one or two goblets of brandy, and for medicinal purposes to boot. Finally he followed his friend.

Simon grinned. He had learned a few things from the hangman by now. Amazing what can be done with a little bag filled with clay!

The physician waited another moment until the two were out of sight. Then he looked around carefully. The market square was empty. He quickly opened the big door a crack and slipped inside.

A smell of spices and musty linen greeted him. Sunlight fell in narrow strips through the large, barred windows. It was already getting dark in the hall and shadows were creeping across the room. Bags and crates were stacked one on top of the other like sleeping giants against the wall. Alarmed, a rat scurried out from behind a crate and disappeared in the darkness.

Simon crept up the wide steps to the upper level and listened at the door to the council chamber. When he could not hear any sound he opened it carefully. The room was empty. Half-full wine pitchers and crystal glasses were standing on the big oaken table in the middle of the room, and the chairs around it were pushed back. A huge oven with green tiles, some of them painted, sat in the corner. Simon held his hand against it. It was still hot. It looked as if the aldermen had left the room for only a short recess and would return at any moment.

Simon crept through the room and tried as best he could to keep the floorboards from creaking. On the eastern wall hung a yellowed oil painting showing the Schongau aldermen assembled around the oaken table. He looked at it closer. At first glance he realized that it had to be quite old. The men were wearing the ruffled collars that were fashionable a few decades ago. The jackets were stiff, black, and buttoned all the way up. The faces with their carefully trimmed goatees were severe and expressionless. Still, he thought he could recognize one of the men. The alderman in the center, the one with the piercing eyes and the bare hint of a smile must be Ferdinand Schreevogl. Simon remembered that the old Schreevogl had once been presiding burgomaster of the town. The patrician held in his hand a document covered with writing. Simon thought he also knew the man next to him. But where had he seen him before? He thought about it, but much as he tried, he could not think of a name. He was certain that he had seen him lately, but of course now as a much older man.

Then he suddenly heard voices and laughter down on the market square. The two bailiffs had apparently followed his recipe. He grinned. It was quite possible, though, that the medicine was taken in a somewhat higher dose than prescribed.

Simon softly tiptoed through the council chamber. He crouched down as he passed the windows with the lead-lined panes so as not to be seen from the outside. Finally he reached the small door to the archive. He pushed the handle down. It was locked.

Cursing softly he reproached himself for his stupidity. How could he have been so naive as to think that the door would be unlocked? Of course the court clerk had locked it! After all, it led to his holy of holies.

Simon was about to turn back, but then he thought some more. Johann Lechner was a reliable man. He had to see to it that at least the four burgomasters had access to the archive, even if he happened to be absent. Did this mean that each of the burgomasters had a key? Hardly. It was much more likely that the court clerk would be keeping the key here for the others. But where?

Simon gazed around at the Swiss pine ceiling with its carved scrolls, the table, the chairs, the wine pitchers…There was no cabinet, no chest. The only large piece of furniture was the tiled oven; a monstrosity at least two paces wide and reaching almost to the ceiling. Simon walked over to it and gave it a closer look. In one row, about halfway up, scenes of country life were depicted on the painted tiles. A farmer with a plow, another farmer sowing, pigs and cows, a girl with geese…In the center of the row was a tile that looked different from the others. It showed a man with the typical wide hat and the ruffled collar of an alderman. He was sitting on a chamber pot brimming over with paper scrolls. Simon tapped on the tile.

It sounded hollow.

The physician took out his stiletto, inserted the blade into a crack and pried the tile out. It slid easily into his hand. Behind it was a tiny niche in which something was glittering. Simon smiled. As far as he knew, old Schreevogl had this oven built during his tenure as burgomaster. In the stovemakers’ guild he had been considered a real artist. Here, one could also see something more––that he had also had a sense of humor. An alderman defecating scrolls? Would Johann Lechner’s father, the court clerk at the time, have recognized himself in the drawing?

The physician removed the copper key, fitted the tile back into its place, and returned to the door that separated him from the archives. He inserted the key into the lock and turned it. With a slight squeak the door opened inward.

The room behind it smelled of dust and old parchment. Only a small barred window opened on the market square. There was no other door. The afternoon sun fell through the window; dust particles floated in the light. The space was almost empty. Along a rear wall stood a small, unadorned oaken table and a rickety chair. All along the left side there was a huge cabinet that reached almost to the ceiling. It contained innumerable little drawers stuffed with documents. Heavy leather-bound folios stood on the larger shelves. Several books and loose pages lay on the table, and next to them a half-full glass inkwell, a goose quill, and a half-consumed candle.

Simon groaned softly. This was the court clerk’s domain. For him all of it had a certain order, but for the physician it was only a confusing collection of parchment rolls, documents, and tomes. The so-called town records were not books at all, but a huge box of loose slips of paper. How could anyone find the map of a parcel in here?

