The Hangman's Daughter

voice only as a distant murmur.

“…that thou shalt turn to God with all thy heart and thus obtain a blessed and peaceful death…”

His father poked him in the side.

“You’ve got to hold her for me,” he whispered as softly as possible so as not to interrupt the reading.

“What?”

“You’ve got to hold her shoulders and her head up, so that I hit the mark. Just take a look at Lisl—she’s just going to tip over otherwise.”

And in fact, the woman’s body was slowly sagging forward. Jakob was confused. It had been his understanding that he was merely to watch the execution. His father had never mentioned helping. But now there was no time for hesitation. Jakob grabbed Elisabeth Clement’s stubbly hair and pulled her head upward. She whimpered. The hangman’s son felt his fingers damp with sweat. He held his arm out to make room for his father’s sword. The trick was to strike precisely between two of the cervical vertebrae with a single blow of the sword dealt with both hands. Just a twinkling of an eye, a breath of air, and the matter would be over and done with. Over and done with, that is, if the job was done properly.

“May God have mercy on your soul…”

The town crier was finished. He produced a thin, black wooden rod, held it over Elisabeth Clement, and snapped it in two. The sharp sound of the breaking wood was audible all over the meadow.

The Elector’s secretary nodded to Johannes Kuisl. The hangman lifted his sword and took a swing.

At this very moment Jakob felt how the girl’s hair slipped from his sweaty fingers. Just a moment before he had been holding up Elisabeth Clement’s head, but now she fell forward like a sack of flour. He saw his father’s sword whiz by, but instead of striking her neck it hit her head at about ear level. Elisabeth Clement writhed about on the platform, screaming like an animal impaled on a stake, and there was a deep gash in her temple. In a pool of blood Jakob glimpsed part of an ear.

Her blindfold had fallen off and, her eyes wide with fear, she looked up at the executioner, who stood over her with raised sword. The crowd groaned in unison and Jakob felt a gagging sensation in his throat.

His father pushed him aside and swung again with the sword, but Elisabeth Clement rolled to the side when she saw the sword coming down. This time the blade struck her shoulder and cut deep into the nape of her neck. Blood spurted from the wound and splattered the hangman, his helper, and the horrified Franciscan.

On all fours, Elisabeth Clement crawled to the edge of the platform. Most Schongauers gazed at the spectacle in horror, but others shouted their disapproval and began pelting the hangman with rocks. People didn’t like to see the man bungling the job.

Johannes Kuisl wanted to put an end to that. He stepped up to the groaning woman and took yet another swing. This time he struck her right between the third and fourth vertebrae, and the groaning stopped at once. But her head wouldn’t come off—it was still connected by tendons and flesh, and it took a fourth blow to sever it from the body.

It rolled over the wooden planks and came to rest right in front of Jakob. He started to faint; his stomach churned, then he dropped to his knees and threw up the watery beer and oatmeal he’d had for breakfast that morning. He retched and retched until nothing would come but green bile. As through a veil he heard the screaming of the people, the railing of the aldermen and his father’s heavy panting next to him.

Sleep, baby, sleep…

Just before he mercifully blacked out, Jakob Kuisl made a decision. Never would he follow in his father’s footsteps; never in his life would he become a hangman.

Then he dropped headlong into the pool of blood.

CHAPTER

1

SCHONGAU,

THE MORNING OF APRIL 24, A.D. 1659

THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER

MAGDALENA KUISL WAS SITTING ON A WOODEN bench in front of the small, squat hangman’s house, pressing the heavy bronze mortar tightly between her thighs. Pounding steadily, she crushed the dried thyme, club moss, and mountain lovage into a fine green powder, breathing in the heady fragrance that offered a foretaste of the summer to come. The sun shone in her deeply tanned face, causing her to blink as pearls of sweat rolled down her brow. It was the first really warm day this year.

Her little brother and sister, the twins Georg and Barbara, six years old, were playing in the yard, running between the elder bushes that were just beginning to bud. Again and again, the children squealed with delight when the long branches brushed over their faces like fingers. Magdalena couldn’t help smiling. She remembered how, just a few years ago, her father had chased her through the bushes. She pictured his massive frame as he ran after her, raising his huge hands and with a big bear’s threatening growl. Her father had been a wonderful playmate. She had never understood why people would cross to the other side of the street when they met in town or murmur a prayer as he approached. Only later, when she was seven or eight, had she seen how her father didn’t just play with his huge hands. They were on Hangman’s Hill, where Jakob Kuisl had drawn the hemp noose around the neck of a thief and pulled tight.

Nevertheless, Magdalena was proud of her family. Her great-grandfather Jorg Abriel and her grandfather Johannes Kuisl had been hangmen. Magdalena’s father Jakob had been apprenticed to Granddad just as her little brother, Georg, would someday be apprenticed to their own father. Once, when she was still a child, her mother had told her at bedtime that Father had not always been a hangman. He had marched off to the Great War and only later felt the call to return to Schongau. When little Magdalena asked what he had done in the war and why he would rather cut people’s heads off than put on his armor and take up his shining sword and march off to foreign lands, her mother simply fell silent and put her finger to her lips.

After she had finished grinding the herbs, Magdalena emptied the green powder into an earthenware container, which she carefully closed. After it had boiled down to a thick broth, the fragrant mixture would help women resume their interrupted menstruation—a well-known remedy used to prevent an unwanted birth. Thyme and club moss grew in every other garden, but only her father knew where to find the much rarer mountain lovage. Even the midwives from the surrounding villages came to get their powder from him. He called it “Our Lady’s Powder” and thus earned one or two extra pennies.

Magdalena pushed a lock from her face. It kept falling back. She had her father’s unruly hair. Thick eyebrows arched above black, glowing eyes, which seemed continually to blink. At age twenty, she was the hangman’s oldest child. Her mother had given birth to two stillborn babies after her, and then to three infants that were so weak they didn’t live to see their first birthday. Then the twins had come, finally. They were two noisy rascals and her father’s pride and joy. Sometimes Magdalena felt something like pangs of jealousy. Georg was his father’s only son and would one day be apprenticed in the hangman’s trade. Barbara was still a little girl, dreaming of all the things possible in this world. Magdalena, however, was the “Hangman’s Wench,” the “Bloody Maiden,” whom nobody could touch and who was the object of gossip and laughter behind her back. She heaved a sigh. Her life seemed to be already prescribed. She’d marry a hangman from another town, as executioners’ families always stuck together. And yet there were a few young men in town whom she fancied. Especially one…

“When you’re done with Our Lady’s Powder, go in and do the laundry. It won’t wash itself, you know!”

Her mother’s voice awakened Magdalena from her reveries. Anna Maria Kuisl looked at her daughter with disapproval. Her hands were covered with dirt from yard work and she mopped her brow before she continued.

“Dreaming of the boys again, I can tell by the looks of you,” she said. “Get your mind off the boys. There’s