The Hangman’s Daughter thd-1 Page 24

  Last night she had considered several times whether to go into town and tell the whole story. Perhaps she could tell it to the physician, providing he was still alive, or to the hangman. They both seemed to be on her side. She could tell them everything, and Clara would be rescued. Perhaps they would only clap the midwife in the stocks, or her foster parents would have to pay a fine because their ward had gotten involved with things that were none of her business. Perhaps she would get away with a good spanking and nothing more. Perhaps everything would still be all right.

  But that certain premonition of things that she’d always had, and which had made her the leader of the other children, told her that she wouldn’t be believed, that things had gone too far already, and there was no way back now.

  Next to her, Clara cried out again in her sleep. Sophie bit her lip and tears ran down her face, which was smeared with dirt. She no longer knew where to turn.

  Suddenly, she heard shouts from far away, laughter and shouting that could be heard way down here in her hiding place. Sophie kissed Clara on her forehead and moved to a spot with a good view over the forest.

  Shadows were flitting among the trees. Dusk had fallen, and at first she could not distinguish the individual figures. Soon, however, she heard dogs barking. Carefully Sophie pushed herself up a few inches higher. Now she recognized the men. They were peasants from Altenstadt, Franz Strasser, Johannes’s foster father, among them. The big dog he was holding on a leash was pulling him toward the hiding place. Quickly Sophie crouched down and crawled to where she could no longer be seen. The voices of the men had a strange echo, as if coming from the far end of a long tunnel.

  “Let’s stop now, Franz!” one of the men called out. “We have been looking all day, and it will be dark soon. The men are tired and hungry and want to go home. Let’s continue looking for this hiding place tomorrow.”

  “Just wait a moment! Just look here!” shouted Franz Strasser in reply. “The dog smells something!”

  “What do you think he smells?” the other one said, laughing. “The witch? He’s smelling Sepp Spanner’s bitch. She’s in heat. Can’t you see how it pulls him off?”

  “You dumb ass! This is something else. Look, he’s going completely crazy…”

  The voices had come closer. Sophie held her breath. Now they were directly above her. The dog started to bark.

  “There must be something around here,” murmured Strasser. “Let’s search the area around here, and then we’ll let it be.”

  “All right then, just around here. The dog is really acting crazy…”

  Sophie heard shouting and hooting. The other peasants were becoming impatient. She heard steps above her, pacing back and forth on the gravel. The dog’s panting sounded as if he were about to choke as he obviously was straining on the leash so hard that he was almost strangling himself.

  At this moment Clara began to scream again. It was a long scream of fear, as once again she was overcome by the shadows of darkness that were scratching her soft young skin with long fingernails. As soon as Sophie heard the scream she threw herself down quickly next to Clara and closed her mouth with her hand. But it was too late.

  “Did you hear that?” asked Strasser excitedly.

  “Hear what? Your dog is panting and barking. I can’t hear anything else.”

  “Damn cur, be quiet, will you!”

  Sophie could hear a kick and then the dog’s whimpering. The dog was finally silent.

  “Somebody did scream. It was a child.”

  “Nonsense, the dog was howling. The devil must have taken a shit in your ears.”

  There was laughter. The shouts of the others became fainter.

  “Hogwash. I am sure it was a child…”

  Under Sophie’s strong hands, Clara was tossing back and forth. Sophie was still holding her mouth closed even though she was afraid of suffocating the girl. But Clara could not be allowed to scream. Not now!

  Suddenly she could hear a frightened panting above her. “Look, the dog!” called Franz Strasser. “He’s starting to dig! There is something here!”

  “True, he’s digging…what in the world is he…”

  The other man’s voice turned to loud laughter.

  “A bone, a stupid bone, that’s what he’s dug up! Ha-ha, that’s sure a devil’s bone!”

  Franz Strasser began cursing. “You stupid cur, what are you doing? Leave it alone or I’ll beat you to death!”

