The Hangman’s Daughter

appointed inquisitors. He smiled back at her. Then his thoughts returned to gloomier things.

The night before he had to accompany his father on a house call. Haltenberger’s farmhand had come down with a bad fever. They’d given him cold compresses, and Simon’s father had bled him. Simon was at least able to convince his father to use some of that ominous powder that had previously helped several times with fever and supposedly came from the bark of a rare tree. The patient’s symptoms reminded him of another case in which a wagon driver from Venice had collapsed on the street in their town. A foul odor had come from the man’s mouth, and his entire body was covered with pustules. People spoke of the French disease, and that the devil used it to punish those who indulged in unchaste love.

Simon would gladly have indulged in unchaste love last night, but during his rendezvous with Magdalena later on in a secret corner by the town wall, she had only wanted to talk about Goodwife Stechlin. She, too, was convinced of the midwife’s innocence. Once he had tried to touch her bodice, but she had turned away. At his next attempt the night watchman had discovered them and sent them home. It was way past eight o’clock in the evening, and at that time young girls were no longer allowed out on the streets. Simon had the feeling of having missed a crucial moment, and he was not sure if luck would soon bring him another. Perhaps his father was right and he should keep his hands off the hangman’s daughter. Simon was not sure if she was only toying with him or whether she really cared for him.

Jakob Kuisl couldn’t fully concentrate on his work that morning either. While Simon sat there sipping weak beer and staring out the window, he mixed a salve of dried herbs and goose fat. He kept putting the pestle aside to fill his pipe. Anna Maria, his wife, was out in the field, and the twins were rollicking under the kitchen table, a few times almost knocking over the mortar. He scolded them and sent them outside into the yard. Georg and Barbara trotted off, pouting, but knowing full well that their father could not stay angry at them for long.

Simon leafed through the well-thumbed book the hangman had lying open on the table. Simon had returned two of his books and was eager to learn new things. The tome before him was not necessarily going to provide that. Dioscorides’s De materia medica was still the standard text of the healing arts even though its author, a Greek physician, had lived in the days of our Savior. Also at the university in Ingolstadt they were still teaching his methods. Simon sighed. He had the feeling that humanity was running in place. So many centuries and they had not learned anything new.

He was still surprised that Kuisl owned this book as well. In the hangman’s wooden chest and medicine cabinet there were over a dozen books and innumerable parchments, among these the writings of the Benedictine nun Hildegard of Bingen and newer texts on the circulation of blood or on the location of organs in the body. Even such a recent text as Ambroise Pare’s Writings on Anatomy and Surgery in a German translation was among them. Simon did not believe that any Schongau citizen owned more books than the hangman, not even the court clerk, who had a reputation as a great scholar in town.

As Simon leafed through the Greek’s text he wondered why he and the hangman could not simply leave the case of the midwife alone. Probably it was precisely this rejection of the obvious, this continuous probing prompted by curiosity, that created a bond between them. That, and a good portion of obstinacy, he thought with a smile.

All of a sudden his finger stopped on a page. Next to a drawing of the human body there were drawings of a few symbols for alchemistic ingredients. One of them showed a triangle with a squiggle below.

It was the old symbol for sulfur.

Simon knew it from his university days, but now he remembered where he had last seen this symbol. It was the symbol that the linen weaver Andreas Dangler had shown him, the same symbol that his foster child Sophie had drawn in the dirt in their backyard.

Simon pushed the book across the table to Jakob Kuisl, who was still crushing herbs in the mortar.

“This is the old symbol I told you about! The symbol Sophie drew! Now I recognize it again!”

The hangman looked at the page and nodded.

“Sulfur…the stink of the devil and of his playmates.”

“I wonder if they really…?” Simon asked.

Jakob Kuisl chewed on his pipe. “First the Venus symbol, and now the symbol for sulfur…well, it is strange.”

“Where did Sophie learn such symbols?” Simon asked. “Only from the midwife. She must have told her and the other children about them. Perhaps she did teach them witchcraft after all.” He sighed. “Unfortunately we can no longer ask her about it, in any case not now.”

“Nonsense,” the hangman growled. “The Stechlin woman is no more witch than I am. The children probably discovered the symbols in her room, in a book, on vials, bottles, who knows where.”

Simon shook his head. “The symbol for sulfur maybe,” he said. “But the Venus symbol, the witches’ symbol? You said yourself that you’ve never seen such a symbol in her house. And if you had, then she would be a witch after all, wouldn’t she?”

The hangman continued crushing the herbs in the mortar even though they had long been ground into a green paste.

“The Stechlin woman is no witch, and that’s that,” he growled. “Let’s forget about her, and instead find the devil who is going through our town and kidnapping the children. Sophie, Clara, and Johannes, they’ve all disappeared. Where are they? I’m sure that when we find them we’ll also find the solution to the puzzle.”

“That is, if the children are still alive,” mumbled Simon. Then he became lost again in his reveries.

“Sophie did see the devil. It was down by the river,” he said finally, “and he asked about the Kratz boy. Not long after that, the boy was dead. The man was tall, he had a coat and a hat with a feather in it and a scar across his face. Also he is said to have had a hand made of bone, at least that’s what the girl thinks she saw…”

Jakob Kuisl interrupted him. “The serving girl at Semer’s inn also saw a man with a skeleton hand in the lounge.”

“True,” said Simon. “That was a few days earlier, together with a few other men. The maid said they looked like soldiers. Then they went upstairs to meet someone there. But who was that?”

The hangman scraped the paste from the mortar into a jar, which he sealed with a piece of leather.

“I don’t like it when soldiers hang around our town,” he growled. “Soldiers only bring trouble. They drink, they rob, they destroy.”

“Speaking of destruction…” said Simon. “Schreevogl told me the night before last that not only is the Stadel destroyed, but on the same evening someone was at the building site for the leper house. Everything was razed to the ground there. Could that too have been the work of the Augsburgers?”

Jakob Kuisl dismissed this with a wave of the hand. “Hardly,” he said. “They’ll only welcome a leper house here. Then they hope that fewer travelers will stop in our town.”

“Well, then perhaps it’s wagon drivers from somewhere else who are afraid of catching leprosy in passing by,” remarked Simon. “After all, the trade route runs not far from the Hohenfurch Road.”

Jakob Kuisl spat. “Well, I know plenty of Schongauers who are just as afraid of that. The church wants the leper house, but the patricians are against it because they fear that business travelers will stay well clear of our little town…”

Simon shook his head. “And yet there are leper houses in many large cities, even in Regensburg and Augsburg…”

The hangman walked over to the apothecary’s closet to put away the jar. “Our moneybags are cowardly dogs,” he told Simon over his shoulder. “Some of them come and go regularly here at my house, and they tremble when the plague is still in Venice!”

When he returned he was carrying a larchwood truncheon about the length of his arm over his shoulder and grinning. “We need to take a closer look at that leper house in any case. I get the feeling that too many things are happening all at once for it to be a coincidence.”

“Right away?” Simon asked.

“Right away,” Jakob Kuisl said, swinging his truncheon. “Perhaps the devil is making his rounds out there. I’ve always wanted to give him a good thrashing.”

He squeezed his massive body through the narrow door opening to the outside, into the April morning. Simon shivered with cold. It wouldn’t be surprising if even the devil were afraid of the Schongau hangman.

The building site for the leper house was located in a clearing right next to the Hohenfurch Road less than half an hour’s travel from the town. Simon had watched the workmen more than once as he passed the site. They