“Magdalena, I forbid you-”
“No, you can’t forbid me from doing anything, you scoundrel!” Magdalena worked herself into a rage. “Do you think I can’t see how you flirt around with other girls behind my back? But because I’m just the hangman’s daughter, it doesn’t matter. People are bound to gossip, anyway. I’m telling you, Benedikta is a slut!”
“Aha! A slut?” Simon lost his patience now, and his voice took on an icy tone. “This…slut has more decency and education than you’ll ever have in three lifetimes. She knows how to behave, she speaks proper German without stammering and stuttering, and she can even speak French! She is a refined lady and no foul-mouthed hangman’s girl!”
The chunk of ice hit him right on the nose so that, for a brief moment, he felt faint. When he gathered his wits again, he felt warm blood flowing down his face, forming a pattern of red dots in the snow.
“Magdalena!” he shouted, still holding his nose and snuffling. “Stay here. I didn’t mean it that way!” But the hangman’s daughter had already passed through the Hof Gate and vanished.
Cursing under his breath, he hurried toward town, taking care that the blood didn’t drip onto his expensive petticoat breeches. Why did Magdalena always have to be so ill-tempered? He knew that what he had said was pretty stupid, and he wanted to ask her forgiveness, take her in his arms, and tell her that she was the only one he really wanted. But the hangman’s daughter was nowhere in sight.
“Magdalena!” he shouted over and over, looking everywhere in the little side streets. “Come back! I’m sorry!”
Passersby gave him strange glances, but he held his head down and hurried along. She had to be somewhere! At the next street corner, he stumbled over a little dog and it ran off whimpering. On and on he went, passing ox carts and glancing nervously at heavily clothed figures, shadowy figures barely visible in the snow that was starting to fall. Magdalena had simply disappeared. As he turned into the Munzgasse, he heard a familiar voice behind him.
“Simon?”
He turned around. Standing in front of the portal of the Church of the Ascension was Benedikta, eyeing him with concern. Apparently, she was just coming out of the Schongau parish church.
“You’re bleeding!” she exclaimed. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” he muttered. “I…fell, that’s all.”
“Let me have a look.” She walked over to him and started to dab determinedly at the blood on his face with her lace handkerchief. And although her touch burned, it felt good, too.
“A sheet of ice in front of the Hof Gate,” he sniffed softly as she continued to wipe his nose. “I slipped.”
“You need hot water to clean the wound. Come.” Like a mother, she took his arm and pulled him along behind her.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To Semer’s Tavern, where I’m staying,” she said. “In the restaurant we can surely get a bowl of water and a cup of mulled wine for you. And then you can tell me if you have found out anything in the meanwhile.”
Simon hesitated. Actually, he wanted to keep looking for Magdalena, and his father would be waiting for him at home. This damned fever was claiming more and more victims who needed treatment. But how could anyone object to a cup of mulled wine? Magdalena had probably already made it back to the tanners’ section of town and was sitting in her father’s house and sulking. It was probably better anyway to wait until the worst of her anger had passed.
There was also a lot to tell. So much had happened in the last few days, and Simon simply needed someone to talk to. In happy anticipation, he staggered along behind Benedikta toward Semer’s Tavern. When she opened the door, his swollen nose took in the fragrance of freshly baked pastries and warm wine.
Magdalena wiped the tears from her eyes as she ran half blind through the streets of Schongau, not even noticing people she passed along the way. She was just so…furious. How could Simon be so cruel to her? Perhaps it was true they were not a good match-she, a hangman’s daughter, a butcher’s girl, the offspring of a dishonorable family; he, an educated medicus, someone who could speak well and wore polished boots and a coat with shiny buttons, and who was adored by the women in town. But he, too, came from a poor family! His money and his clothes were borrowed or donated by one or another of his fawning admirers. Magdalena clenched her teeth. She had watched this spectacle far too long, and this was finally the limit. She might well be a dishonorable, dirty hangman’s daughter, but she still had her pride.
The sound of a child coughing and whining tore her from her thoughts. Without paying much attention to where she was going, she had turned off into a small side street just after the Hof Gate and wandered through narrow lanes into the Women’s Gate area, where the poorer residents lived. The air reeked of tanning solution. Acrid clouds of steam billowed from a dyer’s cottage where freshly dyed gray linen smocks hung out to dry on wooden frames. Magdalena looked around and listened. The crying was clearly coming from the workshop. As the hangman’s daughter walked by the ramshackle thatch-roofed hut, she saw a pale woman with sunken cheeks standing in the low doorway.
“You are Kuisl’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Magdalena could find nothing hostile in the way the woman looked at her, so she stopped and nodded.
“They say you’re a good midwife,” the woman continued. “You helped the dairyman’s wife in the birth of her twins, and both are still alive. And you gave a powder to the blue-dyer’s daughter, the young hussy, to get rid of the fetus…”
Magdalena looked around carefully in all directions. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said softly.
“Oh, come now.” The woman made a dismissive gesture. “In this part of town, you can speak openly. Every other woman here has gotten something from your father to keep from having a kid, or a love potion he brewed up.” She giggled, revealing a few black stumps of teeth between her dry lips. “Only the fat cats can afford the fancy physician, or those who flirt with him. But I don’t need to tell you that…”
“What do you want from me?” Magdalena asked. “I have no time for your silly talk.”
The woman’s face suddenly turned dark.
“My little Lisbeth is sick. I think she has this fever. But we don’t have any money for the doctor. Perhaps you’d like to come in and have a look.”
She gestured for Magdalena to enter and at the same time curtsied clumsily. Her scornful look had completely vanished, and all that remained was a despairing mother who feared for the life of her child.
Magdalena shrugged. “I can have a look at her, but I can’t promise anything.”
Entering the smoke-filled house, she found a kettle standing on a rusty tripod over an open fire and emitting thick, acrid steam. The smoke was so thick that it wasn’t possible to see much more of the cabin. Magdalena could make out a wobbly table, a churn of rancid butter, a stool, and a few sacks filled with straw in a corner. This was the same corner the whining was coming from. Moving closer, Magdalena caught sight of a little child on the ground, a girl perhaps ten years old, with a pale face and sunken cheeks. Rings like black half-moons circled her eyes, which flitted around anxiously. She was coughing, shaking, and spitting up red mucus. The hangman’s daughter realized at once that it was the same fever that had killed so many Schongauers in recent weeks. She bent down over the girl and stroked her hot forehead.
“Everything will be all right,” she murmured. The child’s eyes closed, and her breathing became more regular.
“Give me some hot water,” Magdalena called out over her shoulder, and the anxious dyer woman hurried away, then returned with a steaming cup. The hangman’s daughter pulled out a leather purse from a deep pocket in her skirt and shook a gray powder into the cup.
“Have her drink one swallow of this mornings and evenings for three days,” she said, “but three swallows right now. It’s arnica, evergreen, St. John’s wort, and a few herbs that you don’t know. It will help her sleep and forget the cough. That’s all I can do,” she said with a shrug.
The dyer woman clutched the cup and looked at Magdalena anxiously. “Will she recover? She’s all I have left. My husband, Josef, died last summer when tanning fumes burned his insides. He was spitting blood at the end, just like Lisbeth now.”
“Don’t you have any other children?” Magdalena asked sympathetically.
“Smallpox took every last one, and Lisbeth is the last…”
The woman’s eyes filled with tears. She pressed her lips together tightly and stared fixedly into space. The
