The robber chief stopped to think. “Now that you mention it…actually, no. You’re right…Three plates that had been used were around the fire, but the fourth was stashed away in one of the saddlebags along with a cup.”
Jakob Kuisl chewed on his cold pipe stem, cursing to himself because it had gone out. “That must mean that the fourth man hadn’t been with the others for a while. Perhaps he was in town.”
Hans Scheller shrugged. “Who cares where the fourth man was? Perhaps he had run away earlier.”
The hangman told him about the town clerk’s suspicion that information about the merchants’ secret routes had been leaked to someone. The robber chief nodded.
“I understand. The fourth man hangs around in town and informs his comrades about the routes. Then all they have to do is help themselves. After all, the wagons are not very well guarded, and the merchants are not afraid of anything. Not a bad plan.” He grinned, and Kuisl could see that almost all of his top teeth were missing. “Sounds like a plan I would make up.” Suddenly, he stopped. “I just thought of something.”
“What is that?”
“Alongside the leather bag that you have now, something else was lying there by the campfire-a little bottle made of blue glass. It looked quite valuable, and when we opened it, it smelled like the whole damned palace of the French kings.”
Jakob Kuisl forgot about his pipe. “Perfume, you mean?”
Scheller nodded. “Yes, exactly. It stank like a whole field of spring flowers.”
“And this perfume…” The hangman chose his words carefully. “Did it smell like…violets, perhaps?”
Scheller shrugged. “I don’t know anything about these things. We poured it over our horse. He smashed the bottle the next day in the cave, the stupid beast.”
Jakob Kuisl contemplated this a few more minutes, then turned to leave. “Thanks, Scheller. You’ve been a lot of help to me. When we meet the next time, I’ll see to it that it goes fast. I promise.”
“Kuisl.” Hans Scheller’s voice had a faraway, dreamy sound. The hangman turned around.
“What is it, Scheller?”
The robber chief seemed to be struggling for words. Finally, he began to speak. “Do you really want to know what I’ve learned, hangman?”
“Tell me.”
“I was a carpenter, a good one, down in Schwabmunchen. But then the Swedes came and raped my wife and cut her throat. They bashed my boy’s head against the door and set my house on fire. I fled into the woods, and now it all ends here.” He tried to smile. “Tell me, hangman. If you were in my shoes, what would you have done?”
Jakob Kuisl shrugged. “You always had a choice.” He walked to the door, but then turned around again. “I’m sorry about what happened to your wife and the boy. At least you’ll be together again soon.”
The door closed and Scheller remained alone with his thoughts. He would have cried like a little child if he hadn’t long since forgotten how.
Outside, the blizzard lashed Jakob Kuisl’s face with sharp pellets of ice. He pulled his hat down and forged ahead through the wall of white. His head was spinning as if the storm were also raging inside him.
Had the man with the violet perfume paid a visit to the robbers? Or was
Another day would pass before the good Lord would send someone to help Jakob Kuisl solve at least one of the riddles.
The blizzard brought new patients, so Simon hardly had a moment to even think about the Templars or the Wessobrunn Prayer during the day. He and his father had been able to save only one of the two wagoners employed by the alderman Matthias Holzhofer. The other had quietly passed away the same evening.
In other respects, too, Simon and his father never had a chance to rest. They passed the hours stirring new medicine, bleeding patients, and examining urine. Among the victims of the “Schongau Fever,” as the epidemic had come to be known, were a carpenter’s journeyman whose whole body had broken out in blue pustules, another patient whose foot was crushed by an oxcart, and a wagon driver with frostbite on both hands. The man had attempted to drive from Schongau to Landsberg in his wagon and was discovered lying in a ditch only a mile from town. He had been trying in vain to pull his wagon out of the snow when he was finally overcome by the cold. Simon and his father agreed that three fingers on the left hand would have to be amputated-a job that Bonifaz Fronwieser regarded as one of his specialties since his days as an army doctor.
Old Fronwieser had traveled around with his family during the Great War, following the Bavarian foot soldiers. He had sawed off innumerable arms and legs that were riddled with bullets, and he cauterized the stumps. It was during this time that his wife died, so after the war, Bonifaz Fronwieser settled down in Schongau with his son. He’d never forgiven his son for dropping out of an expensive medical school in Ingolstadt a few years ago, partly because he was short of money, but also because he lacked the interest. Even back then, Simon was attracted more to the latest fashions and games of dice than to Hippocrates, Paracelsus, and Galen.
His father became even more displeased when Simon started consorting with the Schongau hangman, borrowing books on medicine from him and often looking over his shoulder when he was treating patients. Simon then used what he had learned from the hangman on patients in Fronwieser’s own practice.
Simon was also critical of his father during the amputation of the wagon driver’s three fingers, an operation Bonifaz Fronwieser could do in his sleep. They had sedated the patient with a bottle of brandy and shoved a board between his teeth. When old Fronwieser picked up his surgical pincers to nip off the black stumps that had once been fingers, Simon pointed to the rusty cutting blades.
“You have to clean them first,” he whispered to his father, “or the wound will become infected.”
“Nonsense,” said Bonifaz Fronwieser. “We’ll cauterize the places afterward with boiling oil-that’s what I learned from my father, and that’s the logical way to do it.”
Simon shook his head. “The wound will become inflamed, believe me.”
Before his father could answer, he’d taken the pincers and washed them off in a pot of boiling water on the stove, and only then did he start to operate. Watching silently, his father had to admit that Simon knew what he was doing and completed the job quickly. There was no doubt that the boy was talented. Why, for heaven’s sake, had he ever dropped out of school in Ingolstadt? He could have become a great doctor, not a run-of-the-mill barber surgeon like himself, but a doctor with university training, a learned, esteemed physician whom people would respect and reimburse with silver coins-not with rusty kreuzers, eggs from the farm, and worm-infested corned beef. A Dr. Fronwieser, a first in the family…
Sullenly, the old man watched as Simon finally applied the white linen bandage. “Not bad work at all,” he grumbled, “but what are you going to do with the dirty pincers? Are you going to throw them away and buy new ones?”
Simon shook his head and smiled. “I’ll wash them off again in boiling water and use them again; that’s what the hangman does when he clips off a thief’s thumb or index finger, and nobody has died on him.” He checked the wagon driver’s breathing. “Just recently Kuisl told me about an old remedy. He smears sheep dung and mold on the wound and says there’s nothing better for inflammation. The mold…” He stopped because he could see he had gone too far. His father’s face had turned a bright red.
“Just cut it out with your damned hangman and his filthy drug collection!” Bonifaz Fronwieser shouted. “He just puts crazy ideas in your head. He should be forbidden from practicing! Sheep dung and mold-bah! I didn’t send you off to school to study that!” He walked to the other room and slammed the door behind him. Shrugging, Simon watched as his father left, then poured a bucket of water over the wagon driver’s face to wake him up.
A few more hours passed before Simon finally found time again to delve into the world of the Templars and the Wessobrunn Prayer. At six o’clock sharp, as the bells tolled, he closed the office and went down to the marketplace. When he opened the door to the Stern, where he’d arranged to meet Benedikta, he was greeted with the warmth and stuffy odor of wet clothing. At this time of day, the tavern was full of wagon drivers and merchants stranded by the storm and whiling away the time drinking and playing dice. Under the low ceiling of the taproom, about a dozen men were milling about, most of them engaged in serious, muffled conversations.
The merchant woman was sitting at a corner table in the very rear, engrossed in a parchment. As Simon
