“A hiding place?” asked Jakob Kuisl.
For the past few minutes the hangman had been examining the corpse in silence, even taking a close look at the blood-smeared hair and fingernails. He had also inspected the sign once more. Only now did he seem to take an interest in the conversation again.
“What kind of hiding place?”
Franz Strasser shrugged.
“I already told the physician,” he mumbled. “Somewhere in the forest. Must be some kind of cave. He was always covered with dirt when he returned.”
One more time the hangman contemplated the boy’s fingers, now rigid in death.
“What do you mean by ‘covered with dirt’?” he asked.
“Well, full of clay, you see. It looked as if he had been crawling around somewhere.”
Jakob Kuisl closed his eyes. “Damn it all! I’m a complete idiot,” he mumbled. “It’s so clear, and I didn’t see it!”
“What…what is it?” whispered Simon, who was standing next to him and had been the only one to hear the hangman’s words. “What didn’t you see?”
Jakob Kuisl grabbed the physician by the arm and pulled him away from the crowd. “I…I’m not entirely sure yet,” he said. “But I believe I know now where the children’s hiding place is.”
“Where?” Simon’s heartbeat quickened.
“There is something else we must check out first,” the hangman whispered, swiftly taking off down the road in the direction of Schongau. “But for that we’ll have to wait until it’s dark.”
“Tell the highborn gentlemen we are not going to just stand by and wait much longer! The witch must burn!” Franz Strasser called after them. “And that redheaded Sophie, we’re going to look for her ourselves in the forest. With God’s help we shall find that hiding place, and then we shall smoke out that witches’ nest!”
Hooting and cheering broke out, and through it all the priest’s high voice could be heard intoning a Latin hymn, though they could make out only a few words.
“Dies irae, dies illa. Solvet saeclum in favilla… Day of wrath, that day of burning! Earth shall end, to ashes turning…”
Simon bit his lip. The day of wrath was indeed close at hand.
Court clerk Johann Lechner blew sand over what he had just written and then rolled up the parchment. With a nod he enjoined the bailiff to open the door to the small chamber. As he rose, he turned once more toward the Augsburg wagon driver.
“If you told the truth, you have nothing to fear. The brawl is of no interest to us…at least not yet,” he added. “We only wish to know who set fire to the Stadel.”
Martin Hueber nodded without looking up. His head was hanging over the table, and his skin was pale and sallow. Just one night in the detention room and the anticipation of possible torture had been sufficient to transform the formerly arrogant wagon driver into a bundle of misery.
Johann Lechner smiled. If the Fuggers’ delegates were really going to come in the next few days and insist indignantly that their wagon driver be handed over to them, they would find a repentant sinner. Lechner would then generously order his release. It was quite possible that Martin Hueber would still have to sit in jail in distant Augsburg, if only to atone for his superiors’ embarrassment…Lechner felt certain that next time the Augsburg merchants would be much more deferential.
On the whole, Martin Hueber had confessed to what he had already hinted yesterday. Less than two weeks ago, some of his men were involved in a brawl at the Stern, on which occasion Josef Grimmer had thrashed one of them so soundly that he had to be taken to the infirmary. Together with a gang of cronies they had then sneaked down to the raft landing on Tuesday night in order to teach the Schongau guards a lesson they wouldn’t forget. But by the time they reached the Stadel, it was already burning. Martin Hueber did see a few figures looking like soldiers running away from there, but he had been too far away to make out more than that. A brawl occurred afterward nevertheless, but only because the Schongau men had suspected them of arson.
“And who do you think set fire to the Stadel?” Lechner asked just before leaving, as he was already standing in the door.
Martin Hueber shrugged. “Those were foreign soldiers, not from around here. That much is certain.”
“It’s just strange that no Schongau guard had noticed them, only you fellows from Augsburg,” Lechner added.
The wagon driver resumed his lament. “By the Holy Virgin Mary, I told you already! Because the Schongauers were so busy putting out the fire! And besides, it was difficult to make out anything with all that smoke!”
