The Hangman’s Daughter

CHAPTER 1

SCHONGAU, THE MORNING OF APRIL 24, A.D. 1659 THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

Magdalena Kuisl was sitting on a wooden bench in front of the small, squat hangman’s house, pressing the heavy bronze mortar tightly between her thighs. Pounding steadily, she crushed the dried thyme, club moss, and mountain lovage into a fine green powder, breathing in the heady fragrance that offered a foretaste of the summer to come. The sun shone in her deeply tanned face, causing her to blink as pearls of sweat rolled down her brow. It was the first really warm day this year.

Her little brother and sister, the twins Georg and Barbara, six years old, were playing in the yard, running between the elder bushes that were just beginning to bud. Again and again, the children squealed with delight when the long branches brushed over their faces like fingers. Magdalena couldn’t help smiling. She remembered how, just a few years ago, her father had chased her through the bushes. She pictured his massive frame as he ran after her, raising his huge hands and with a big bear’s threatening growl. Her father had been a wonderful playmate. She had never understood why people would cross to the other side of the street when they met in town or murmur a prayer as he approached. Only later, when she was seven or eight, had she seen how her father didn’t just play with his huge hands. They were on Hangman’s Hill, where Jakob Kuisl had drawn the hemp noose around the neck of a thief and pulled tight.

Nevertheless, Magdalena was proud of her family. Her great-grandfather Jorg Abriel and her grandfather Johannes Kuisl had been hangmen. Magdalena’s father Jakob had been apprenticed to Granddad just as her little brother, Georg, would someday be apprenticed to their own father. Once, when she was still a child, her mother had told her at bedtime that Father had not always been a hangman. He had marched off to the Great War and only later felt the call to return to Schongau. When little Magdalena asked what he had done in the war and why he would rather cut people’s heads off than put on his armor and take up his shining sword and march off to foreign lands, her mother simply fell silent and put her finger to her lips.

After she had finished grinding the herbs, Magdalena emptied the green powder into an earthenware container, which she carefully closed. After it had boiled down to a thick broth, the fragrant mixture would help women resume their interrupted menstruation-a well-known remedy used to prevent an unwanted birth. Thyme and club moss grew in every other garden, but only her father knew where to find the much rarer mountain lovage. Even the midwives from the surrounding villages came to get their powder from him. He called it “Our Lady’s Powder” and thus earned one or two extra pennies.

Magdalena pushed a lock from her face. It kept falling back. She had her father’s unruly hair. Thick eyebrows arched above black, glowing eyes, which seemed continually to blink. At age twenty, she was the hangman’s oldest child. Her mother had given birth to two stillborn babies after her, and then to three infants that were so weak they didn’t live to see their first birthday. Then the twins had come, finally. They were two noisy rascals and her father’s pride and joy. Sometimes Magdalena felt something like pangs of jealousy. Georg was his father’s only son and would one day be apprenticed in the hangman’s trade. Barbara was still a little girl, dreaming of all the things possible in this world. Magdalena, however, was the “Hangman’s Wench,” the “Bloody Maiden,” whom nobody could touch and who was the object of gossip and laughter behind her back. She heaved a sigh. Her life seemed to be already prescribed. She’d marry a hangman from another town, as executioners’ families always stuck together. And yet there were a few young men in town whom she fancied. Especially one…

“When you’re done with Our Lady’s Powder, go in and do the laundry. It won’t wash itself, you know!”

Her mother’s voice awakened Magdalena from her reveries. Anna Maria Kuisl looked at her daughter with disapproval. Her hands were covered with dirt from yard work and she mopped her brow before she continued.

“Dreaming of the boys again, I can tell by the looks of you,” she said. “Get your mind off the boys. There’s enough gossiping as is.”

She smiled at Magdalena, but the hangman’s daughter knew that her mother was being serious. She was a practical, strait-laced woman who cared little for her daughter’s dreams. Also she thought it was a waste of time that her father had taught Magdalena to read. A woman who buried her nose in books was regarded with suspicion by the men. And if she was the hangman’s daughter on top of that and liked to flirt with the lads, then she wasn’t far from the pillory and the scold’s bridle. More than once, the hangman’s wife had prophesied in the darkest tones how her husband would have to clap his own daughter into the shrew’s fiddle and lead her through town at the end of a rope.

