The Dark Monk

by Oliver Pötzsch

  “Or the next riddle,” Benedikta whispered, holding her head erect while accepting condolences from the mourners. “In any case, we’ll have to go to Wessobrunn. I hope in the meantime you’ve learned a little more about riding a horse,” she said, with a slight smile, “or we’ll never find out if this Templars’ treasure really exists.”

  Simon returned the smile but felt a queasiness in his stomach. The Steingaden abbot had sown a seed of suspicion that took root in his mind. Nodding, he bade farewell and left the cold basilica.

  The young boy led Magdalena through the narrow lanes of Augsburg, down into the Weavers’ Quarter. Little icy gutters lined the paved streets. Everywhere, there were millwheels that drove the weavers’ looms during the warmer part of the year but now were silent, covered with icicles and half submerged under ice where a number of brooks came together. Most houses didn’t have windows but just tiny peepholes, and Magdalena had the feeling that behind each of them a pair of eyes was staring at them as they walked by.

  It was well past nightfall, and she kept looking around to see if the two thugs might be waiting around the next corner for her as she passed by with the boy.

  Finally, they came to a large house directly along the city wall. With whitewashed stone walls, green shutters, and a heavy wood front door, it seemed almost elegant in comparison to the rundown weavers’ cottages, though it was nowhere near as magnificent as the three-story mansions closer to the city hall. Magdalena could hardly believe this was the hangman’s house, but the boy stopped and knocked. Shortly, steps could be heard, a little slit opened beside the door, and a bearded face appeared. As the man raised his lantern to get a look at his visitors, Magdalena could see the reddish-blond hair of his beard and two eyes sparkling in the dim light. The man looked at Magdalena and the boy with suspicion.

  “No more customers today,” he growled. “Come back tomorrow if you’re still alive and kicking.”

  The boy crossed himself, mumbled a brief prayer, and took off into the darkness. Magdalena stared at the hangman behind the peephole. Apparently, he hadn’t recognized her.

  “Are you deaf, or what?” The man’s voice sounded threatening now. “Beat it fast, or I’ll come and get you, you goddamn harlot!”

  He was just about to close the little hatch when Magdalena addressed him.

  “It’s me, Magdalena Kuisl from Schongau. Don’t you recognize me?”

  Eyes wide in astonishment, he opened the door. His massive frame was illuminated by the light from the room.

  Philipp Hartmann was almost as big as the Schongau hangman. He had a long, thick, reddish-blond mane, which, along with his beard, framed a wrinkled face. His arms were as thick as tree trunks, and a massive paunch with a dense growth of hair spilled out from under his shirt. He could be mistaken for a day laborer or hired thug, except that his shirt was made of the finest fustian and the black jacket over it didn’t show a single patch. Philipp Hartmann sized her up with the narrow little slits of his eyes—the eyes of an intelligent but extremely proud man.

  Finally, he grinned. “Indeed, Magdalena Kuisl!” he cried, and his deep voice echoed through the streets. “What a surprise! Come in before you freeze to death standing outside the hangman’s house.”

  He put his hand on her shoulder and guided her into the warm house. A fire rumbled softly in a tile stove, and some leftovers from supper were still on the table: roast pheasant, a half wheel of cheese, and a sliced leg of ham, alongside a pitcher of wine and a plate of sliced white bread. Magdalena felt her mouth water, reminding her she had eaten nothing substantial since the night before. Philipp Hartmann noticed her gaze and gestured for her to sit down. “Come and eat; it’s too much for one person.”

  Magdalena sat down to eat. The bread was still warm, and the fine, white pheasant leg delicious. It was like Easter and a church fair combined. The Kuisls could afford a meal like this only when there were a lot of executions—and even then, only when the pay was good. Philipp Hartmann looked at her, impressed with her beauty, but kept his silence.

  Suddenly, footsteps could be heard on the stairs, the door squeaked, and a little girl peeked in. She was about five years old, wore a nightshirt, and had reddish-blonde pigtails.

  “Go back upstairs, Barbara,” the hangman said. “We have company. Magdalena will certainly stay overnight, so you can play with her tomorrow morning.” He smiled, a facial expression that clearly did not come naturally to him. “Perhaps she’ll even stay longer.”

  Magdalena swallowed the rest of the pheasant, but suddenly the meat had lost its taste and seemed dry. The little girl nodded, scrutinized the hangman’s daughter from head to toe again, and then disappeared up the stairs.

  “You can have more, if you like,” Philipp Hartmann said, pouring her another cup of wine. “I’ve also got some nuts and other delicacies. We’re not hurting for money.”

  Magdalena shook her head in wonderment and admired the whitewashed walls, the brightly polished copper kettles, and the enameled pitchers and plates. Philipp Hartmann’s wife had died more than a year ago, and still, the house was in remarkably good condition. The reeds and straw on the floor smelled fresh, and Magdalena couldn’t find a single cobweb anywhere. In the devotional corner, an oil painting of the Madonna, which looked as if it had just been framed, hung next to a polished executioner’s sword. Beneath this, fresh linen and colorful clothes were stacked on the brass-studded cover of a walnut chest. Magdalena nodded to herself. Her father had been right; the Augsburg hangman would, in fact, be a great match for a girl, but even in her wildest dreams, she couldn’t even consider marrying him.

  Philipp Hartmann sat down next to her, poured himself a cup of wine, and raised his glass to her. “And now tell me what you’re doing in Augsburg at this time of year. Actually, it’s the man who is supposed to be the suitor and pay a visit to his intended—or do you do things differently in Schongau?” Again, he tried to smile.

