himself.” He turned to leave.
“Give the prisoner some warm soup and a piece of bread, by God!” he called back to the bailiff as he went down the stairs to the Ballenhaus. “After all, we are no monsters!” Behind him the door of the cell fell shut with a squeak.
Johann Lechner stopped once more on the worn steps and from this high vantage point surveyed the town’s warehouse. In spite of worm-eaten beams and peeling paint, the hall was still Schongau’s pride. Bales of wool, cloth, and the finest spices were stacked up to the ceiling in places. A scent of cloves hung in the air. Who could be interested in seeing this wealth go up in flames? If they really were soldiers, they must have been under someone’s orders. But whose? Someone in Schongau? An outsider? Maybe in fact the Augsburgers? Or could it have been the devil himself, after all? The court clerk furrowed his brow. He must have missed something, and he could not forgive himself such a thing. He was a man of perfection.
“Sir! I have been sent by Andreas, the bailiff at the jail.” Johann Lechner looked down, where a young lad in wooden clogs and a threadbare linen shirt had just come through the door. He was out of breath and his eyes sparkled.
“The bailiff Andreas?” Johann Lechner asked inquisitively. “What does he want?”
“He says the Stechlin woman is awake again, and she’s howling and whining like ten furies!” The boy was standing on the lowest step. He was not yet fourteen years old. Expectantly he looked at the court clerk. “Are you going to burn her soon, sir?”
Johann Lechner looked at him with satisfaction. “Well, we shall see,” he said as he placed a few small coins in the boy’s hand. “Just go look for the physician now, so that he may confirm the good health of the Stechlin woman.”
The boy had already run off when he called him back once more.
“But get the old physician, not the young one! Do you understand?” The boy nodded.
“The young one is a little too…” Johann Lechner hesitated, then he smiled. “Well, we all want to see the witch burning soon, don’t we?”
The boy nodded. The ardor in his eyes almost frightened Lechner.
Rhythmic knocking, as if a heavy hammer was being pounded again and again against a door, had awakened Martha Stechlin. When she opened her eyes, she noticed that the hammer was raging inside her body. A pain such as she had never experienced before ran through her right hand at regular intervals. She looked down and saw a shapeless black and blue pig’s bladder. It took her a while to realize that this bladder was in fact her hand. The hangman had done a good job with the thumbscrews. Her fingers and the back of her hand were now swollen to more than twice their normal size.
She vaguely remembered having drunk the potion Jakob Kuisl gave her. It had tasted bitter, and she could imagine what it contained. She was a midwife, after all, and familiar with drugs made of thorn apple, monkshood, or mandrake. In small doses, Martha Stechlin had often used those as painkillers during childbirth. Of course no one was supposed to know this, as those plants were widely reputed to be witches’ herbs.
The drink the hangman had given her was so strong that she could only vaguely remember the events that had followed. She had been tortured, but the court clerk, the witnesses, and also the hangman had been strangely far off, their voices sounding like fading echoes. She had not felt any pain, only a pleasant warmth in her hand. Then the blackness had come, and now finally the rhythmic pounding that had brutally fetched her back from the land beyond fear and suffering. The pain flowed into her like water into an empty vessel, filling her completely. She began to scream and to shake the bars of her cell with her undamaged hand.
“Well, you witch, can you feel the fire yet?” shouted Georg Riegg, the raftsman, from the adjoining cell. He and the guardsman from the raft landing were still imprisoned with her. Martha Stechlin’s screams were a welcome diversion.
“Why don’t you witch yourself out of here, if you can, or did the devil abandon you?” sneered Georg Riegg.
The guardsman who was locked up together with him grabbed his shoulder. “Stop, Georg,” he admonished him. “The woman is in pain. We should call the bailiff.”
But that was no longer necessary. Just as the raftsman was about to launch himself into yet another hateful tirade, Andreas the jailkeeper opened the door to the keep. The screaming had awakened him from his nap. When he saw that Martha Stechlin was rattling the bars he left in a hurry. Her sobbing and crying followed him out into the street.
