Cursing loudly, she stomped back into the midwife’s house, where Stechlin now sat at the large table holding a damp cloth to her scalded face. Magdalena was relieved to see that apart from a few red blotches on her skin, no real damage had been done. The midwife’s eyes had thankfully escaped injury, but the broken glass and the green puddle on the floor showed the stones had shattered more than just a flask and a few phials. Magdalena felt as if a stone had struck her straight in the heart.
Only now did she break down, leaning on the midwife and sobbing, as wave after wave of grief and pain surged through her body. Stechlin whispered softly to her, stroking the young girl’s hair as if she were a child. Finally the midwife whispered, “They will never accept us; it’s like a law of nature, like budding, blooming, and dying. You must try to live with this.”
Magdalena rose. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, but her gaze was firm and unyielding. “To hell with the laws,” she whispered. “I’ll never accept them-never. I’ll do what suits me, now more than ever!”
Stechlin moved away a bit and cast a furtive glance at Magdalena. There was no doubt about it-the girl really was the Schongau hangman’s daughter.
A few hours later Magdalena’s anger had subsided a bit. She and her mother were busy getting the twins ready for bed, a job that always occupied her so completely she had no time left for gloomy thoughts.
“Just one more story, Magda,” little Barbara pleaded. “Just one more! Tell us the one about the queen and the house in the forest! You haven’t told us that one for a long time!”
Magdalena laughed and carried her nine-year-old sister up the narrow stairs to the bedroom. Her back ached under the weight of the squirming child. The twins had grown an astonishing amount in the last year, and soon she wouldn’t be able to lift Barbara anymore. Clearly they took after their father.
“Oh, no, it’s time to go to bed,” Magdalena said with feigned severity as she put her little sister in bed, covered her up, and blew out a smoking pine chip standing on a stool in the corner. “Look, your brother’s eyes are already closed.”
She pointed at Georg, Barbara’s twin brother, who in fact seemed to be asleep in his narrow little bed.
“Then at least sing something for me,” Barbara pleaded, trying hard not to yawn.
With a sigh, Magdalena began to sing a soft lullaby. Her little sister closed her eyes, and soon her breathing was regular and calm and she seemed to drift off to sleep.
The hangman’s daughter looked down at Barbara, stroking her cheek tenderly. She loved her younger brother and sister, even if they sometimes got on her nerves. To Georg and Barbara their father was a growling bear who fought off bad men but was loving and tender with them, his own children. It almost made Magdalena a bit jealous that the hangman seemed to develop a kindlier attitude as he grew older. When she’d misbehaved as a little girl, she’d received a good spanking, but with the twins, her father usually just growled his displeasure-which didn’t necessarily achieve the desired effect.
Magdalena was thinking about her father in faraway Regensburg when she heard footsteps behind her. Her mother smiled as she entered the room.
Anna-Maria Kuisl had the same long, black locks as her daughter, the same bushy eyebrows, and the same temper, as well. Jakob Kuisl had often complained he was married to two women, both of whom had a tendency to flare up. When they both were angry with him, he would often go and brood over the medical books that he kept in his pharmaceutical closet.
“Well?” Anna-Maria asked softly. “Are the children finally asleep?”
Magdalena nodded and stood up from the bed, exhausted. “A dozen stories and certainly a hundred rounds of bouncing up and down on my knees playing horsie! That should be enough.”
“You spoil them too much.” The hangman’s wife shook her head. “Just like your father. He was like that with his little sister.”
“Lisbeth?” Magdalena asked. “Did you know her well?”
Anna-Maria bit her lip, and Magdalena sensed that her mother really didn’t want to talk about Magdalena’s aunt, certainly not on such a beautiful summer evening. Just the same, she persisted with her question until her mother was finally persuaded to tell the story.
“After Lisbeth and Jakob’s mother died, she lived here in the house with us,” Anna-Maria said. “She was so young-almost a child-but then this owner of a bathhouse came along and took her back to Regensburg with him. Your father cursed and scolded, but what could he do? She didn’t care a whit what her big brother thought-she was just as stubborn as he was. She just packed up her things and left. For Regensburg, of course…”
She stared blankly into space for a while, as if some macabre image had arisen from the past like a monster emerging from a dark abyss. She remained silent for a long while.
“Why?” Magdalena finally asked, breaking the silence.
Anna-Maria merely shrugged. “Love, perhaps? But to tell you the truth, I think she just couldn’t stand it here anymore. The constant whispering, the evil glances, how people would make the sign of the cross whenever she passed by.” She sighed. “You know yourself it takes a thick hide to be a hangman’s daughter and stay in a place like this.”
“Or maybe just stupidity,” Magdalena said softly.
“What did you say?”
Magdalena shook her head. “Nothing, Mama.” She sat down on a stool in the corner and looked at her mother in the moonlight that fell through the open shutters.
“You never told me how you met Papa for the first time,” she said finally. “I know so little about you. Where did you grow up? Who are my grandparents? You must have had a life before Father came along.”
In fact, her mother had always kept silent about her past. Father, too, never spoke about his time as a mercenary. Magdalena could vaguely remember Mother crying a lot, and in her mind’s eye Magdalena could still see her father rocking her mother gently in his arms to console her. But this was a very distant memory, and in listening to her parents speak, it almost seemed as if their life hadn’t begun until Magdalena was born. Everything before that was darkness.
Anna-Maria turned away and glanced out the window and across the river. Suddenly she looked very old.
“Much has happened since I was a child,” she said. “Much that I don’t want to be reminded of.”
“But why?”
“Let’s leave it at that, child. We’ll save the rest for another day, perhaps when your father returns from Regensburg. I don’t have a good feeling about this trip.” She shook her head. “I dreamed of him just last night, and it wasn’t a nice dream but a bloody one.”
Anna-Maria stopped speaking and laughed. But it sounded like a tormented laugh.
“I’m already behaving like a silly old woman,” she said finally. “It must have something to do with that accursed Regensburg. Believe me, a curse lies over this region, a bloody curse…”
“A curse?” Magdalena frowned. “What do you mean by that?”
Her mother sighed. “As a child I went to Regensburg often. I went to the market there with your grandmother, as we lived not far from the city. Whenever we passed by the city hall, Grandma said that the noblemen inside were plotting wars.” She closed her eyes briefly, then continued in a soft voice. “It made no difference whether it was against the Turks or the Swedes; it was always the little people on the anvil who had to suffer the blows. Why did your father have to go to Regensburg, of all places?”
“But the war ended long ago,” Magdalena interrupted with a laugh. “You’re seeing ghosts!”
“The war may be over, but the scars remain.”
Magdalena didn’t get to ask her mother what she meant, because at that moment they heard footsteps and whispers in front of the house.
And in the next moment chaos broke out.
Simon washed the sweat from his face at a little washbasin in the consulting room, then buttoned his jacket and stepped warily out of the house.
All day the young medicus had been treating consumptive farmers, feverish children, and old women covered in boils. Since the hangman had been away, over a week now, more patients than ever had visited the Fronwieser house in the Hennengasse. Simon’s father had retired upstairs to his room with a terrible hangover and needed treatment himself. Simon had his hands full. Only now, after sundown, did he find the time to visit Magdalena down in the Tanners’ Quarter. He needed to speak with her, alone, to discuss Michael Berchtholdt’s threats. Just the day before he’d agreed with Magdalena that she should enter an official complaint against the master baker, but in the
