had already set the foundations and raised brick walls. The doctor remembered having seen wooden scaffolding and a roof truss the last time. The ground walls of the little chapel next to it had also been completed.
Simon recalled how the priest had often mentioned with pride in his sermons during recent months the progress being made on the construction. In building the leper house, the church was fulfilling a long-held wish: it had always been its basic mission to care for the poor and the sick. Besides, the highly contagious lepers were a danger to the entire town. So far they had always been shunted off to the leper house in Augsburg. But the Augsburgers had enough lepers of their own, and lately they had only reluctantly accepted more. Schongau didn’t want to plead for their help in the future. The new leper house would be a symbol of municipal independence, even if many in the council were opposed to its construction.
Not much was to be seen now of that once-busy building site. Many of the walls had collapsed as if someone had rammed them as hard as they could. The truss was now a sooty skeleton reaching up to the sky, and most of the wooden scaffolds were smashed or burnt. A smell of wet ashes hung in the air. An abandoned cart loaded with wood and barrels was stuck in a ditch at the side of the road.
In one corner of the clearing there was an old well made of natural stone. A group of craftsmen were sitting on the edge, staring in complete bewilderment at the destruction. The work of weeks, if not months, was destroyed. The construction had been a living for these men, and their future was now uncertain. As of yet, the church had not said what was going to be done.
Simon waved at the workmen and walked a few steps toward them. They eyed the physician with suspicion while continuing to chew on their bread. The doctor was obviously interrupting their meal, and they had no intention of wasting their short break on a chat.
“It looks pretty bad,” Simon called out as he walked toward them and pointed toward the building site. The hangman followed a few steps behind him.
“Do you know who did it?”
“And what business would that be of yours?” replied one worker, spitting on the ground in front of them. Simon recognized him as one of those who had tried a few days earlier to crash the keep to get at the midwife. The man looked over Simon’s shoulder in the direction of Jakob Kuisl. The hangman smiled and rolled the truncheon back and forth on his shoulder.
“Greetings, Josef,” said Kuisl. “How’s the wife? In good health? Did my concoction work?”
Surprised, the others looked at the carpenter who had been hired by the town as site manager.
“Your wife is sick?” one of them asked. “You didn’t say anything about that.”
“It’s…nothing serious,” he growled and looked at the hangman as if seeking his help. “Only a little cough. Isn’t that right, Master Kuisl?”
“That’s right, Josef. Would you be so kind as to show us around?”
Josef Bichler shrugged and walked off in the direction of the collapsed walls. “There isn’t much to see. Follow me.”
The hangman and the physician followed while the other workmen remained at the well, talking to one another in hushed voices.
“What’s wrong with his wife?” asked Simon in a whisper.
“She no longer wants to go to bed with him,” said Jakob Kuisl as he surveyed the site. “He asked the midwife for a love potion, but she wouldn’t give him one. She thought that was witchcraft. So he came to me.”
“And you gave him?”
“Sometimes belief is the best potion. Belief and clay dissolved in water. There have been no complaints since then.”
Simon grinned. At the same time he could not help shaking his head over a man who wanted to see the midwife burned as a witch and at the same time ordered magic potions from her.
In the meantime they had reached the foundation of the leper house. Parts of the once six-foot-high walls had collapsed completely, and stones were scattered everywhere on the ground. A stack of planks had been thrown over and set on fire, and in some places smoke was still rising.
Josef Bichler crossed himself as he looked down on the destruction. “It must have been some kind of devil,” he whispered. “The same one that murdered the little ones. Who else knocks down entire walls?”
“A devil or a couple of strong men using a tree trunk,” Jakob Kuisl said. “This one there, for instance.” He pointed to a thick pine trunk with its branches removed lying in the clearing not far from the north wall. Tracks in the dirt revealed how it had been dragged from the edge of the wood to the spot and from there on to the wall. The hangman nodded. “They probably used it like a battering ram.” They climbed over part of the destroyed wall into the interior of the structure. The foundation had been smashed at several points as if someone had gone wild with a pickax. Slabs of stones had been pushed to the side and clumps of clay and pieces of brick were scattered around. In places the debris reached as high as their knees, so that they sometimes had to climb over heaps of rubble. It looked worse than after an attack by the Swedish forces.
“Why would someone do anything like that?” whispered Simon. “That’s no longer vandalism, that’s blind destructiveness.”
“Strange,” remarked Kuisl, chewing on his cold pipe. “Tearing down the walls would really have been enough to halt the building. But here…”
The carpenter looked at him anxiously. “I’m telling you…the devil,” he hissed. “Only the devil has such power. Look at the chapel next to it-he crushed it with his fist as if it were a piece of paper.”
Simon shivered. Now at noon the sun was trying to dissolve the morning mist but it couldn’t quite do that. The mist still hung in thick clouds over the clearing. The forest, which began only a few yards behind the building site, could be seen only dimly.
In the meantime Jakob Kuisl had stepped out again through the masonry archway. He kept searching around in front of the western wall fragment and finally stopped. “Here!” he called out. “Clear tracks. Must have been four or five men.”
All of a sudden he stooped down and picked something up. It was a small black leather pouch, no larger than a child’s fist. He opened it, looked inside, and then sniffed it. A blissful smile brightened his face. “First-rate tobacco,” he told Simon and the carpenter, who had both come closer. He rubbed the brown fibers into crumbs and deeply inhaled the aroma once more. “But not from around here. This is good stuff. I’ve smelled something like this up in Magdeburg once. For this stuff, traders got themselves slaughtered like pigs.”
“You’ve been to Magdeburg?” asked Simon softly. “You never told me about that.”
The hangman quickly stuffed the pouch into his coat pocket. Without answering Simon’s question he walked toward the foundation walls of the chapel. Here, too, there was nothing but destruction. What had been walls were toppled over, forming small stone mounds. He climbed one of them and gazed all about. His mind seemed to be still on the pouch he had found. “Nobody smokes that kind of tobacco around here,” he called down to the other two.
“How would you know?” asked the carpenter sourly. “All of this devil’s weed smells the same!”
The hangman was torn from his thoughts and looked down angrily at Josef Bichler. As he stood there on the mound of stones surrounded by clouds of mist, he reminded Simon of some legendary giant. The hangman pointed his finger at the carpenter. “You stink,” he shouted. “Your teeth stink, and your mouth stinks, but this…weed, as you call it, is fragrant! It invigorates the senses and tears you from your dreams! It covers the entire world and lifts you into heaven; let me tell you that! In any case, it’s much too good for a peasant numskull like you. It comes from the New World, and it is not meant for any old nitwit.”
Before the carpenter could answer, Simon interrupted, pointing to a mound of wet, brown earth just next to the chapel. “Look, there are tracks here too!” he shouted. The mound was indeed covered with shoe prints. With a last angry look the hangman climbed down from the mound and examined the tracks. “Boot tracks,” he said finally. “These are soldiers’ boots, that’s for sure. I’ve seen too many of them to make a mistake here.” He whistled loudly. “This is getting interesting…” He pointed to a particular impression, somewhat blurred at the end of the sole. “This man limps. He’s dragging one foot a little and cannot put much weight on it.”
“The devil’s clubfoot,” hissed Josef Bichler.
“Nonsense,” growled Kuisl. “If it were a clubfoot, then even you would be able to see it. No, the man is limping. He probably got a bullet in his leg during the war. They took out the bullet, but the leg has remained stiff.”
Simon nodded. He could still remember such operations from his days as an army surgeon’s son. Using long,
