The two bailiffs pulled Elisabeth up. She was as limp as a puppet, and her eyes stared into space. When the hangman pinched the girl’s right upper arm with the pincers, she screamed, shrilly and sharply, then seemed to drop off into another world. There was smoke and a hissing noise and Jakob smelled the odor of burned flesh. His father had told him what the procedure was, yet he had to fight an urge to vomit.
Three more times, at each corner of the Ballenhaus, the wagon stopped and the procedure was repeated. Elisabeth’s left arm was pinched, then her left breast, and then her right breast. Owing to the potion, however, the pain was bearable.
Elisabeth began to hum a nursery rhyme and smiled as she stroked her belly. “Sleep, baby, sleep…”
They left Schongau through the Hof Gate and followed the Altenstadt Road. Soon the execution site appeared in the distance. It was a grassy field with patches of bare soil situated between farmland and the edge of the forest. The whole of Schongau and the neighboring villages, it seemed, was assembled here with benches and chairs brought in for the aldermen. The commoners were standing in the back, passing the time gossiping and snacking. The execution site was in the middle of the field: a masonry structure seven feet tall with wooden stairs leading to the top.
As the wagon approached the site, the crowd parted and everyone tried to catch a glimpse of the child murderess curled up on the bed of the wagon.
“Make her get up! Up! Up with her! Hey, hangman, show her to us!”
The crowd was obviously annoyed. Many had been waiting since the morning, and now they didn’t even get to see the criminal. Some of the onlookers began hurling rocks and rotten fruit. A Franciscan ducked to protect his brown habit, but several apples hit him in the back. The bailiffs tried to push back the people who were crowding in on the wagon from all sides, as if to swallow it up along with its passengers.
Calmly Johannes Kuisl steered the wagon to the platform. There the aldermen were waiting together with Michael Hirschmann, the Elector’s secretary. He was the representative of the Prince-Elector, and as such he had pronounced the death sentence over the girl two weeks ago. Now he looked deep into her eyes once more. The old man had known Elisabeth since she was a child.
“My, my, Lisl, what have you done?”
“Nothin’. I’ve done nothin’, Your Excellency.” Elisabeth looked at the bailiff from eyes that were already dead and kept stroking her belly.
“Our good Lord alone knows that,” murmured Hirschmann.
The bailiff nodded and then the executioner led the murderess up the eight steps to the scaffold. Jakob followed. Twice Elisabeth tripped, then she took her last step. Another Franciscan friar and the town crier were waiting on the platform. Jakob surveyed the meadow below and saw hundreds of curious faces; their mouths and eyes were wide open. The aldermen had taken their seats and in the town the bell was pealing the death knell. The air was filled with the tension of expectation.
Gently, the hangman pushed Elisabeth Clement down on her knees. Then he blindfolded her with one of the linen cloths he had brought. She shivered slightly and murmured a prayer.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women…”
The town crier cleared his throat, then he proclaimed the death sentence one more time. Jakob perceived his voice only as a distant murmur.
“…that thou shalt turn to God with all thy heart and thus obtain a blessed and peaceful death…”
His father poked him in the side.
“You’ve got to hold her for me,” he whispered as softly as possible so as not to interrupt the reading.
“What?”
“You’ve got to hold her shoulders and her head up, so that I hit the mark. Just take a look at Lisl—she’s just going to tip over otherwise.”
And in fact, the woman’s body was slowly sagging forward. Jakob was confused. It had been his understanding that he was merely to watch the execution. His father had never mentioned helping. But now there was no time for hesitation. Jakob grabbed Elisabeth Clement’s stubbly hair and pulled her head upward. She whimpered. The hangman’s son felt his fingers damp with sweat. He held his arm out to make room for his father’s sword. The trick was to strike precisely between two of the cervical vertebrae with a single blow of the sword dealt with both hands. Just a twinkling of an eye, a breath of air, and the matter would be over and done with. Over and done with, that is, if the job was done properly.
“May God have mercy on your soul…”
The town crier was finished. He produced a thin, black wooden rod, held it over Elisabeth Clement, and snapped it in two. The sharp sound of the breaking wood was audible all over the meadow.
The Elector’s secretary nodded to Johannes Kuisl. The hangman lifted his sword and took a swing.
At this very moment Jakob felt how the girl’s hair slipped from his sweaty fingers. Just a moment before he had been holding up Elisabeth Clement’s head, but now she fell forward like a sack of flour. He saw his father’s sword whiz by, but instead of striking her neck it hit her head at about ear level. Elisabeth Clement writhed about on the platform, screaming like an animal impaled on a stake, and there was a deep gash in her temple. In a pool of blood Jakob glimpsed part of an ear.
Her blindfold had fallen off and, her eyes wide with fear, she looked up at the executioner, who stood over her with raised sword. The crowd groaned in unison and Jakob felt a gagging sensation in his throat.
His father pushed him aside and swung again with the sword, but Elisabeth Clement rolled to the side when she saw the sword coming down. This time the blade struck her shoulder and cut deep into the nape of her neck. Blood spurted from the wound and splattered the hangman, his helper, and the horrified Franciscan.
On all fours, Elisabeth Clement crawled to the edge of the platform. Most Schongauers gazed at the spectacle in horror, but others shouted their disapproval and began pelting the hangman with rocks. People didn’t like to see the man bungling the job.
Johannes Kuisl wanted to put an end to that. He stepped up to the groaning woman and took yet another swing. This time he struck her right between the third and fourth vertebrae, and the groaning stopped at once. But her head wouldn’t come off—it was still connected by tendons and flesh, and it took a fourth blow to sever it from the body.
It rolled over the wooden planks and came to rest right in front of Jakob. He started to faint; his stomach churned, then he dropped to his knees and threw up the watery beer and oatmeal he’d had for breakfast that morning. He retched and retched until nothing would come but green bile. As through a veil he heard the screaming of the people, the railing of the aldermen and his father’s heavy panting next to him.
Sleep, baby, sleep…
Just before he mercifully blacked out, Jakob Kuisl made a decision. Never would he follow in his father’s footsteps; never in his life would he become a hangman.
Then he dropped headlong into the pool of blood.
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, r
aising 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 Jörg 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. Thi
s 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.