Just half an hour later, the witnesses, Berchtholdt, Augustin, and Schreevogl, were informed and summoned to the jailhouse. There Johann Lechner was already waiting for them with the doctor.
Old Fronwieser was the town’s most compliant henchman, meekly assenting to anything they asked him to do. Just now he was stooping down over the midwife, winding a damp cloth around her swollen hand. The cloth was spotted and stank as if it had been used in the past to cover other bodies.
“Well?” asked the court clerk as he contemplated the sobbing midwife with as much interest as he would some rare, mutilated insect. Her cries had now become a constant wailing, like that of a child.
“A simple blood swelling, nothing more,” said Bonifaz Fronwieser, tying the cloth into a tight knot. “Of course the thumb and the middle finger are probably broken. I gave her a compress of arnica and oak bark. It’ll make the swelling go down.”
“What I want to know is whether she is ready to be interrogated,” Johann Lechner insisted.
The doctor nodded obsequiously as he packed up his bag of ointments, rusty knives, and a crucifix. “However, I’d use her other hand for continuing the torture. Otherwise there is a risk she may again lose consciousness.”
“I thank you for your pains,” said Lechner, placing a whole guilder in Bonifaz Fronwieser’s hand. “You may withdraw now. But stay within reach and we shall call you if we need you again.”
Bowing and scraping, the physician took his leave and rushed out into the street. Once outside, he shook his head. He could never understand the necessity of healing someone who had already been tortured. Once the painful interrogation had started, the poor sinners almost inevitably ended at the stake or, like shattered dolls, on the wheel. The midwife would have to die one way or the other, even if his son Simon was convinced of her innocence. At any rate, Fronwieser had at least earned some money because of her. And who knows? It was quite possible that he would be called back once more.
Contently he played with the guilder in his pocket as he headed for the market square to buy himself a hot meat pie. The treatment had whetted his appetite.
Inside the torture cellar, the witnesses and the court clerk had already taken their places on their chairs. They were waiting for the hangman to bring down the midwife and render her compliant. Johann Lechner had ordered wine, bread, and slices of cold meat prepared for all of them, because today the interrogation might last a little longer. Lechner considered Martha Stechlin to be hardheaded. Never mind, however. They had at least another two days until the Elector’s lieutenant and his entourage would make their appearance and start living at the town’s expense. By then the midwife would have confessed. Lechner was certain of that.
But the hangman had not yet arrived, and without him they couldn’t get started. Impatiently, the court clerk drummed his fingers on the tabletop.
“Kuisl has been told, hasn’t he?” he asked one of the bailiffs. The bailiff nodded in reply.
“Probably drunk again,” witness Berchtholdt piped up. But he also looked as if they had dragged him not from his bakery, but from one of the inns behind the market square. His clothing was spotted with flour and beer, his hair was ruffled up in tufts, and he smelled like an empty beer keg. He guzzled down his wine and refilled the goblet.
“Easy does it,” Jakob Schreevogl admonished him. “This isn’t a beer hall get-together but a painful interrogation.” Secretly he hoped the hangman had run away and that they therefore couldn’t proceed with the torture. Yet he knew that this was unlikely. Jakob Kuisl would lose his job, and in only a few days an executioner from Augsburg or perhaps from Steingaden would take his place here. But even a delay of a few days could be enough to find the real murderer or murderers. By now, Jakob Schreevogl was quite convinced that Martha Stechlin had been unjustly imprisoned.
The witness Georg Augustin sipped at his wine goblet and straightened out his white lace collar.
“Perhaps the hangman doesn’t realize that we don’t have unlimited time on our hands. These interrogations cost me a whole bunch of guilders each time.” He cast a bored glance at the instruments of torture as he continued to speak. “Our wagon drivers will just sit around forever in the Stern unless we keep after them. And the paperwork