Simon approached the cabinet. Now he realized that letters were painted on the drawers. They were distributed apparently without rhyme or reason over the rows of shelves, abbreviations obviously familiar only to the court clerk and perhaps the members of the inner council. RE, MO, ST, CON, PA, DOC…

The last abbreviation gave Simon pause. The Latin word for a deed, a record, or any kind of instrument was
documentum.
Would deeds of donation also be kept in this drawer? He pulled the drawer out. It was filled to the top with sealed letters. Even a first glance showed him that he had been right. All the letters bore the seal of the town and were signed by high-ranking burghers. There were wills, sales agreements, and exactly what he was looking for––deeds, among them those of money, natural produce, and for parcels of land willed by burghers who had died without heirs. Further down were more recent documents, all of them indicating the parish church as the beneficiary. Simon sensed that he was reaching his goal. The Schongau church had recently received a number of gifts, especially for the construction of the new cemetery at Saint Sebastian’s. Lately, anyone who felt his end nearing and wanted to secure an eternal resting place directly at the city wall willed at least part of his fortune to the church. Then there were donations of valuable crucifixes, holy images, pigs and cattle, and land. Simon kept looking and at last came to the bottom of the drawer. There was no contract regarding the piece of land on the Hohenfurch Road…

Simon cursed. He knew that somewhere here the solution of the secret had to be found. He could practically feel it. Furiously he returned the drawer to the closet to push it in and take out a new one. As he stood up he brushed against the pages that had already been lying on the table. They floated to the floor. Hastily Simon picked them up, but then he stopped. A document in his hand was torn on one side, as if someone had quickly ripped off part of it. The seal had been broken in haste. He glanced down at it.

Donatio civis Ferdinand Schreevogl ad ecclesiam urbis Anno Domini MDCLVIII…

Simon froze. The deed of donation! However it was only the first page, the rest had been torn off very neatly. He quickly looked through the documents on the table and checked the floor. Nothing. Someone had taken the document from the closet, read it, and taken away the part that was important to him—probably a sketch of the property. He did not seem to have had much time however, in any case not enough to return the document to the drawer. The thief had quickly shoved the piece of paper under the stack of the other documents on the table…
and had returned to the council meeting.

Simon shuddered. If someone stole this document, it could only be someone who knew about the key behind the tile. That meant Johann Lechner himself…or one of the four burgomasters.

Simon swallowed hard. He noticed that his hand, still holding the document, was trembling slightly. What had the patrician Jakob Schreevogl told him earlier about the meeting?

Burgomaster Semer denies that the soldiers had met someone upstairs in his rooms
.

Could the first burgomaster himself be involved in this thing with the children? Simon’s heart beat faster. He remembered how Semer had questioned him a few days ago in his own inn and had finally advised him not to continue investigating the case. And wasn’t it also Semer who had always spoken against the construction of the leper house, purely in the interest of the town, as he said? Because after all, lepers before the gates of a trading town really didn’t look good? But what if Semer wanted to delay the construction work only because he suspected that a treasure was hidden on that piece of land? A treasure he had heard about from his close friend, Ferdinand Schreevogl, a member of the inner circle of aldermen, just shortly before his death?

Simon’s thoughts were racing. The devil, the dead children, the witches’ marks, the abduction of Magdalena, the missing hangman, a burgomaster as the puppet master of a monstrous murder conspiracy…All these were racing through his mind. He tried to bring some order to the chaos raging in his mind. What was most important now was to free Magdalena, and to do that he had to find the children’s hiding place. But someone had entered this room before him and had stolen the plan of that parcel! All he was left with was a first page on which the main facts of the donation had been inscribed. Desperately Simon looked down at the piece of paper with its Latin words. Quickly he translated them:

Parcel belonging to Ferdinand Schreevogl, bequeathed to the Schongau Church on September 4, 1658, parcel size: 200 by 300 paces; moreover, five acres of woods and a well (dried up).

Dried up?

Simon stared at the small words at the very bottom of the document: dried up.

The physician slapped his forehead. Then he put the piece of parchment under his shirt and ran out of the stuffy room. Hastily he locked the small door and returned the key to the niche behind the tile. A few seconds later he reached the entrance of the Ballenhaus downstairs. The two bailiffs had disappeared. Most likely they had gone back to the inn to fetch more medicine. Without paying any heed to whether anyone noticed him, Simon left the Ballenhaus and ran across the market square.

But from a window on the other side of the square, someone was indeed observing him. When the man had seen enough he pulled the curtain shut and returned to his desk. Next to a glass of wine and a piece of steaming meat pie was a torn-off piece of parchment. The man’s hands trembled as he drank, and wine dripped onto the document. The red drops spread slowly across the document, leaving spots that looked like blood seeping out across it.

The hangman lay on a bed of moss, smoked his pipe, and blinked into the last rays of the afternoon sun. From a distance he could hear the voices of the guards at the building site. The workmen had already gone home at noon because of the May Day celebrations the next day. Now the two bailiffs assigned to guard duty were loafing around, sitting on the chapel wall, and throwing dice. Occasionally Jakob Kuisl could hear the sound of their laughter. The guards had pulled worse duty in their days.

Now a new sound was added to the others, a rustling of twigs coming from the left. Kuisl extinguished his pipe, jumped to his feet, and disappeared in a matter of seconds in the underbrush. When Simon tiptoed past him he reached for his ankle and pulled him down with a quick tug. Simon hit the ground with a soft cry and felt for his knife. The hangman’s face appeared, grinning, between the branches.

“Boo!”

Simon dropped the knife.

“My God, Kuisl, did you ever frighten me! Where were you all this time? I was looking for you everywhere. Your wife is very worried, and besides…”

The hangman placed one finger to his lips and pointed toward the clearing. Between the branches, the watchmen could be vaguely made out as they sat on the wall throwing dice. Simon continued in a low voice.

“Besides I now know where the children’s hiding place is. It is…”

“The well,” Jakob Kuisl said, finishing the sentence for him and nodding.

For a moment Simon remained speechless.

“But…How did you know? I mean—”

The hangman cut him off with an impatient wave of his hand.