At any rate, she’s safe for today.”
Jakob Kuisl trudged over the wooden bridge. Suddenly he turned around again.
“Oh, I almost forgot. You should just stop by at young Schreevogl’s house. He asked me to tell you that his Clara is ill. And you send Magdalena home, understand?”
Simon turned to the hangman’s daughter. She smiled.
“Father likes you.”
Simon frowned. “You really think so?”
“Sure. Otherwise he’d have cut off your family jewels long ago and thrown you in the Lech. You can’t imagine how fast.”
The physician grinned. Then he considered what it must be like to have the hangman for an enemy. He hoped that Magdalena was right.
Jakob Kuisl headed back to the prison. In the meantime it was getting dark in the streets. A single bailiff was standing in front of the keep. They had left him there and ordered him to keep watch while all the others ran down to the raft landing. Since then a few of them had reappeared with Georg Riegg and the watchman at the bridge, had locked up the two of them without further comment, and had returned to the river again.
The young man looked worried. He seemed to be the only person in the town who didn’t know what had happened. And now the hangman had come back alone. Where were the others? The court clerk? The witnesses?
“That’s enough for today,” growled Kuisl and pushed the bailiff aside. “Time to leave. Just have to put the things away. Did you lock up the Stechlin woman again?”
The bailiff nodded. He was barely eighteen years old, his face deeply marked with smallpox. Finally he could no longer restrain his curiosity. “What’s been happening down there?” he asked.
“The Stadel burned down,” said Kuisl. “Want to go and look?”
The bailiff looked uncertainly behind him into the entrance of the keep. The hangman clapped him on the shoulder.
“The witch won’t run away, I’ll take care of that. And now off you go.”
The youth nodded thankfully, then handed the keys over to Kuisl. A few seconds later he disappeared behind the corner of the house next door.
Jakob Kuisl entered the interior of the keep. Immediately the chill of the stone walls enveloped him. A musty smell of urine and damp straw lay in the air. In the left-hand cell sat Georg Riegg and the bridge watchman. They had locked up the Augsburg wagon driver in the small but more comfortable room in the Ballenhaus, so as not to further provoke the powerful neighboring city.
The Schongauers seemed to have temporarily accepted their situation. Each had withdrawn into a corner of the cell and was dozing. When the raftsman saw the hangman, he jumped up and shook the bars of the grill.
“Kuisl, look here! They’ve locked us up with the witch. Do something, before she casts a spell on us,” he shouted.
“Shut your mouth.”
The hangman did not look at him and went on to the neighboring cell.
The bailiff had locked up Martha Stechlin again, but mercifully he returned her clothing to her. She had crept into a corner and covered her shorn head with both hands. As Kuisl approached the bars of the grille, a rat whisked between his feet.
“Martha, this is important,” he said. “Look at me.”
The midwife blinked at him.
“I need the names of the children,” he whispered.
“Which names?”
The hangman put his finger to his lips and nodded toward the other cell. Then he continued whispering.
“The names of the children who were with you the night before the murder. Every single one. If we are going to get you out of here, I must know what happened.”
Martha Stechlin told him the names. There were five. All except Peter Grimmer were orphans. Two of them were no longer alive.
Lost in thought, Jakob Kuisl drummed his fingers against the iron bars. These children must have some secret. He kicked out at another rat, slamming it into a corner, where it squealed and died.
“See you tomorrow, Martha,” he said, this time aloud. “Tomorrow it may hurt a bit, but you must be strong.”
“Ha, she’ll scream, the witch! And we’ll be right near, all right,” Georg Riegg shouted at them. The wagon driver shook the iron bars again. At the same time he kicked the dozing watchman, who sat up suddenly and looked at him, shocked.
“You be quiet, Riegg,” the watchman whispered. “Just be happy that they’re not going to torture us.”
The hangman went out into the night. But at the next corner he stopped and stood as if rooted to the ground.
From the market square a crowd with torches was coming toward him.
When Simon Fronwieser reached the Schreevogls’ house to look at the sick child, he saw at once that something was not right. In front of the door a dozen people had assembled. A few had lit lanterns in the gathering darkness. The flickering light threw unnaturally big shadows on the walls of the houses, and the faces of the curious were bathed in a dull red light. People whispered, again and again fingers were pointed up at the second floor. Simon heard someone say: “He flew out of the window and took her with him. The devil incarnate, as true as I stand here!” Another uttered curses against Martha Stechlin and wanted to see her burn that very day.
Directly above the physician the shutters of a window stood wide open. The right shutter swung crookedly on its lower hinge, as if a heavy man had held fast to it. Splinters of glass were scattered on the street. From the upper rooms a woman could be heard sobbing. At that moment she uttered such a shrill cry of grief that Simon thought the other glass panes would be shattered as well.
The physician made his way through the crowd and began to climb the broad, thickly carpeted stairs up to the second floor. The crying came out of the room on the left. A maid and another servant, pale as death, were standing in front of the door. The maid was mumbling prayers and fingering a rosary. Simon examined the damaged door. The thin wood in the middle had been broken out and the splinters lay on the carpet. Through the chest-high hole Simon could see Maria Schreevogl lying on her stomach in the bed, her fingers clutching the comforter, her head buried in the pillows. Jakob Schreevogl sat alongside her on the edge of the bed and stroked his wife’s hair, talking softly to her and trying to calm her. Two chairs in the room had been upset; a picture of the Holy Virgin lay on the floor, the frame shattered. Right across her peacefully smiling face was the impression of a boot.
When Jakob Schreevogl saw the physician standing at the splintered door, he nodded to him and asked him to come in.
“If you’ve come to see our sick Clara, you’ve come too late,” whispered Schreevogl. Simon saw that he, too, had been weeping. The face of the young alderman was even paler than usual. The arched, rather oversize nose stuck out under eyes red with tears, his otherwise carefully arranged hair looked unkempt and fell over his forehead.
“What’s happened?” Simon asked.
Maria Schreevogl began to scream again: “The devil has taken her! He flew into the room and took our little Clara…” The rest was drowned in sobs.
Jakob Schreevogl shook his head.
“We don’t know exactly what happened,” he said. “Someone must have…kidnapped her. He opened the street door, although it was locked, then he kicked down the upper door, seized our little Clara, and obviously jumped out of the window with her.”
“Out of the window?” Simon frowned. He went over to the window and looked down. Directly beneath him stood a hay wagon.
The physician nodded. With a bold jump it would be possible to get down without breaking all one’s bones.
“Someone down on the street said that he or it flew away with little Clara,” Simon said, looking down at the crowd below. He could hear angry sounds like the buzzing of bees coming from the crowd down below. “Are there any eyewitnesses?”