“All right, Mother,” said Magdalena and set the mortar down on the bench. “I’m taking the laundry down to the river.”

She grabbed the basket of soiled bedsheets and walked through the garden and down to the Lech River. Her mother’s eyes followed her pensively.

Right behind the house, a well-worn path led past herb and flower gardens, barns, and handsome houses down to the river, to a place where the water had shaped a shallow cove. Magdalena gazed at the whirling eddies that were forming in the middle of the river. It was springtime, and the water was high, reaching the roots of the birches and carrying along branches and entire trees. For a moment Magdalena believed she saw something that looked like a shred of linen in the earth-brown waters, but when she looked more closely, she saw just branches and leaves.

She bent down, took the laundry from her basket, and started scrubbing it on the damp gravel. She was thinking of the festival at St. Paul’s Fair three weeks ago, especially how she had danced with him…It was only last Sunday that she’d seen him again, at Mass. She’d sat down in a pew way back in the church and bowed her head, but then he got up to fetch himself a prayer book. And he had winked at her. She’d giggled, quite involuntarily, and the other girls had glared at her.

Magdalena was humming a song now and rhythmically slapping the laundry on the gravel.

“Ladybird, fly, your father’s gone to war…”

She was so absorbed in her thoughts that at first she believed the screaming was only in her imagination. It took her a while to realize that the cries were coming from somewhere upstream.

A woodcutter from Schongau up on the steep bank was first to see the boy. He’d grabbed hold of a tree trunk and was spinning around like a tiny leaf in the foaming water. Initially, the woodcutter was not sure that the tiny thing down there in the rushing water was really human. But when it started to kick and struggle wildly he called to the raftsmen who were getting ready for their first run to Augsburg in the early-morning fog and asked for help. Not until just before Kinsau, four miles north of Schongau, did the riverbank flatten out, with the Lech calm enough for the men to try to reach the boy. They tried to pull him from the water with their long poles, but each time he slid away like a slippery fish. At times he went under completely, remaining beneath the surface for a troubling length of time, then popped up again like a cork at a different spot.

Once more the boy gathered enough strength to pull himself up onto the slippery log and raise his head above the surface to breathe. He reached for the pole with his right hand, his fingers outstretched, but he missed. With a loud thud, the log bumped against the other logs that were clogging the raft landing. The impact caused the boy to lose his grip; he slipped down and sank among dozens of gigantic floating tree trunks.

Meanwhile the raftsmen had steered toward the small pier at Kinsau. Tying their rafts together with great haste, they carefully ventured onto the treacherous surface of the logs closest to shore. Balancing on the slippery logs was a challenge even for these well-seasoned raftsmen. It was easy to lose one’s grip and be crushed to a pulp between the mighty beech and fir trunks. But the river was calm at this spot, and the trunks just bobbed up and down lazily.

Soon two men had reached the log with the boy. They prodded in the gaps with their poles in hopes of feeling a soft object. The logs underneath their feet began to wobble and roll. Again and again the men had to get their balance; their bare feet were slipping on the glistening bark.

“I’ve got him,” the larger and stronger of the two suddenly called out. With his powerful arms he pulled both boy and pole from the water and tossed them to the safety of the shore like a fish on a hook.

The raftsmen’s calls had made others aware of the emergency. Washerwomen from nearby Kinsau had come running to the river together with some wagon drivers. Now they were all standing on the rickety pier, gazing at the dripping clump at their feet.

The burly raftsman brushed the boy’s hair from his face, and a murmur went up from the crowd.

The boy’s face was blue and puffy, and the back of his head was crushed in as if he’d been struck hard with a heavy piece of wood. He was groaning. Blood was oozing through his wet coat, soaking the pier and dripping into the river. This boy had not just fallen into the water. Someone must have pushed him, and that someone had dealt him a fierce blow before that.

“Why, that’s Josef Grimmer’s boy, the son of the wagon driver in Schongau,” a man exclaimed. He was standing close by with his wagon and team of oxen. “I know the kid. He used to come to the landing site with his father. Quick, put him on the wagon. I’ll drive him to Schongau.”

