Magdalena was striding up the steep road from the Lech to the market square with a basket in hand. She could think of nothing but the events of the previous night. She hadn’t slept a wink, and yet she was wide awake.
When Johann Lechner saw that the midwife was indeed unconscious and severely injured, he had dismissed the hangman and the physician, cursing violently. Now they were sitting in the hangman’s house, tired, hungry, and at their wit’s end. Magdalena had volunteered to go to the market to buy beer, bread, and smoked meat to help to revive them. After she had purchased a loaf of rye bread and a good cut of bacon in the market square, she turned to the inns behind the Ballenhaus. She avoided the Stern since Karl Semer, its landlord and the town’s presiding burgomaster, was currently on bad terms with her father. Everyone knew that the hangman had taken the side of the witch. So she went over to the Sonnenbrau to get two mugs of beer.
When she stepped back into the street with the foaming tankards, she heard whispering and giggling behind her. She looked around. A group of children clustered around the door of the inn, eyeing her, partly out of fear, partly out of curiosity. Magdalena was making her way through the throng of children when she heard several voices strike up a little song behind her. It was an insulting rhyme with her name in it.
Angrily, she turned around.
“Who was that? Speak, if you dare!”
Some of the children ran away. Most, however, remained and looked at her, smirking.
“Who was that?” she asked again.
“You’ve put a spell on Simon Fronwieser, so that he follows you everywhere like a puppy, and you’re hand in glove with the Stechlin woman, that witch.”
A boy with a crooked nose, approximately twelve years old, had spoken. Magdalena knew him. He was the son of Berchtholdt, the baker. He looked her in the eye defiantly, but his hands were shaking.
“Is that so. According to whom?” Magdalena asked calmly, attempting a smile.
“According to my father,” the Berchtholdt boy hissed. “And he says you’ll be next to end up burning at the stake.”
Magdalena gave him a provocative stare. “Anybody else who believes this sort of rubbish? If so, shove off now, or else you’ll get one behind the ears.”
Suddenly she had an idea. She reached into her basket and took out a handful of candied fruit. Actually, she had bought it at the market for her siblings. She smiled as she spoke on.
“For everybody else, I might have some candy, if they want to tell me a thing or two.”
The children pushed closer to her.
“Don’t take anything from the witch!” Berchtholdt’s son yelled. “There’s sure to be a spell on the fruit that’ll make you sick!”
Some of the children looked frightened, but their appetite was stronger. With big eyes they followed all of her movements.
“Magdalena, hangman’s cow, bears the mark upon her brow,” the Berchtholdt boy repeated. But nobody sang along.
“Oh, shut up,” another boy interrupted him. He was missing most of his front teeth. “Your father stinks of brandy every morning when I go to get bread. God knows all the crazy things he thinks up when he’s drunk. Now shove off.”
Crying and hollering, the baker’s son ran off. Some followed him; the others crowded around Magdalena and stared at the candied fruit in her hand as if in a trance.
“Well, then,” she began. “About the murdered boys, Clara, and that Sophie girl. Who knows what they did at the midwife’s? Why didn’t they play with you?”
“They were buggers, real pests,” the boy in front of her said. “Nobody here misses them. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with them.”
“Why would that be?” Magdalena asked.
“’Cause they were bastards, weren’t they? Wards and orphans,” a little blonde girl piped up, as if the hangman’s daughter were a bit slow on the uptake. “And besides, they didn’t want to have anything to do with us. They always hung around with that Sophie. And one time she beat my brother black-and-blue, that witch!”
“But Peter Grimmer wasn’t a ward at all. He still had his father,” Magdalena objected.
“He got bewitched by Sophie,” the boy with the missing teeth whispered. “He was totally different since they met! They kissed and showed each other their bare arses. Once he told us that all the wards had entered a compact together and that they could cast a spell on other children to put warts on their faces and even smallpox, if they wanted to. And just a week later little Matthias died of smallpox!”
“And they learned their witchcraft from the Stechlin woman!” a little boy shouted from farther back in the group.
“They used to sit in her house, and now the devil has taken away his disciples,” another one hissed.
“Amen,” Magdalena murmured. Then she gave the children an enigmatic look.
“I know witchcraft as well,” she murmured. “Do you believe me?” Frightened, her audience backed away a little.
Magdalena put on a conspiratorial face, waving her hands mysteriously. “I can make candied fruit rain from the sky.”
She tossed the sweet candies high up in the air. As the children screamed and scrambled to get the fruit, she disappeared around the nearest corner.
She didn’t notice that a figure was following her at a safe distance.
“I guess today I’ll take a cup of your devil’s brew.” The hangman pointed at the small pouch dangling at Simon’s side. The physician nodded and poured the coffee grounds into the pot of boiling water that was hanging above the fire. A strong, invigorating fragrance filled the air. Jakob Kuisl breathed it in and nodded appreciatively. “Doesn’t smell bad at all. Considering it’s supposed to be the devil’s piss.”
Simon smiled. “And it’ll clear our minds, believe me.”
He filled a pewter mug for the hangman. Then he sipped cautiously at his own mug. Every sip helped dispel the tired feeling in his head.
The two men were sitting across from each other at the large, worn table in the main room of the hangman’s house, brooding over the previous night’s events. Anna Maria, Kuisl’s wife, had sensed that the two needed to be alone, so she went down to the Lech to do her laundry and took the twins with her. Silence engulfed the room.
“I bet my behind that Clara and Sophie are still at that building site,” the hangman growled after a while, drumming his fingers on the table. “There has to be a hideout there, and a good one at that. Otherwise we or the others would have found it long ago.”
Simon winced. He’d scalded his lips with his hot mug.
“That’s certainly possible, but there’s no way of finding that out now,” he said finally, running his tongue over his lips. “At daytime, the workmen are at the site, and at night there are the guards that Lechner dispatched. If they find out anything concerning those children, they’re sure to inform Lechner…”
“And Sophie will end up at the stake together with Martha,” the hangman concluded. “Jesus Christ, there’s a jinx on all of this!”
“Don’t say such a thing,” Simon grinned. Then he turned serious again.
“Let’s recapitulate,” he said. “The children seem to be hiding somewhere at the building site. And there’s something else hidden there as well. Something that a rich man would like to have. That’s why he has hired a handful of soldiers. Resl from Semer’s inn told me that these soldiers were meeting with somebody in the upstairs room last week.”
“That would’ve been the mastermind, the patron.”
The hangman lit his pipe on a chip of pinewood. Like a tent, the tobacco smoke billowed over the two men, mingling with the fragrance of the coffee. Simon had to cough briefly before he went on.
“The soldiers are vandalizing the building site for the leper house, so that they’ll have more time for their search there. That makes sense to me. But why, in the name of God, does one of them slaughter the orphans? There’s no sense in that!”
