down there?” He pointed to old Augustin, who had meanwhile recovered and sat in his chair, his eyes full of hate.
“He’s the mastermind we’ve been looking for so long,” said Simon, while he bound up his wound with a strip of cloth as best he could. At the same time he told the hangman what had happened.
“The honorable Matthias Augustin,” Jakob Kuisl finally growled when Simon had finished his story, looking at the old man. “You can’t have enough of executions at the stake. Didn’t my grandfather do enough of them for you? Haven’t you heard enough women screaming?”
“As God is my witness, I wanted no such thing,” said Matthias Augustin. “All I wanted was the money.”
“Your damned money,” said the hangman. “It’s blood money. I want none of it. Take it-you can eat it as far as I’m concerned!”
He reached under his coat and drew out a small dirty linen bag. With disgust he threw it onto the table, where it burst open. Gold and silver coins poured over the tabletop and rolled jingling to the floor.
The old man looked on, his mouth wide open. Then he leaned over the table and grabbed the coins.
“My treasure! My money!” he panted. “I shall die with dignity. My house will live on!” He began to count the coins.
“A pity, really, all that money for a moneybags like you,” grunted Jakob Kuisl. “I’m wondering if I should take it away from you again.”
Fearfully Matthias Augustin looked across at him. He stopped counting, his fingers trembled.
“You wouldn’t dare, hangman,” he hissed.
“And why not?” said Kuisl. “Nobody would notice anything. Or are you going to tell the council that I took Ferdinand Schreevogl’s treasure away from you? Money that actually belongs to the church and you have unlawfully embezzled?”
Matthias Augustin looked at him with suspicion.
“What do you want, hangman?” he asked. “You’re not interested in the money. What then?”
Jakob Kuisl lunged over the table with his massive body until his face was directly in front of the old man’s toothless mouth.
“Can’t you guess?” he mumbled. “I want you to persuade the council and the Landgrave that there is no witch. That it was all a children’s game with elderberry juice and magic rhymes. So that the midwife will be freed and this persecution will be over. Help me do this, and you can have your goddamned money.”
Matthias Augustin shook his head and laughed.
“Even if I wanted to do that, who would believe me? There were deaths, the Stadel burned down, the soldiers at the building site…”
“The destruction at the building site was an act of vandalism by some burghers who didn’t want a leper house there. A trifle…” Simon interjected, when he had understood what the hangman was leading up to. “The Augsburgers started the Stadel fire,” he hastened to add. “But so as not to upset neighborly relations, there will be no further consequences. And the dead children…”
“Peter Grimmer fell into the river, an accident, as the physician here can confirm,” he continued in measured tones. “And the others? Well now, the war hasn’t been over all that long. The region is swarming with robbers and highwaymen. In any case, who’s going to bother with a couple of orphans when he can save the town with a lie?”
“Save…the town?” asked Matthias Augustin, astonished.
“Well,” Simon added, “if you don’t present the Landgrave with a good story, he’ll hunt down more witches and keep on until half the women in Schongau are burned at the stake. Remember the witch trials in your childhood, when dozens of women were burned. The council will support you and swallow a few small lies if you see to it that the past does not repeat itself. You alone have enough influence to persuade the aldermen and the Landgrave. Use it! I’m sure you know all the mean little secrets that each of them has, which you can use to persuade them if necessary.”
Matthias Augustin shook his head.
“Your plan won’t work. Too much has happened…”
“Think of the money,” the hangman interrupted him. “The money and your reputation. If we tell the people out there what kind of villains you and your son are, probably nobody will believe us. We ourselves know that we lack proof. But who knows? Somewhere something will stick…I know the people. They gossip, and even the fine people come to me from time to time for a love potion or a salve for warts, and so people start to talk…”
“Stop, just stop it!” Matthias Augustin cried. “You have persuaded me. I will do my utmost. But I can’t promise you anything.”
“We can’t promise anything either,” said the hangman, deftly sweeping up the money from the table into his big coat. The old man tried to protest, but a glance from the hangman made him fall silent.
“Come to my house in two days, after the big council meeting,” said Jakob Kuisl. “I’m quite sure your son will be needing a jar of arnica.” He looked down at Georg Augustin almost sympathetically as he lay huddled upon the floor, still unconscious. A small pool of dried blood surrounded his black locks. Then the hangman turned to the father again.
“Perhaps I can also find an elixir in my closet that will reduce your pain. Believe me, we shabby barbers and army surgeons know one or two mysteries that the university doctors still haven’t heard of.”
He went to the door and waved his goodbye with the bag. “If the council gets it right, this bag will change its owner. If not, I’ll throw it in the Lech. It’s up to you.”
Simon followed him out. Before he shut the door, he could hear the old man groaning once more. The cramps had started again.
The council meeting two days later was one of the strangest ever to take place in Schongau. Matthias Augustin had used the whole of the previous day to put the squeeze on individual members of the inner council. He had found something against every one of them. With threats, flattery, and persuasion he was able to bring every one of them over to his side. When he finally convinced the court clerk Johann Lechner, there was nothing more in the way of the final plan.
When the Landgrave appeared at the council meeting in the morning, he was confronted by a unanimous group of enlightened burghers who considered the slightest suspicion of witchcraft as belonging in the realm of legend. The investigations conducted by the council had determined without doubt that the witches’ signs were nothing but a children’s game, the fire at the Stadel was an act of revenge by the depraved Augsburg thugs, and the murdered children the victims of shady elements hiding in the forests around Schongau. All of it no doubt very sad, but no cause for mass hysteria.
In addition, by a stroke of luck, the former mercenary soldier and robber Christoph Holzapfel was arrested by the Landgrave’s men on the morning of the third of May. Magdalena, the hangman’s daughter, identified him immediately as her abductor, and by the evening the wicked soldier had confessed, in the keep, to having murdered three little children from Schongau out of pure malice.
Remarkably, no torture was necessary to obtain this confession. But the hangman must have shown him the instruments during the short time that he was alone with the abductor of his daughter. In any case, the murderer was afterward prepared to make a written confession, which he signed with his left hand. The right hand hung down like a damp red rag and seemed to be only held together by skin and sinew.
The Landgrave made a few lame attempts to have the Stechlin woman tried for witchcraft after all. But as she had not confessed up to then, he would have had to apply to Munich for permission to continue the torture. The four burgomasters and the court clerk made it clear to him that he could not rely on their support.
The final touch was supplied by old Matthias Augustin, who described in lively detail before the whole council the horrors of the last great witchcraft trial of 1589. Even the Landgrave did not want to do anything to bring that about again.
And so at noon on May 4, 1659, the entourage of the Landgrave Count Wolf Dietrich von Sandizell set out again for his estate at Thierhaupten, from there to direct the destinies of Schongau at a distance. As the soldiers in their shining breast-plates rode through the town gates, the burghers waved a long farewell to their lord. Noisy children and barking dogs accompanied the carriage as far as Altenstadt. The burghers all agreed it had been nice to see such important people close up. It was even nicer to see them ride away.
The hangman went to the keep and had the door unlocked by the bailiffs. Martha Stechlin lay sleeping among damp straw and her own foul-smelling excrement. Her breathing was regular, and the swelling on her forehead had