Johann Lechner gave him a piercing look. “May our Savior keep you from lying,” he murmured. “Otherwise you’ll hang, and I won’t give a hoot that you are a wagon driver for the Fuggers or, for all I care, the emperor himself.” He turned to leave.
“Give the prisoner some warm soup and a piece of bread, by God!” he called back to the bailiff as he went down the stairs to the Ballenhaus. “After all, we are no monsters!” Behind him the door of the cell fell shut with a squeak.
Johann Lechner stopped once more on the worn steps and from this high vantage point surveyed the town’s warehouse. In spite of worm-eaten beams and peeling paint, the hall was still Schongau’s pride. Bales of wool, cloth, and the finest spices were stacked up to the ceiling in places. A scent of cloves hung in the air. Who could be interested in seeing this wealth go up in flames? If they really were soldiers, they must have been under someone’s orders. But whose? Someone in Schongau? An outsider? Maybe in fact the Augsburgers? Or could it have been the devil himself, after all? The court clerk furrowed his brow. He must have missed something, and he could not forgive himself such a thing. He was a man of perfection.
“Sir! I have been sent by Andreas, the bailiff at the jail.” Johann Lechner looked down, where a young lad in wooden clogs and a threadbare linen shirt had just come through the door. He was out of breath and his eyes sparkled.
“The bailiff Andreas?” Johann Lechner asked inquisitively. “What does he want?”
“He says the Stechlin woman is awake again, and she’s howling and whining like ten furies!” The boy was standing on the lowest step. He was not yet fourteen years old. Expectantly he looked at the court clerk. “Are you going to burn her soon, sir?”
Johann Lechner looked at him with satisfaction. “Well, we shall see,” he said as he placed a few small coins in the boy’s hand. “Just go look for the physician now, so that he may confirm the good health of the Stechlin woman.”
The boy had already run off when he called him back once more.
“But get the old physician, not the young one! Do you understand?” The boy nodded.
“The young one is a little too…” Johann Lechner hesitated, then he smiled. “Well, we all want to see the witch burning soon, don’t we?”
The boy nodded. The ardor in his eyes almost frightened Lechner.
Rhythmic knocking, as if a heavy hammer was being pounded again and again against a door, had awakened Martha Stechlin. When she opened her eyes, she noticed that the hammer was raging inside her body. A pain such as she had never experienced before ran through her right hand at regular intervals. She looked down and saw a shapeless black and blue pig’s bladder. It took her a while to realize that this bladder was in fact her hand. The hangman had done a good job with the thumbscrews. Her fingers and the back of her hand were now swollen to more than twice their normal size.
She vaguely remembered having drunk the potion Jakob Kuisl gave her. It had tasted bitter, and she could imagine what it contained. She was a midwife, after all, and familiar with drugs made of thorn apple, monkshood, or mandrake. In small doses, Martha Stechlin had often used those as painkillers during childbirth. Of course no one was supposed to know this, as those plants were widely reputed to be witches’ herbs.
The drink the hangman had given her was so strong that she could only vaguely remember the events that had followed. She had been tortured, but the court clerk, t
he witnesses, and also the hangman had been strangely far off, their voices sounding like fading echoes. She had not felt any pain, only a pleasant warmth in her hand. Then the blackness had come, and now finally the rhythmic pounding that had brutally fetched her back from the land beyond fear and suffering. The pain flowed into her like water into an empty vessel, filling her completely. She began to scream and to shake the bars of her cell with her undamaged hand.
“Well, you witch, can you feel the fire yet?” shouted Georg Riegg, the raftsman, from the adjoining cell. He and the guardsman from the raft landing were still imprisoned with her. Martha Stechlin’s screams were a welcome diversion.
“Why don’t you witch yourself out of here, if you can, or did the devil abandon you?” sneered Georg Riegg.
The guardsman who was locked up together with him grabbed his shoulder. “Stop, Georg,” he admonished him. “The woman is in pain. We should call the bailiff.”
