“That’s not half as much fun,” Johannes said, trying to grin despite the pain.
In the meantime Magdalena handed Simon clean water, cloths, and bandages, always keeping an eye on the ragged bunch crowded behind the dirty sick-bay curtain. By now she’d come to know some of the beggars: the crippled and sick, the disbanded mercenaries, stranded pilgrims, cast-off wives, prostitutes, and abandoned orphans-a motley mix of outcasts just like Magdalena. Looking over their faces, she felt a strange bond with them all.
The previous night she and Simon had gone for a walk through the winding subterranean passageways, counting almost forty cellars all connected to one another. Many were empty, but the beggars had stashed food and furnishings in some. Musty drapes and trunks, even a child’s toy here and there, all suggested whole families called these damp, dark vaults home. Beneath some of the cellars Simon and Magdalena came upon even deeper cellars by way of staircases or narrow, winding corridors. Here they found Latin inscriptions on the walls, and tucked away in one corner they even discovered a small bronze pagan statue. Were these the remains of an even older Roman settlement predating the Jewish ghetto above?
Here, deep in the bowels of the city, far from the beggars, they found themselves alone together for the first time in a long while. They made love in the dim, sooty glow of a lantern and promised each other not to give up. Magdalena still believed they could save her father. What might come next, though, she refused to consider now. Would she return with Simon to Schongau, where she could expect nothing but mockery and shame? Where Alderman Berchtholdt and his cronies would make their life hell? And where they could never expect to build a life together?
In spite of it all, Magdalena missed her mother and the twins desperately. Perhaps the little ones were ill or her mother was spending sleepless nights worrying over the disappearance not only of her husband but of her eldest daughter as well. Wasn’t it Magdalena’s duty to return to report her father’s fate?
A sharp cry brought her back to the present, where Simon had just finished sewing up Johannes’s wound and given the beggar a friendly slap.
“That’s it!” he said, helping the beggar back to his feet. “As I said, no tricks for the next few weeks. And lots of wine; you’ve got to get your strength back.”
Despite his pain, Johannes forced a smile. “Now that’s a medicine to my liking. Is there an illness for which peach brandy is the cure?”
Smiling, Magdalena packed the bandages and salves into a leather bag. She found it hard to imagine she’d ever feared the beggars. For a while now they’d felt to her like one big family.
At that moment she remembered the letter from her father that the hangman’s son had given her. She hadn’t even gotten around to opening it! So once she’d helped Simon wipe the bloodstains from the sickbed, she retired to a quieter niche and with trembling fingers unfolded the crumpled piece of paper. What did her father have to tell her? Had he found a way to escape?
Looking down at the letter, she stopped short. The faded note consisted of a single line:
GREETINGS FROM WEIDENFELD…
Magdalena held the paper close enough to the candle that its edges slowly started to curl, but there was nothing else legible in the note.
GREETINGS FROM WEIDENFELD…
Was her father trying to tell her something that no one else was supposed to know? Was this a secret clue, something only she was meant to understand?
Then Magdalena realized this letter couldn’t possibly be from her father.
It was in someone else’s handwriting.
The boy had told her the letter came from her father, so someone was lying. Deep in thought, Magdalena folded it up and returned it to her skirt pocket.
“What’s wrong?” Simon, who had returned to her side, looked at her with surprise.
“The letter from my father…” she began hesitantly. “Someone else wrote it.” She told Simon about the mysterious text.
“Well?” Simon asked. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
Magdalena shook her head. “Unfortunately no.” She bit her lip, thinking. “This letter must have come from the man who’s out to get my father. I’m pretty sure there’s more behind this than the patricians retaliating against the freemen.” Magdalena collapsed onto the straw, rubbing her temples. “Someone has it in for my father-maybe someone he crossed a long time ago, someone who is sparing no pains to pay him back now.”
“Does your father have lots of enemies?” Simon asked hesitantly.
Magdalena laughed. “Enemies? My father is the hangman. He has more enemies than the kaiser has soldiers.”
“So the murderer could be a relative of someone he once executed?” the medicus persisted.
Magdalena shrugged. “Or someone he broke on the rack until he got the truth out of him, or someone he whipped or whose ear he cut off, or someone he put in the stocks or banished from town… Just forget about that! It won’t lead anywhere.”
“What bad luck that the bathhouse ruins collapsed!” Simon said. “Now we’ll probably never learn what was going on in that secret alchemist’s workshop.”
“But the stranger who’s apparently on our trail won’t learn anything, either,” Magdalena replied. “And don’t forget, we have an advantage:
“Though we can’t make any sense of it.” Sighing, Simon sank down in the straw beside Magdalena and stared off into the gloomy hall. Nathan sat at the massive table amid a number of other beggars and sipped from a mug of watery beer. Though the beggar king seemed to watch them out of the corner of his eye, he made no attempt to approach them.
“Let’s go over what we know again,” Magdalena said, chewing on a piece of straw. “The bathhouse owner, Andreas Hofmann, and his wife, my aunt, were killed. They were members of the freemen, who are rebelling against patrician rule and whose leader is the Regensburg raftmaster, Karl Gessner. Hofmann was Gessner’s second in command, and when his cover got blown, he had to die-the patricians’ act of revenge and a deterrent to the other revolutionaries.”
“Your father was the scapegoat,” Simon added. “He received a forged letter about his oh-so-sick sister, traveled to Regensburg, where he was arrested at the scene of the crime to divert suspicion from the patricians. So far, so good. But in the bathhouse cellar there was a secret alchemist’s workshop, and apparently someone was looking for it-the stranger with the rapier who tried to kill us and who, it seems, is taking orders from none less than the Regensburg city treasurer.”
Magdalena nodded. “Paulus Mamminger. He must be at the center of everything. And he’s the only lead we really have. We’ll have to follow him.”
“And how do you intend to do that?” Simon inquired. “Shadow one of the most powerful patricians in Regensburg around the clock? It won’t be easy. You’d need an army.”
Magdalena grinned. “You forget we have one.” She pointed at the beggars Nathan was now toasting jovially with his mug of beer. “They’re just itching for someone to send them into battle.”
Philipp Teuber shuffled home from the torture chamber as if he were on his way to his own execution. He’d spent the entire morning torturing Jakob Kuisl and in the afternoon was to begin again. Teuber felt as if he’d aged years in a matter of hours, and not even the prospect of a hot dinner at home could change that.
The Regensburg executioner’s house was located on Henkersgasschen, Hangman’s Lane, in a rundown part of town south of the old grain market. Amid muddy roads, crooked, warped roofs, and dilapidated houses the tidy property seemed a bit out of place. It was freshly whitewashed, the well-tended garden behind it was full of fragrant roses and lavender blossoms, and a newly renovated barn next door housed cattle and carts. Teuber wasn’t poor; in a Free Imperial City like Regensburg, the hangman made a decent living. And almost every day people came to him to purchase some medicine or talisman, among them well-to-do citizens who hid their faces as they passed through the rank lanes of this part of town.
The hangman, stooped and pale, opened the door to his home and was immediately surrounded by a crowd of cheerful children. Under normal circumstances he would lift his five little children high into the air one by one and hug them against his broad chest, but today he quietly pushed the rambunctious group aside and sat down at the
