Oliver Potzsch: The Hangman’s Daughter

They went through the living room, which smelled of fresh-baked bread, across to the little workroom. The hangman, as always, had to stoop to get through the low doorway. Behind him Simon entered the holy of holies. Once again he looked reverently at the massive cabinet, which reached up to the ceiling. A treasure chest, thought Simon. Full of the medical knowledge of centuries…

Immediately the young physician was overcome with the urge to open the cabinet so as to browse through the books and folios. As he moved toward it he almost stumbled over a small chest standing in the middle of the chamber. It was made of polished cherrywood, with silver fittings and a solid-looking lock, with the key still in it.

“Open it,” said the hangman. “It belongs to you.”

“But…” Simon interjected.

“Consider it as payment for all your trouble,” he said. “You helped me to rescue my daughter and also save the woman who brought my children into the world.”

Simon knelt and opened the chest. The lid sprang open with a little click.

Inside there were books. At least a dozen.

They were all new editions. Scultetus’s Wundarzneylisches Zeughaus, or Surgical Armory, the book of midwifery by the Swiss Jakob Ruf, the complete works of Ambroise Pare in a German translation, Georg Bartisch’s Augendienst , Paracelsus’s Grosse Wundarzney , bound in leather with illustrations in color…

Simon rummaged through them, turning pages. A treasure lay before him, much greater than the one they had found in the tunnels.

“Kuisl,” he stammered. “How can I ever thank you? It’s too much! That…it must have cost a fortune!”

The hangman shrugged.

“A few golden coins more or less. Old Augustin didn’t notice it.”

Simon sat up, shocked.

“You mean, you-?”

“I believe that Ferdinand Schreevogl would have wanted it like that,” said Jakob Kuisl. “What use would so much money be to the church or the old moneybags on the council? It would have taken on dust just as it did down below in that hole. Now off you go and start reading, before I regret it.”

Simon gathered the books together, shut the chest, and grinned.

“Now you can borrow a few books from me when you want to. If in return, Magdalena and I…”

“You rascal, be off with you!” The hangman gave him a gentle slap on the back of the head so that Simon almost tripped over the threshold with the chest. He ran outside and along the banks of the Lech through the tanners’ quarter, into town, over the cobblestones of the Munzstrasse, and into the narrow stinking alleys, until he arrived panting at his house.

He would have a lot of reading to do today.