  More kicks and whimpering. Then the steps retreated. After a while, nothing could be heard anymore. Nevertheless Sophie’s hand remained clamped over Clara’s mouth. She held her delicate head as in a vise. The sick girl’s face had turned blue by now. Finally Sophie released her, and Clara sucked air into her lungs, gasping, as if she were about to drown. Then her breathing became more regular. The shadows had withdrawn. She drifted into a quiet sleep.

  Sophie sat next to her and wept without making a sound. She had almost killed her friend. She was a witch; people were right. God would punish her for what she had done.

  While Martha Stechlin was being tortured, Simon Fronwieser was sitting in the hangman’s house making coffee. He was still carrying a handful of the foreign beans in a small pouch on his belt. Now he had ground them up in the executioner’s mortar and had set a pot with water on the fire. When the water was at a boil he used a pewter spoon to put a little of the black powder in the pot and stirred. Immediately, a sharp aromatic fragrance spread through the house. Simon held his nose directly over the pot and breathed it in. The scent cleared his head. Finally he poured some of the brew into a mug. As he waited for the grounds to settle he thought about everything that had happened in the past few hours.

  After their brief detour to Altenstadt he had walked Jakob Kuisl home, but the hangman did not want to disclose the meaning of his enigmatic words at the end of their visit to Strasser’s. Even when Simon had insisted, he only told him to be available during the night, and that they had come quite a bit closer to the solution. Then the otherwise grim hangman smiled quietly. For the first time in days, Simon had the feeling that Jakob Kuisl was highly pleased with himself.

  This bliss was instantly disrupted when they arrived at the hangman’s house in the Lech quarter. Two bailiffs were already waiting at the door to tell Jakob Kuisl that the Stechlin woman was again ready to be interrogated.

  The hangman’s face suddenly turned white.

  “So soon?” he murmured, stepping inside and reappearing a short time later with the necessary tools. Then he took Simon briefly aside and whispered in his ear, “Now we can only hope that Martha remains strong. In any case, be at my house tonight at the stroke of midnight.”

  Then he had trudged off behind the bailiffs, up to the town, with a sack slung over his shoulders filled with thumb-and leg screws, ropes, and sulfur sticks that could be inserted under the fingernails and lit. The hangman walked very slowly, but finally he disappeared beyond the Lech Gate.

  When Anna Maria Kuisl stopped to pick up Simon in front of the house a short time later, she found him staring into space. She poured him a goblet of wine, ran her hand over his hair, and then went to market with the twins to buy bread. Life went on, even if three little boys were dead and a presumably innocent woman was suffering unspeakable torture at this very moment.

  Simon went into the hangman’s spare chamber carrying the steaming brew and started to leaf aimlessly through some books. But he couldn’t really concentrate and the letters danced before his eyes. Almost gratefully he looked around when the squeaking door behind him announced a visitor. Magdalena was standing there, her face tearstained, her hair tangled and unkempt.

  “Never, never will I marry the Steingaden hangman,” she sobbed. “I’d rather go and drown myself!”

  Simon winced. With all the ghastly events of the last few hours he had completely forgotten Magdalena. He slammed the book shut and took her in his arms.

  “Your father would never do such a thing, not without your consent,” he sai
d, trying to console her.

  She pushed him away. “What do you really know about my father!” she cried. “He is the hangman. He tortures and kills, and when he isn’t doing that, he sells love potions to old hags and poison to young sluts to kill the brats inside them. My father is a monster, a fiend! He’ll marry me off for a few guilders and a bottle of brandy without batting an eye! To hell with my father!”

  Simon held her tightly and looked into her eyes. “You mustn’t speak like this about your father! You know that it’s not true. Your father is the hangman, but God knows somebody must do it after all! He is a strong and a wise man. And he loves his daughter!”

