The Beggar King

“As guilty as our Savior,” Kuisl replied.

“Do not blaspheme our Lord,” the young Bavarian replied. “You will just make everything worse.”

“We have evidence, Kuisl,” said the old man with the rasping voice. “We found the will. You had poison in your possession. For the last time, confess!”

“Good heavens, those were medicines!” Kuisl swore. “My sister was deathly ill. I came to visit her to try to cure her, nothing more. This is a damned setup, don’t you see that?”

“A setup?” asked the Bavarian, amused. “Now who do you think would have wanted to set you up?”

“I don’t know myself,” Kuisl muttered. “But when I find out, I’ll-”

“Lies, nothing but lies,” the old man interrupted. “This is pointless; we’ll have to torture the suspect. Teuber, put the spiketooth roller under him.”

The Regensburg executioner lifted Kuisl’s upper body until his back arched like a bridge, then inserted a roller covered in thin spikes between the rack and his body. When the executioner let go of him, Kuisl’s back dropped onto the roller and the iron spikes bore deeply into his flesh. Kuisl clenched his jaw but didn’t utter a sound.

“Now turn the wheel,” the Bavarian ordered.

Teuber moved to the head of the rack and began turning a crank so that Kuisl’s arms and legs were stretched in opposite directions. Bones cracked, beads of sweat appeared on Kuisl’s brow, but still he remained silent.

Then a third voice sounded behind the lattice, quiet and throaty, of indeterminate age, but as sharp as a saw.

“Jakob Kuisl of Schongau,” the man whispered. “Can you hear me?”

Kuisl shuddered. His back arched upward as if a fire had been lit beneath him. He knew this voice from his distant past. It had sought him out in the dungeon, and now it was here to torment him like something out of a nightmare.

How is this possible?

“Dear little hangman,” the voice whispered. “I know you’re a stubborn old bastard, but believe me when I tell you that we’ll cause you more pain than you could ever imagine. And if you don’t confess today, then you will tomorrow or the day after. We have time, plenty of it.”

Kuisl pulled against the ropes with such force that the blood- and soot-stained rack nearly toppled.

“Go to hell, damn it!” he screamed. “Whoever you are, go back to where you came from!”

The guards seized their halberds, and the little surgeon jumped up anxiously from the bench.

“Shall I bleed him a bit so he’ll calm down?” Elsperger muttered. “With loss of blood, they tire quickly.” But the Schongau hangman’s furious shouts drowned him out.

Teuber took firm hold of Kuisl’s hands and bent down close over him. “Damn it, what’s the matter with you, Kuisl?” he whispered. “This is just the beginning. You’re only going to make everything much, much worse.”

Kuisl tried hard to breathe evenly.

Got to calm down… Have to find out who is behind the grille.

Again the third voice spoke.

“Teuber, it’s time to show this monster how serious we are,” the unknown man whispered with an enjoyment audible to Kuisl alone. “He who refuses to hear shall feel. Put the blue fire to him.”

Kuisl turned his head in despair, but Teuber was already outside his field of vision. Nearby he heard a sound he knew only too well: a long, drawn-out hiss and sizzle, like the sound of fat being dropped into a hot pan. Then the infernal odor of sulfur wafted through the torture chamber.

Kuisl clenched his jaw. No matter what happened, they wouldn’t hear him scream.

Magdalena was stirring an ointment of butter, arnica, resin, and chamomile in a wooden crucible. The pleasant aroma more or less distracted her from the stench that permeated the space around her.

Since the early-morning hours, more and more beggars had been arriving at the underground hall with their various ailments. The hangman’s daughter would have guessed there were almost two dozen now, but the exact number was hard to determine given the vault’s irregular shape and the dim torchlight. The beggars lay, crouched, and leaned in corners and tiny niches. They came with scabies; open sores on their legs; hacking coughs; and sudor anglicus, English sweating sickness; and whatever their ailment, all wanted to be treated by Simon and Magdalena. By now it was almost noontime.