But that was no longer necessary. Just as the raftsman was about to launch himself into yet another hateful tirade, Andreas the jailkeeper opened the door to the keep. The screaming had awakened him from his nap. When he saw that Martha Stechlin was rattling the bars he left in a hurry. Her sobbing and crying followed him out into the street.
Just half an hour later, the witnesses, Berchtholdt, Augustin, and Schreevogl, were informed and summoned to the jailhouse. There Johann Lechner was already waiting for them with the doctor.
Old Fronwieser was the town’s most compliant henchman, meekly assenting to anything they asked him to do. Just now he was stooping down over the midwife, winding a damp cloth around her swollen hand. The cloth was spotted and stank as if it had been used in the past to cover other bodies.
“Well?” asked the court clerk as he contemplated the sobbing midwife with as much interest as he would some rare, mutilated insect. Her cries had now become a constant wailing, like that of a child.
“A simple blood swelling, nothing more,” said Bonifaz Fronwieser, tying the cloth into a tight knot. “Of course the thumb and the middle finger are probably broken. I gave her a compress of arnica and oak bark. It’ll make the swelling go down.”
“What I want to know is whether she is ready to be interrogated,” Johann Lechner insisted.
The doctor nodded obsequiously as he packed up his bag of ointments, rusty knives, and a crucifix. “However, I’d use her other hand for continuing the torture. Otherwise there is a risk she may again lose consciousness.”
“I thank you for your pains,” said Lechner, placing a whole guilder in Bonifaz Fronwieser’s hand. “You may withdraw now. But stay within reach and we shall call you if we need you again.”
Bowing and scraping, the physician took his leave and rushed out into the street. Once outside, he shook his head. He could never understand the necessity of healing someone who had already been tortured. Once the painful interrogation had started, the poor sinners almost inevitably ended at the stake or, like shattered dolls, on the wheel. The midwife would have to die one way or the other, even if his son Simon was convinced of her innocence. At any rate, Fronwieser had at least earned some money because of her. And who knows? It was quite possible that he would be called back once more.
Contently he played with the guilder in his pocket as he headed for the market square to buy himself a hot meat pie. The treatment had whetted his appetite.
Inside the torture cellar, the witnesses and the court clerk had already taken their places on their chairs. They were waiting for the hangman to bring down the midwife and render her compliant. Johann Lechner had ordered wine, bread, and slices of cold meat prepared for all of them, because today the interrogation might last a little longer. Lechner considered Martha Stechlin to be hardheaded. Never mind, however. They had at least another two days until the Elector’s lieutenant and his entourage would make their appearance and start living at the town’s expense. By then the midwife would have confessed. Lechner was certain of that.
But the hangman had not yet arrived, and without him they couldn’t get started. Impatiently, the court clerk drummed his fingers on the tabletop.
“Kuisl has been told, hasn’t he?” he asked one of the bailiffs. The bailiff nodded in reply.
“Probably drunk again,” witness Berchtholdt piped up. But he also looked as if they had dragged him not from his bakery, but from one of the inns behind the market square. His clothing was spotted with flour and beer, his hair was ruffled up in tufts, and he smelled like an empty beer keg. He guzzled down his wine and refilled the goblet.
“Easy does it,” Jakob Schreevogl admonished him. “This isn’t a beer hall get-together but a painful interrogation.” Secretly he hoped the hangman had run away and that they therefore couldn’t proceed with the torture. Yet he knew that this was unlikely. Jakob Kuisl would lose his job, and in only a few days an executioner from Augsburg or perhaps from Steingaden would take his place here. But even a delay of a few days could be enough to find the real murderer or murderers. By now, Jakob Schreevogl was quite convinced that Martha Stechlin had been unjustly imprisoned.
The witness Georg Augustin sipped at his wine goblet and straightened out his white lace collar.
“Perhaps the hangman doesn’t realize that we don’t have unlimited time on our hands. These interrogations cost me a whole bunch of guilders each time.” He cast a bored glance at the instruments of torture as he continued to speak. “Our wagon drivers will just sit around forever in the Stern unless we keep after them. And the paperwork doesn’t get done all by itself either. So for heaven’s sake, let’s get started!”