  Crying she clung to Simon’s doublet, shaking her head again and again. “You don’t know him. He is a monster, a monster…”

  Simon was standing at the window looking vacantly into the herb garden, where the first green shoots were starting to appear in the brown earth. He felt so helpless. Why couldn’t they simply be happy together? Why were there always people telling them how to live their lives? His father, Magdalena’s father, the whole damn town…

  “I just talked with him, with your father…about us,” he began suddenly.

  She stopped sobbing and looked up to him questioningly.

  “And what did he say?”

  Her eyes were so full of hope that he impulsively decided to lie.

  “He…he said that he would think it over. That first he wanted to see if I was good for anything. Once the matter with Martha Stechlin was settled, he would make up his mind. He won’t exclude the possibility, that’s what he said.”

  “But…but that’s wonderful!”

  Magdalena wiped the tears from her face and smiled at him with puffy eyes.

  “That means all you have to do is help him get Martha Stechlin out of the keep.” With every word her voice became firmer. “Once he sees that you’ve got something inside your head he will also trust you with his daughter. That has always been what counted for my father. That a person should have something inside his head. And that’s what you are going to prove to him now.”

  Simon nodded but avoided looking directly at her. In the meantime Magdalena had again gotten a hold of herself. She poured a goblet of wine and emptied it in one gulp.

  “What did you find out this morning?” she asked, wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.

  Simon told her about the death of the Strasser boy, and that the midwife had regained consciousness. He also told Magdalena of her father’s hints and their planned meeting in the coming night. She listened attentively and only here and there interjected a short question.

  “And you say Strasser had noticed that Johannes had often been covered with clay?”

  Simon nodded. “That’s what he said. And then your father gave him such a funny look.”

  “Did you get to look at the dead boy’s fingernails?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I believe your father did.”

  Magdalena smiled. Simon suddenly thought he was looking into her father’s face.

  “What are you grinning about? Do tell me!”

  “I think I know what my father wants to do with you tonight.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Well, he probably wants to have another look at the fingernails of the other boys.”

  “But they were buried long ago in the cemetery at Saint Sebastian’s!”

  Magdalena gave him a wicked grin. “And now you know why you’ll only get going at midnight tonight.”

  Simon’s face turned white. He had to sit down.

  “You…you think?”

  Magdalena poured herself another goblet of wine. She took a deep gulp before continuing.

  “Let’s just hope the two boys are really dead. Who knows, the devil might’ve really gotten into them. Best take a crucifix along. You never know…”

  Then she quickly kissed him on the mouth. She tasted of wine and earth. It was better than coffee.

  CHAPTER 12

  SUNDAY APRIL 29, A.D. 1659 SIX O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

  Slowly dusk settled over the town. Roads and fields still lay in the sunlight, but beneath the thick foliage of oaks and beeches evening had already arrived. Shadows gradually spread into a clearing in the forest where four men sat round a crackling fire. Above the fire, a spit with two rabbits was turning. Grease dropped onto the embers and gave off a smell that made their mouths water. They had eaten nothing all day except a few mouthfuls of bread and some wild plants and were accordingly in an irritable mood.

  “How much longer must we sit on our backsides in this damned place?” grumbled one of them, turning the spit. “Let’s go over to France. The war’s still going on over there and they’re looking for people like us.”

  “And what about the money, eh?” asked a second man, who was lolling about on the mossy forest ground. “Fifty guilders he promised us for destroying the building site. And another fifty once Braunschweiger got rid of those little bastards. Up to now we’ve only seen about a quarter of the money. And that, even though we have fulfilled our part of the bargain.”

  He glanced over at a man who was leaning against a tree a short distance away, but the man didn’t even look up. He was busy doing something with his hand. Something didn’t seem to be right about it, for he squeezed, massaged, and kneaded it. On his head he wore a broad-brimmed hat with a few colorful rooster’s feathers. His clothing consisted of a bloodred doublet, a black coat, and two worn, hip-high leather boots. In contrast to the others, he wore his beard carefully trimmed, so that a pale face with a hooked nose and a long scar was visible above it. He was short, wiry, and muscular.