They had just finished treating an especially difficult case. The left leg of old Mathis was covered with festering wounds, some of them already infested with maggots.

“When the principessa finishes preparing her ointment, it would be nice if she could help me clean out these wounds,” the young medicus said, glancing up from his work to Magdalena. “Of course, only if she doesn’t find it beneath her dignity.”

The hangman’s daughter sighed softly. Simon was still out of sorts because she’d spent the prior evening with Silvio. A dozen times she reassured him she hadn’t enjoyed herself at the ball at all, and that her curiosity had nearly cost her her life in the Venetian’s garden. Still, Simon was in a huff. And though she could understand that somewhat at first, his fussing had begun to get on her nerves-mainly because she’d scarcely slept that night. At least the beggars had brought her her travel bag from the Whale; she’d put on a halfway clean dress, and in her linen skirt and gray bodice she felt once more like the simple daughter of the Schongau hangman. Yet none of that prevented Simon from treating her as if she’d just spent a fabulous and decadent night at a glittering ball.

“You can take your principessa and shove it,” she snapped angrily. “And going forward, you can spare me your whining.”

Sullenly, Magdalena took the salve to Simon and, with some tweezers, helped to pluck maggots from the leg of a snoring man she’d plied beforehand with a generous portion of brandy. Simon used a tattered cloth as a curtain to block off a niche that served as their examination room. He arranged some planks as a bed, as well as a wobbly chair and a table on which he laid out his few medical instruments and books.

“It’s only because I worry,” Simon whispered after a while, still cleaning the wound. “It’s not a good idea for you to be gadding about Regensburg by yourself. You see what can happen when you get involved with a runty provincial aristocrat like him.”

“Oh, I see, but you, sir, can march straight into a band of revolutionaries and listen to a raftmaster spout off all sorts of foolishness. That’s a good idea?”

“At least now we know why this trap was set for your father,” Simon replied.

Magdalena frowned. Simon had told her about his experience the night before with the freemen on Wohrd Island. Nevertheless, she remained skeptical. There were just too many unanswered questions.

“I’m not sure I really understand it all,” she said, laying the tweezers aside. “This freeman Gessner believes the Regensburg patricians lured my father here with some letter from his sister, forged a will, and then posted guards at the scene of the crime. All that just so they could frame him for murder? Why should they do that? They could just as well have framed some random person. These things happen in every big city. They didn’t have to drag my father all the way from Schongau just for that.”

Simon set a bowl of dirty water down on the table and began to bandage the beggar’s leg with scraps of halfway clean cloth. “You’re right; it’s a roundabout way of doing it,” he said. “But this way no one asked any questions. The patricians wanted to eliminate one of the freemen’s leaders without arousing suspicion. They clearly succeeded in that.”

“That just sounds too simple,” Magdalena mumbled. “There’s a catch here somewhere. Why, for instance, was the bathhouse under surveillance until just last night? Something important must have been inside.”

“Hofmann’s pharmacy looked like it had been hit by a tornado,” Simon replied. He sat down on a stool, rubbed the sweat from his forehead, and tried to think. “Certainly someone was looking for something in there-”

“Perhaps there was some piece of evidence they wanted to destroy,” Magdalena interrupted, “something that would have revealed the real reason for the murder. And now…”

“And now this someone thinks we know, too!” Simon continued excitedly. “They think we found something in the bathhouse that could implicate them.” He sprang up from his stool. “That just might be it!”

“That would also explain the strange hooded man who tried to kill me twice yesterday,” Magdalena said. “Once in the coffeehouse and later in Silvio’s garden. The Mamminger fellow who spoke with the stranger is the Regensburg city treasurer, a patrician! I bet Mamminger hired him as an assassin to silence us both.”

Simon nodded. “I’m certain this is the same man who locked us in the bathhouse basement and nearly burned us alive. As fast as possible we’re going to have to-”

Magdalena put a finger to his lips. Without a word, she pointed to the curtain, then pulled it aside in a single