“And somebody run and tell Grimmer that his boy is a-dying,” a washerwoman screamed. “Good Lord, and him having lost so many kids already!”

“It would be better to tell him right away,” the stocky raftsman grumbled. “This one’s not going to last long.” He slapped at some nosy boys standing around. “Run along. And fetch the barber or the physician.”

As the boys took off toward Schongau, the injured child’s groans grew fainter. He was shaking all over and seemed to be muttering something. A last prayer? He was about twelve years old and looked skinny and pale like most children his age. He must have eaten his last square meal weeks ago, and the watery barley broth and watery beer he had consumed over the past few days had made his cheeks hollow.

The boy’s right hand kept reaching out; his murmuring rose and ebbed like that of the Lech River beneath him. One of the raftsmen was on his knees, bending over the boy to hear what he was saying. But the murmuring gave way to gurgling, and bright red bubbles of blood and saliva trickled from the corners of his mouth.

They lifted the dying child onto the wagon, the driver cracked his whip, and they rumbled along Kinsau Road to Schongau. It was a journey of over two hours, and as they moved along, more and more people joined the silent procession. When they finally reached the landing site in the nearby town, more than two dozen onlookers followed the wagon: children, peasants, crying washerwomen. Dogs were yapping at the oxen, someone was mumbling a Hail Mary. The driver brought the vehicle to a halt at the jetty next to the storage shed. Two of the raftsmen lifted the boy off with great caution and gently placed him on some straw right by the shore of the rushing, gurgling Lech River that was flowing restlessly against the pillars.

The murmur of the crowd was suddenly interrupted by heavy footsteps on the pier. The boy’s father had been waiting off to one side, as if he were afraid of the last and final moment. Now deathly pale, he pushed his way through the throng.

Josef Grimmer had had eight children, and they had all died, one after the other, from the plague, diarrhea, fever, or simply because the good Lord had willed it. Hans was six years old when he fell into the Lech and drowned while playing. Marie, aged three, had been run over by drunken mercenaries on their horses in a narrow lane. His wife, together with their youngest child, had perished in childbirth. Little Peter was all that was left to old Grimmer. And as he saw him lying before him, he knew that the Lord would be taking this last son away from him as well. He fell on his knees and tenderly brushed the boy’s hair from his face. The child’s eyes were closed already, his chest was heaving convulsively, and a few moments later a spasm shook the little body. Then there was silence.

Josef Grimmer raised his head and screamed his grief across the Lech. His voice was high and shrill like a woman’s.

The scream reached the ears of Simon Fronwieser along with the sound of pounding downstairs at the front door. The physician’s house in the Hennengasse was just a stone’s throw from the river. Earlier, Simon had looked up from his books several times, distracted by the shouting of the raftsmen. Now that the screams were resounding through the narrow lanes of the town, he knew that something must have happened. The knock at the door grew more urgent. With a sigh he closed one of his hefty anatomy volumes. Like all the others, this book never went below the surface of the human body. The composition of the humors, bleeding as a universal remedy…Simon had read these same litanies far too many times, but they hadn’t really taught him anything about the inside of the body. And nothing would change today, as along with the knocking there was now shouting downstairs.

“Doctor, doctor! Quick, come! Grimmer’s boy is lying in his blood down at the landing site. It doesn’t look good!”

Simon threw on his black overcoat with the shiny copper buttons, ran his fingers through his black hair, and straightened his beard in front of the small mirror in his study. The shoulder-length mane and the Vandyke beard, which was again fashionable, made him appear older than his actual age of twenty-five. Some Schongauers regarded Simon as a dandy, but he didn’t care. He knew that girls saw the matter differently. The ladies of Schongau liked him on account of his dark and dreamy eyes, his well-shaped nose, and his slim figure. Moreover, he was well-groomed. He still had all his teeth; he took regular baths. And he had rose-scented perfume delivered specially from Augsburg, as expensive as his meager salary permitted it. It was only his height that bothered him. He didn’t stand taller than five feet, so he had to look up to most men, and to some women as well. But of course that could be remedied by high-heeled boots.

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 Munzstrasse 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 Kuh 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.