“I am sure the witch will confess today, or tomorrow at the latest,” Lechner said, trying to calm him down. “Then everything will be back to normal again.”
Jakob Schreevogl laughed to himself. “Back to normal? You seem to forget that there is a devil on the prowl out there, a devil who has killed three children by now. And my beloved Clara is God knows where!” His voice broke and he wiped a tear from the corner of his eye.
“Don’t make such a fuss,” snapped Georg Augustin. “Once the witch is dead, the devil will come out of her and will disappear to wherever he came from. And your Clara will surely show up again.”
“Amen,” mumbled the witness Berchtholdt, belching audibly. In the meantime he had started his third goblet. His eyes were glassy as he stared into space.
“And anyway,” Georg Augustin continued, “if it had gone the way my father wanted, we would have started this interrogation much earlier. Then Martha Stechlin would already be burning at the stake, and the matter would be settled.”
Jakob Schreevogl clearly remembered last Monday’s council meeting, when blind Augustin had reminded the gentlemen of the great Schongau witch trial seventy years ago and had urged a quick resolution. Five days had gone by since then, and to Schreevogl it seemed like an eternity.
“Be quiet!” Johann Lechner shouted at the son of the blind alderman. “You know very well that we couldn’t continue any sooner. If your father were here in your place, we would not have to listen to such gibberish!”
Georg Augustin winced at this rebuke. For a moment it seemed he wanted to say something, but then he reached for the goblet and looked again at the torture instruments.
While the gentlemen were arguing among themselves downstairs, the hangman silently sneaked into the midwife’s cell. Under the watchful eyes of two bailiffs he removed the chains from the sobbing midwife and helped her sit up.
“Listen to me, Martha,” he whispered. “You must be strong now. I am very close to finding the real culprit, and then you will get out of here, as God is my witness. But today I shall have to hurt you once more. And this time I cannot give you any potion. They would notice it. Do you understand me?”
He shook her gently. The midwife stopped sobbing and nodded. Jakob Kuisl’s face was now very close to hers, so that the bailiffs could not hear him.
“Just make sure you don’t confess anything, Martha. If you confess, everythin
g is lost.” He took her delicate, ashen face between his huge paws.
“Do you hear me?” he asked once more. “No confession…”
The midwife nodded again. He hugged her closely, then they climbed down the stairs to the torture cellar.
Hearing Martha Stechlin’s bare feet on the stairs, the witnesses immediately turned their heads in her direction. Conversation stopped; the show could begin.
Two bailiffs set the accused woman down on a chair in the center of the room and bound her with heavy rope. Her eyes darted fearfully back and forth between the aldermen and finally settled on Jakob Schreevogl. Even from his place behind the table he could see how her rib cage was frantically moving up and down, much too rapidly, just like a young bird in mortal fear.
Johann Lechner began the interrogation. “We were interrupted last time,” he said. “I would therefore like to start over from the beginning.” He unrolled a parchment scroll in front of him and dipped his quill into the inkwell.
“Point one,” he intoned. “Does the delinquent have witches’ marks to show that could serve as evidence?”
Berchtholdt the baker licked his lips as the bailiffs pulled the brown penitent’s garment over Martha’s head.
“In order to avoid any disputes like last time, I shall conduct the examination myself,” said Johann Lechner.
He scrutinized the midwife’s body inch by inch, checking under her armpits, on her behind and between her thighs. Martha Stechlin kept her eyes closed. Even when the clerk poked his fingers into her genitals she did not weep. Finally, Lechner stopped. “The mark on the shoulder blade seems to be the most suspicious of them. We shall do the test. Hangman, the needle!”
Jakob Kuisl handed him a finger-long needle. Without hesitating the clerk pushed the needle deep into the shoulder blade. Martha Stechlin’s scream was so shrill that Jakob Kuisl winced. They were starting and there was nothing he could do about it.