  At last he seemed to be contented with his hand. He smiled, then held it up so that it shone white in the light of the fire. His arm, from the elbow to the fingertips, was composed of pieces of bone held together by copper wires passed through holes drilled in the bone. It looked like the hand of a corpse. Not until now did the devil look over at his companions.

  “What did you just say?” he asked quietly.

  The soldier by the fire swallowed nervously but continued speaking. “I said that we have done our part. You insisted on killing the little brats yourself. Now they’re still running around free, and we are still waiting for our money…” He looked cautiously at the man with the bony hand.

  “Three are dead,” whispered the devil. “The other two are somewhere around here. Don’t worry, I’ll find them.”

  “Yes, when the fall comes,” laughed the third man by the fire as he carefully pulled the rabbits off the spit. “But I’m not going to hang around here that long. I’m leaving, and I’m leaving tomorrow. I’ve just about had enough of this, and I’ve had more than enough of you!” He spat toward the tree.

  The devil ran over to the man and in a twinkling of an eye had snatched the iron spit from his hand. He held the iron to the soldier’s throat, his face only inches from the other man’s. When the soldier swallowed, the red-hot point of the spit touched his Adam’s apple. He uttered a loud scream, and a thin trickle of blood ran down his neck.

  “You stupid bastards!” hissed the devil, without withdrawing the spit as much as a hair’s breadth. “Who got you this job anyway, hey? Who got you grub and booze up till now? Without me you would have starved to death long ago, or you’d be dangling from some tree. I’ll get those little bastards yet, don’t you worry, and until then we are staying here! It would be a pity to lose the money!”

  “Let go of Andre, Braunschweiger!” The second man by the fire stood up slowly. He was tall and broad shouldered, and there was a scar across his face. He drew his saber and pointed it in the devil’s direction. Only by looking closely could you see the fear in his eyes. His sword hand trembled slightly.

  “We’ve stuck with you long enough,” he hissed. “Your cruelties, your thirst for blood, your torturing, they make me sick! You shouldn’t have killed the boy! Now we have the whole town looking for us!”

  The devil whom they called Braun
schweiger shrugged his shoulders. “He overheard us, just like the others. He would have betrayed us, and then that lovely money would have been lost. Anyway…” He grinned broadly. “They’re not looking for us. They think a witch killed the children, and perhaps tomorrow they’ll burn her. So then, Hans, put away your saber. Let’s not quarrel.”

  “First you’ll put down that spit you have pointed at Andre,” whispered the man called Hans. Not for one second did the muscular soldier let the smaller man out of his sight. He knew how dangerous Braunschweiger could be, in spite of his rather diminutive size. He could probably slice all three of them to pieces right here in the clearing before they could strike a single blow at him.

  With a smile, the devil lowered the spit. “Fine,” he said. “Then I can tell you at last about my discovery.”

  “Discovery? What discovery?” asked the third man, who had been lying expectantly in the patch of moss up till then. His name was Christoph Holzapfel, and he was, like the other three men, a former soldier. They had been traveling about together for nearly two years, living on murder, robbery, and arson. They could not remember the last time they’d been paid. They were always on the run, no better than hunted animals. But deep inside them there still glowed a spark of decency, something left over from the bedtime stories their mothers had told them and the prayers that the village priest had drummed into their heads. And each of them felt instinctively that in the man they called Braunschweiger this spark of decency was missing. He was as cold as his bony hand that had been made for him after an amputation. Although it couldn’t wield a weapon, it was a useful substitute for one. It instilled fear and horror, and that was what Braunschweiger liked best.

  “What discovery are you talking about?” Christoph Holzapfel repeated his question.

  The devil smiled. He knew that he had the upper hand again. He stretched out on the moss, tore a leg off the rabbit, and kept talking while nibbling on the leg. “I followed Moneybags. I wanted to know what he intended to do at the building site. He was there again last night, and I was, as well.” He wiped the grease from his lips.