The monk smiled, then opened the door and disappeared. There was a grating sound as a key turned in the lock, then footsteps that became fainter until they finally faded away.
The hangman’s daughter remained behind with the angels, the evangelists, and a savior. Two women knelt at the foot of his cross and wept.
Simon looked into the rigid eyes of the man laid out on the bed in front of him and put down his doctor’s bag. The medicus didn’t have to listen to his heart, feel his pulse, or put a mirror under his nostrils anymore. He knew the man was dead. Gently, he closed the old man’s eyes, then turned to the deceased’s wife, who stood alongside, whimpering.
“I’ve come too late,” Simon said. “Your husband is already in a better place.”
The farm woman nodded, looking intently at her husband as if her gaze alone could bring him back to life. Simon guessed she was in her mid-forties, but the hard work in the fields, the yearly births, and the bad food made her look older. Her hair was gray and unkempt, and deep wrinkles had formed in the corners of her mouth and eyes. A few rotting, yellow stumps of teeth could be seen behind her cracked lips. Simon wondered if Magdalena would look like this in twenty years.
Simon had been up all night thinking about the hangman’s daughter. How was she doing in Augsburg? Her father had received no news from her yet, though he expected her return at any moment. But because of the blizzard, it was quite possible she’d be further delayed. No doubt she was waiting to join a group of merchants who awaited better weather-and an end to the attacks.
A child’s cry startled Simon out of his thoughts. A girl about four years of age was fondling the face of her dead father, and at the back of the room, six more of the farmer’s children were standing about with lowered heads. Two of them were coughing loudly; the medicus hoped they hadn’t caught the fever, too.
In the last two weeks, over thirty people had died in Schongau from the mysterious illness, most of them the elderly or children. Along the city wall, St. Sebastian’s Cemetery was filling up, and a number of the old graves holding victims of the plague were now being turned over to make room for the new arrivals. Simon and his father had tried everything. They had bled their patients, given them enemas, brewed them a drink of linden blossoms and wild marjoram. Bonifaz Fronwieser had even leafed through the pages of the so-called
“Faith, it’s faith that helps,” his father called after him.
“Faith! Is that the best we can do?”
The very thought of what his father was doing made Simon curse under his breath. Mouse droppings and dried toads! Next they’d be painting pentagrams and magic signs on the doors of the sick. If only he had some of that Jesuit’s powder! The physician was sure this medicine, acquired from the bark of a tree in the West Indies, would quickly reduce the fever. Simon had long ago used his last bit of it, however, and the next Venetian merchant would not be heading their way until the mountain passes were open again.
Once more, he turned to the farm woman and her coughing children. “It’s important now that you bury your husband as soon as possible,” said Simon. “He could be carrying something that will infect you and the children as well.”
“A…spirit?” the farm woman asked anxiously.
The physician shook his head in resignation. “No, not a spirit. Think of them as tiny creatures that-”
“Tiny creatures?” The woman’s face became even paler. “In my Alois?”
Simon sighed. “Just forget about that and bury him.”
“But the ground is frozen, and we’ll have to wait until-”
There was a knock at the door. Simon turned around to see a dirty little boy in the doorway, looking up at him with a mixture of fear and respect.
“Are you the Schongau physician?” he asked finally. Simon nodded. Secretly, he was happy to be addressed this way, because most residents still regarded him as nothing more than the coddled son of the local doctor, a dandy and a womanizer who had run out of money at the university in Ingolstadt.
“The…the Schreevogls have sent me,” the boy said.
“I’m supposed to tell you that Clara is coughing up snot and mucus. And please, can you stop by as soon as possible?”
Simon closed his eyes in a silent prayer. “Not Clara,” he murmured. “God, not Clara.”
He grabbed his doctor’s bag and, after exchanging a few more words with the farmer’s family, rushed off after the boy. On the way to the marketplace where the Schreevogls lived, Simon couldn’t help thinking of Clara. So much had happened in the last few days that he’d completely forgotten her! Usually, he stopped to pay a visit to his little friend several times a week. And now she was sick; perhaps she even had this terrible fever!
Maria Schreevogl was waiting for him by the front door. As so often, she appeared pale and agitated. Simon never understood what the patrician saw in the overly pious, sometimes hysterical woman. He assumed there were financial considerations involved in the marriage. Maria Schreevogl’s maiden name was Puchner, and she came from an old influential family with political connections.
“She’s in bed up in her room!” the woman lamented. “Please Mary, Mother of God and all saints, don’t let it be this fever! Don’t let this happen to my Clara!”
Simon hurried up the wide staircase and entered the room of the sick girl. Clara lay in her bed coughing, her pale face peeking out from a thick comforter.
Her stepfather, Jakob Schreevogl, sat anxiously at the edge of the bed. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Fronwieser,” he said, standing up. “Would you like something to drink-perhaps some coffee?”
Simon shook his head, noticing with concern that the patrician peered back at him with vacant eyes. The councillor looked like he was in a trance. Just the evening before, he’d returned with the hangman from their trip with Karl Semer, and clearly, he was severely shaken by the news of his daughter’s sickness.
Simon bent down to look at Clara. “Clara, it’s me, Simon,” he whispered, but Clara didn’t react. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing fast. In her sleep her whole body shook from time to time with a coughing fit. The physician placed an ear to her chest and listened to her breathing.
“How long has she been this way?” Simon asked, trying to speak over the crying and wailing of Schreevogl’s wife, who had followed him into the room, anxiously passing rosary beads through her fingers.
“Just since yesterday,” Jakob Schreevogl replied. “The fever came on in the evening, very quickly. Since then we haven’t been able to talk to her. Good Lord, woman, be quiet for a moment!”
The praying stopped. “Does she have the fever, Simon?” Maria Schreevogl asked through tears. “You can tell me! Oh, good Lord, does she have it?” She stared at the medicus wide-eyed.
Simon hesitated. The sudden onslaught of the illness, the rasping cough, the high fever-everything pointed to Clara’s having been infected. Once more the medicus cursed himself for not having been able to ask Magdalena to pick up some medications for him in Augsburg. Perhaps the apothecaries there even had the Jesuit’s powder! But now it was too late.
When Simon remained silent, that was sign enough for the patrician woman.
“St. Barbara, I will lose her!” she moaned. “St. Quirinus, help us!” She fell to her knees, fingering her rosary beads again.
Her husband tried to ignore her and turned to address Simon in a serious voice. “What can we do?”
Simon struggled to look him in the eye. “I’ll be honest with you, Schreevogl,” he said. “I can make a compress for her and a cup of tea, but that’s about all. Beyond that all we can do is wait and pray.”
“Saint Primus, Saint Felicianus, be with us in our hour of need and sickness!” Maria Schreevogl’s voice turned shrill as she placed a chain of sacred amulets around Clara’s neck.
“That will never cure her, woman,” said Jakob. “Better to make her a cup of linden blossom tea. I think the cook still has some in the kitchen.”
Maria hurried out the door wailing, and Simon bent down again over Clara.
“I’ll put a salve on her chest,” he said. “One of the hangman’s recipes-calamint, rosemary, and goose fat. That will at least alleviate the cough.”
He opened Clara’s shirt and began applying the salve, leaving the chain with the saint’s images in place-it couldn’t hurt, in any case.
As he rubbed the salve on, his gaze fell on the individual figures pictured on the chain’s silver coins, each
