Oliver Potzsch - The Dark Monk

“Faith, it’s faith that helps,” his father called after him.

“Faith! Is that the best we can do?”

The very thought of what his father was doing made Simon curse under his breath. Mouse droppings and dried toads! Next they’d be painting pentagrams and magic signs on the doors of the sick. If only he had some of that Jesuit’s powder! The physician was sure this medicine, acquired from the bark of a tree in the West Indies, would quickly reduce the fever. Simon had long ago used his last bit of it, however, and the next Venetian merchant would not be heading their way until the mountain passes were open again.

Once more, he turned to the farm woman and her coughing children. “It’s important now that you bury your husband as soon as possible,” said Simon. “He could be carrying something that will infect you and the children as well.”

“A…spirit?” the farm woman asked anxiously.

The physician shook his head in resignation. “No, not a spirit. Think of them as tiny creatures that-”

“Tiny creatures?” The woman’s face became even paler. “In my Alois?”

Simon sighed. “Just forget about that and bury him.”

“But the ground is frozen, and we’ll have to wait until-”

There was a knock at the door. Simon turned around to see a dirty little boy in the doorway, looking up at him with a mixture of fear and respect.

“Are you the Schongau physician?” he asked finally. Simon nodded. Secretly, he was happy to be addressed this way, because most residents still regarded him as nothing more than the coddled son of the local doctor, a dandy and a womanizer who had run out of money at the university in Ingolstadt.

“The…the Schreevogls have sent me,” the boy said.

“I’m supposed to tell you that Clara is coughing up snot and mucus. And please, can you stop by as soon as possible?”

Simon closed his eyes in a silent prayer. “Not Clara,” he murmured. “God, not Clara.”

He grabbed his doctor’s bag and, after exchanging a few more words with the farmer’s family, rushed off after the boy. On the way to the marketplace where the Schreevogls lived, Simon couldn’t help thinking of Clara. So much had happened in the last few days that he’d completely forgotten her! Usually, he stopped to pay a visit to his little friend several times a week. And now she was sick; perhaps she even had this terrible fever!

Maria Schreevogl was waiting for him by the front door. As so often, she appeared pale and agitated. Simon never understood what the patrician saw in the overly pious, sometimes hysterical woman. He assumed there were financial considerations involved in the marriage. Maria Schreevogl’s maiden name was Puchner, and she came from an old influential family with political connections.

“She’s in bed up in her room!” the woman lamented. “Please Mary, Mother of God and all saints, don’t let it be this fever! Don’t let this happen to my Clara!”

Simon hurried up the wide staircase and entered the room of the sick girl. Clara lay in her bed coughing, her pale face peeking out from a thick comforter.

Her stepfather, Jakob Schreevogl, sat anxiously at the edge of the bed. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Fronwieser,” he said, standing up. “Would you like something to drink-perhaps some coffee?”

Simon shook his head, noticing with concern that the patrician peered back at him with vacant eyes. The councillor looked like he was in a trance. Just the evening before, he’d returned with the hangman from their trip with Karl Semer, and clearly, he was severely shaken by the news of his daughter’s sickness.

Simon bent down to look at Clara. “Clara, it’s me, Simon,” he whispered, but Clara didn’t react. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing fast. In her sleep her whole body shook from time to time with a coughing fit. The physician placed an ear to her chest and listened to her breathing.

“How long has she been this way?” Simon asked, trying to speak over the crying and wailing of Schreevogl’s wife, who had followed him into the room, anxiously passing rosary beads through her fingers.

“Just since yesterday,” Jakob Schreevogl replied. “The fever came on in the evening, very quickly. Since then we haven’t been able to talk to her. Good Lord, woman, be quiet for a moment!”

The praying stopped. “Does she have the fever, Simon?” Maria Schreevogl asked through tears. “You can tell me! Oh, good Lord, does she have it?” She stared at the medicus wide-eyed.

Simon hesitated. The sudden onslaught of the illness, the rasping cough, the high fever-everything pointed to Clara’s having been infected. Once more the medicus cursed himself for not having been able to ask Magdalena to pick up some medications for him in Augsburg. Perhaps the apothecaries there even had the Jesuit’s powder! But now it was too late.

When Simon remained silent, that was sign enough for the patrician woman.

“St. Barbara, I will lose her!” she moaned. “St. Quirinus, help us!” She fell to her knees, fingering her rosary beads again.

Her husband tried to ignore her and turned to address Simon in a serious voice. “What can we do?”

Simon struggled to look him in the eye. “I’ll be honest with you, Schreevogl,” he said. “I can make a compress for her and a cup of tea, but that’s about all. Beyond that all we can do is wait and pray.”

“Saint Primus, Saint Felicianus, be with us in our hour of need and sickness!” Maria Schreevogl’s voice turned shrill as she placed a chain of sacred amulets around Clara’s neck.

“That will never cure her, woman,” said Jakob. “Better to make her a cup of linden blossom tea. I think the cook still has some in the kitchen.”

Maria hurried out the door wailing, and Simon bent down again over Clara.

“I’ll put a salve on her chest,” he said. “One of the hangman’s recipes-calamint, rosemary, and goose fat. That will at least alleviate the cough.”

He opened Clara’s shirt and began applying the salve, leaving the chain with the saint’s images in place-it couldn’t hurt, in any case.

As he rubbed the salve on, his gaze fell on the individual figures pictured on the chain’s silver coins, each engraved with a figure and a name, just as in the basilica in Altenstadt-St. Barbara, St. Quirinus, St. George, and of course, St. Walburga, patron saint of the sick and of women in labor.

But there were some here whom he had never heard of-St. Ignatius, who kept watch over children and difficult births; St. Primus again; and St. Felicianus, to whom Maria Schreevogl had prayed earlier.

Suddenly Simon stopped rubbing the child’s chest and reached for two amulets on the chain in front of him, staring at the names.

St. Primus, St. Felicianus…

The two amulets felt like two clumps of ice in his hand. How could he have been so blind?

With a choked voice, he turned to Jakob Schreevogl and asked, “Can we withdraw for a moment to your library?”

The patrician raised his eyebrows. “Do you think you might be able to find a medicine for this sickness there? I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you. My collection of medical books is limited.”

Simon shook his head. “No, I’m looking for a book on the lives of the saints.”

“On the lives of the saints?” Jakob Schreevogl looked back at him in astonishment. “I think my wife has something like that. But why-”

“Let’s just go to the library. For the time being, there’s nothing else we can do here, in any case. If my suspicions are right, I’ll soon be able to buy Clara the best medicine in all of the Priests’ Corner. And a Paracelsus bound in gold leaf for you. You have my word on that.”

Jakob Kuisl set out on the painful mission. He almost felt like a condemned man on the way to the scaffold. The strong coffee the day before had helped him over the worst of his hangover, but his head still felt like a sack full of stones. But it wasn’t the headache that troubled him the most; it was that he had broken his word.