The Hangman’s Daughter

“Uncle Simon, Uncle Simon!”

The twins, Georg and Barbara, scrambled down from the oak tree and ran with loud cries to Simon. The physician was their friend, and they knew that he was always ready for a game or a romp with them.

Anna Maria Kuisl, aroused by the noise, opened the front door. Simon looked at her, smiling a little stiffly, while the children tried to jump up on him to see what he had in the bundle over his shoulder. Although she was just about forty, the hangman’s wife was still an attractive woman, who with her raven-black hair and bushy eyebrows looked almost like his sister. Simon had often asked himself if she was not a distant relative of Jakob Kuisl’s. Since executioners were regarded as dishonorable and could only marry burghers’ daughters in exceptional circumstances, their families were often closely related by marriage. In the course of centuries whole dynasties of executioners had formed, and that of the Kuisls was the largest in Bavaria.

Laughing, Anna Maria Kuisl came out to meet the physician, but when she noticed the bundle on his back, his warning glance, and his defensive gesture, she motioned to the children to leave.

“Georg, Barbara! Go and play behind the house. Uncle Simon and I have something to talk about.”

The children, grumbling, disappeared, and Simon was at last able to enter the room and lay the corpse on the kitchen bench. The cloth in which it was wrapped fell to the side. When Anna Maria saw the boy, she uttered a cry.

“My God, that’s Grimmer’s boy! What in the world has happened?”

Simon took a seat next to the bench and told her the story. Meanwhile Anna Maria poured him some wine mixed with water from an earthenware jug, which he drank in great gulps.

“And so you need my husband now to tell you what happened?” Anna Maria asked, when he had finished. Shaking her head, she kept on glancing at the boy’s body.

Simon wiped his lips. “Exactly. Where is he?”

Maria shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t tell you. He went up to the town to the blacksmith’s to get some nails. We need a new closet, you know. Ours is full to the bursting point.”

She glanced once more at the bloody bundle on the kitchen bench. As the wife of the hangman she was more than accustomed to the sight of corpses, but the death of a child always moved her. She shook her head. “The poor lad…”

Then she seemed to come to herself again. Life went on. Outside the twins romped about noisily, and little Barbara screeched at the top of her lungs. “It would be best if you wait for him here,” she said, getting up from the bench. “You can read a bit while you’re waiting.”

The hangman’s wife smiled. She knew that Simon often came just to leaf through her husband’s dog-eared old books. Sometimes the physician made up some rather feeble excuse for going down to the hangman’s house to look up something.

Anna Maria gave the dead boy one more compassionate glance. Then she took a woolen blanket from the closet and laid it carefully over the corpse, so that there was nothing more to see in case the twins came in suddenly. Finally she went to the door. “I must see what the children are doing outside. Help yourself to the wine, if you like.”

The door closed and Simon was alone in the room. The hangman’s living room was large and spacious and took up almost the entire ground floor of the house. In the corner there was a large stove, which was stoked from outside in the corridor. Next to it was the kitchen table, and above it the executioner’s sword hung on the wall. A steep staircase led from the passage to the upper room, where the Kuisls and their three children slept. Next to the oven was a low, narrow door, which led to another room beyond. Simon ducked under the lintel and entered the holy of holies.

On the left stood two chests in which Jakob Kuisl kept everything needed for executions and torture-ropes, chains, gloves, but also thumbscrews and pincers. The rest of this threatening arsenal was owned by the town authorities and was kept in the tower, deep down in the dungeons. Next to the chests, the gallows ladder was leaning on the wall.

But Simon was looking for something else. Almost the whole of the opposite wall was taken up by an enormous closet that reached to the ceiling. The physician opened one of the many doors and looked into a confused mass of bottles, pots, leather bags, and vials. Inside the closet, herbs were hanging to dry; they smelled like summer. Simon recognized rosemary, goat’s rue, and daphne. Behind a second door were countless drawers, labeled with alchemical signs and symbols. Simon turned to the third door. Behind this were piled old dusty volumes, crackling parchment rolls, and books both printed and handwritten-the hangman’s library, collected over the course of many generations, ancient knowledge, completely different from what Simon had studied in the course of his many dry-as-dust lectures at the university in Ingolstadt.

Simon reached for a particularly heavy volume, which he often held in his hands. He ran his finger over the title. “Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis,” he murmured. A disputed book that was based on the idea that all the blood in the body was part of a perpetual circulation powered by the heart. Simon’s professors in Ingolstadt had laughed at this theory, and even his father had found it far-fetched.

Simon continued browsing. The Buch der Medicie, or Book of Medicine, was the name of a handwritten, poorly bound little book in which all kinds of remedies against illnesses were listed. Simon’s gaze was arrested by a page on which dried toads were recommended as a remedy against the plague. Next to it on the shelf was a work that the hangman could have acquired only recently. Das Wundarzneyische Zeughaus, or Surgical Armory, by Johannes Scultetus, the city physician of Ulm, was so new that probably not even the University of Ingolstadt had acquired it yet. Reverently, Simon let his fingers glide over the binding of this masterpiece of surgery.

“Pity that you have eyes only for books.”

Simon looked up. Magdalena was leaning in the doorway and looking at him brightly. The young physician couldn’t help swallowing. Magdalena Kuisl, twenty years old, was aware of the effect she had on men. Whenever Simon saw her, his mouth became dry and his head seemed empty. In the past few weeks, it had become worse, he always kept thinking of her. Sometimes before he fell asleep, he imagined her full lips, the dimples in her cheeks, and her laughing eyes. If the physician had only been a little superstitious, he would have supposed that the hangman’s daughter had cast a spell over him.

“I’m…waiting for your father…” he stammered, without taking his eyes off her. Smiling, she came up to him. She appeared not to have noticed the dead boy on the bench as she walked past, and Simon had no intention of bringing it to her attention. The few moments they had together were too precious to fill with death and suffering.

He shrugged and put the book back on the shelf.

“Your father has the best medical library for miles around. I’d be foolish not to use it,” he murmured. His glance wandered over her plunging neckline in which two well-formed breasts were apparent. He quickly looked the other way.

“Your father sees that differently,” said Magdalena and slowly came nearer.

Simon knew that his father considered the hangman’s books to be works of the devil. And he had often warned him about Magdalena. Satan’s woman, he had said.

And he who has dealings with the hangman’s daughter will never be a respected medical man.

Simon knew that there could be no question of a marriage with Magdalena. She was “dishonorable,” just like her father. But he couldn’t stop thinking of her. Only a few weeks before, they had danced together for a short time at St. Paul’s Fair, and for days this had been the subject of gossip in the town.

His father had threatened to beat him if he was seen with Magdalena again. Hangmen’s daughters married hangmen’s sons-that was an unwritten law. Simon knew it very well.

Now Magdalena stood in front of him and ran her fingers across his cheek. She was smiling, but in her eyes there was an unspoken grief.

“Do you want to come to the meadows with me tomorrow?” she asked. “Father needs mistletoe and hellebore…”

Simon thought he heard a pleading note in her voice.

“Magdalena, I…” There was a rustle behind him.

“You can very well go alone. Simon and I have a great deal to talk about. Now off with you.”

Simon looked round. Unnoticed by him, the executioner had entered the narrow room. Magdalena looked once