Oliver Potzsch - The Dark Monk

“Nonsense, you gave him a drug. Admit it!” Lechner took a seat again behind his desk and was busily scribbling notes in a document in front of him with his goose-quill pen. “It’s about time for me to take away your damned crucibles, potions, and salves. I can do that, you know.” His voice suddenly sounded threatening. “You have no right to give people medical care. Only the physician can do that. In other cities, they would have long ago revoked your permission.”

“Then I will no longer be able to brew the drink Your Excellency has ordered from me. I’ll just have to take the opium poppy I have at home and throw it in the Lech.”

“Oh, just stop!” The clerk seemed to have calmed down a bit. “I didn’t mean it that way. Turn your attention to this fever going around, and put a stop to it. If you can do that, I’ll let you sell love potions, toad eggs, and hangman’s nooses to your heart’s content. Now, beat it. I’ve got a lot to do!”

Kuisl bowed and disappeared silently through the low doorway. Lechner stared after him for a long time. What a stubborn old fool! He just couldn’t see what was good for the city and what was not. The clerk rubbed his temples and again studied the letter he was holding in his hands, which had arrived that morning. It demanded once more that he do whatever was necessary to make sure the hangman minded his own business.

Lechner cursed softly. What did the writer of this letter want him to do-watch over Jakob Kuisl like a nursemaid? And who the hell did he think he was, anyway, giving orders in Lechner ’s city? Lechner took orders from Munich, from the elector personally, or from the elector’s representative, not from some church dignitary!

He picked up the envelope and looked at the seal of the church. Then he examined the inside of the envelope again. There were no coins in it, nor a promissory note like the last time.

He ripped the letter up into small pieces and tossed it in the fire. Let the gentleman pamper the hangman himself. He had more important things to do.

A short time later, Jakob Kuisl entered his house in the Tanners’ Quarter. Anna Maria was sitting at the kitchen table, rubbing her eyes.

“What’s the matter, woman?” the hangman asked. “Is it on account of the twins?” He placed his hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but suddenly he felt the effects of the alcohol and lack of sleep. “Pull yourself together. It’s probably not the fever.”

Anna Maria sighed. She’d been awakened again and again by the coughing of her two youngest children the night before and hadn’t been able to sleep. But she, too, thought it was just a simple cold. She was worried less about the children than about her husband, who, as so often before executions, had been drinking far into the night, mumbling and cursing about the evil in the world and the wickedness of the people of Schongau in particular. Anna Maria knew that, at such times, there was nothing she could do to help him, so she had lain awake thinking of Magdalena.

Magdalena, her eldest, the apple of her eye, stubborn and unrestrained like her father, and still not back from Augsburg.

Sitting at the dinner table, she was so burdened by grief she couldn’t eat a thing. She didn’t touch the bread, and even her husband couldn’t console her. Worry about her daughter made her look older than her forty years. The first strands of gray were beginning to show in the long black hair she’d been so proud of as a child and that she’d passed on to her daughter.

“It’s been a week, and Magdalena still isn’t back,” she lamented to Jakob, whose hand was still resting on her shoulder. “Something’s wrong.”

“Oh, come now,” the hangman grumbled. “I think she’s just having a good time in Augsburg. When she gets home, we’ll give her a good spanking and then everything will be all right.”

Anna Maria brushed her husband’s hand away and stood up abruptly. “I’m sure something’s happened to her. A mother can feel these things.” She gave the stool a quick kick, and it tipped over, landing with a crash in a corner. “And Lechner has you out in the forest hunting for robbers instead of looking after your daughter! Doesn’t he have bailiffs to do that?”

Jakob Kuisl remained silent. When his wife got wound up, there was no stopping her. The simplest thing to do then was not to fight it, but just to let the storm pass. The hangman’s wife could rage and wail for hours, but this time she quickly ran out of steam.

“It’s bad enough that you hang and break people on the wheel for Lechner and his fat burgomasters,” she shouted. “What a dirty job! Let those big shots bloody their own hands!”

Jakob Kuisl grinned. He loved his wife, even when she lost her temper. “At least I screwed things up for him with the Scheller execution.” He poured himself a mug of light beer and emptied it in one gulp. “And as for Magdalena, don’t worry. She knows how to take care of herself.” He brushed the dark foam from his lips with the back of his broad, hairy hand. “In contrast to Simon. He’s in real danger, and he doesn’t even know it.”

The hangman’s wife snorted. “Stop talking like a smart-ass. How do you know that?”

Jakob Kuisl picked up a loaf of bread from the table and turned to leave. “I know it, that’s all.” Without turning around, he marched out into the snow. “I’ve got to save Simon from doing something really stupid. I at least owe him that.”

The hangman stomped down to the bridge over the Lech, leaving his nagging wife behind.

“Isn’t that nice!” she shouted as he left. “Go and save the fine gentleman, but don’t give a damn about your daughter! Go to hell, you old fool!”

But Jakob Kuisl, who had disappeared in the drifting snow, didn’t hear a word of what she said, his hangover pounding in his head with every step he took.

Cursing under his breath, he hoped he wasn’t too late for the physician.

As Simon leaned over the colorful illustrated Bible, he knocked over his cup of coffee, and a brown flood surged across the walnut table onto the polished parquet floor.

“Damn!” he shouted. “I’m sorry, I’m probably getting tired.”

“Don’t curse,” Augustin Bonenmayr scolded, looking at the physician through his pince-nez. “God punishes every vice, even the smallest-even if there’s a good reason to curse. The Bible in front of you is worth many hundreds of guilders, so please handle it with great care.”

Simon nodded and carefully wiped the spilled coffee from the table with a parchment full of notes he’d taken. Since early that morning, he and Benedikta had been sitting in the Steingaden Monastery library, which they’d visited on their first trip. Together, they studied the Bible quotations and descriptions of landmarks in the Priests’ Corner, looking for the solution to the riddle they’d found in Rottenbuch. All around them, books, folios, and parchments were piled high on the tables they’d pushed together. Simon had even been able to get a closer look at Friedrich Wildgraf’s sales deed, but so far they hadn’t found anything to help in their search.

Augustin Bonenmayr kept coming back to the library to check on their progress. The last time he’d even done Simon the favor of having the kitchen brew a cup of coffee from the physician’s supply of beans. But whereas the black brew usually spurred Simon’s thinking, it didn’t work this time.

The physician was also having trouble concentrating because the two monks, Lothar and Johannes, who were sent to guard them, didn’t even once leave their posts at the library door. The Steingaden abbot had made good on his threat and didn’t let Simon and Benedikta out of his sight. They’d traveled to Steingaden in complete darkness in the horse-drawn sled, then spent the rest of the night in two monks’ cells, which were locked from the outside. Simon knew he and Benedikta would be regarded as nothing but church desecrators by the abbot until they had convinced him otherwise.