  “It’s…not exactly what you think,” Magdalena began hesitantly. It was wrong for her to come here; she knew that. She was leading him on by coming here, but what other choice did she have? Even as far away as Schongau, people knew the Augsburg hangman’s wife had died of consumption the year before. Since that time, Philipp Hartmann had been looking for a new wife and a good mother for his little girl, Barbara. The only possible match for him as a hangman was the daughter of a butcher or a hangman.

  Three months had passed since Philipp Hartmann had paid a visit to the Kuisls in order to get to know Magdalena a little better. The men had quickly come to an agreement, and her father had described the life of the Augsburg hangman’s wife to her in glowing colors. In contrast to the Schongau hangman, Philipp Hartmann was well-to-do. Admittedly, he was also a so-called dishonorable man whom people avoided, but with hard work and ambition, Hartmann had made a name for himself in recent years. He was viewed not just as an experienced hangman, but as an excellent healer who was consulted by well-off citizens as well as the simple people. Workers, merchants’ daughters, and patricians all came to him for treatment and they all left behind decent sums of money.

  For hours her father had tried to reason with her, tried to explain she would never be allowed to marry Simon and that all she would achieve would be mockery and, in the worst case, banishment from town. But in the end, all his arguments were in vain and Philipp Hartmann finally left empty-handed, taking his dowry in a safely guarded little chest back to Augsburg with him.

  And now Magdalena was here at his house, eating his food and asking for a place to stay the night. She felt dirty and wrong, and only slowly and hesitantly did she tell him what had happened to her.

  The hangman listened to her silently, and when she finished, he said, “So it isn’t a suitor’s visit, after all…”

  He paused for a moment. Magdalena had a heavy feeling in her stomach.

  “Well, be that as it may”—he stood up to stir the fire—“your money is, in any case, gone,” he called back to her. “I know t
he two guys. Bad apples. I’ve put them in the stocks a couple of times and whipped them in public, too. They actually were banished from town some time ago and shouldn’t be here. I poked out the eye of the big fat fellow because he came back to Augsburg, and if I catch them again, I’ll string them up.” He returned to the room and wiped his large sooty hands on a fine white towel. “Now, what were you supposed to get for your father and the midwife?”

  Magdalena, who’d always had a strong memory, recited the individual herbs and other ingredients. The hangman nodded, thought for a moment, then replied, “I have melissa, sundew, and most of the other herbs right here. You can get ergot in the apothecary.”

  “But I have no money!” Magdalena wailed, burying her face in her hands. “Twenty guilders—where can I get all that money?”

  Philipp Hartmann hesitated, then walked over to a chest in the corner and opened it with a key from a chain on his belt. Magdalena listened to the clinking, and when the hangman returned and opened his hand, ten shiny guilders rolled across the table toward her.

  “You’ll need this for the apothecary,” Hartmann said. “The rest you can get from me.”

  Magdalena looked at him in disbelief. “But…” she started to stay.

  Something else rolled across the table toward her—a black, shining ball the size of a child’s fist made from a strange material she had never seen before. She held it in her hand and could hear something rattle inside.

  “A bezoar,” the hangman said. “If you ask me, a useless magic thing for superstitious wives. You can keep it; I have no use for it anymore, in any case.”

  “I’ll never be able to pay you back,” Magdalena whispered.

  The hangman shrugged. “I could give you fifty times as much as a dowry. I’m not a poor church mouse like your father. In a few years, I’ll be able to purchase my citizenship rights, and who knows…” He tried to put on a cheerful face, but his face twisted into a grimace. “Perhaps you’ll think it over some more. I’m not a bad catch, and Barbara urgently needs a mother.” He stood up and walked to the door. “You can sleep here in the main room on the bench. Go to the apothecary tomorrow and then have a look around Augsburg. You’ll see that it’s a not a bad place to live.”

  As Magdalena listened to his heavy footsteps going back up the stairs, her stomach sank. She felt as if she had swallowed the bezoar.

  The wagon driver lay on a bed of straw and screamed like a stuck pig. Startled, Bonifaz Fronwieser, who had just been tapping his abdomen, withdrew his hand.

  “Hmm, so this is where it hurts,” the older physician said, looking at his son apprehensively. Anton Steingadener’s wife knelt alongside the two doctors, wiping sweat from her husband’s brow with one hand, fingering a rosary in the other. Just an hour ago, the elderly couple had arrived at Fronwieser’s house, where several patients had been waiting since noon. Most were suffering from the fever that had been going around Schongau for weeks, but this case, Simon thought, looked even more serious, if that were possible. He was already certain that it was hopeless.

  “What’s wrong with him, Herr Doktor?” Agathe Steingadener wailed. “Was it the food? Our bread is not the best, I know. We add milled acorns to the dough because we never have enough flour. But these pains…What is wrong with him?”

  “How long has he been like this?” Bonifaz Fronwieser asked, examining Anton Steingadener’s eyes under a magnifying glass. They were dilated and glassy, and the man’s severe pain had driven him half crazy.

  “Let’s see…three days, I think,” Agathe Steingadener replied. “Can you help him?”

  Bonifaz Fronwieser stepped back, letting his son palpate the man’s abdomen again. It was rock hard and swollen above the pelvis. Simon pressed lightly, and the man screamed again as if he were being impaled on a stake.

  “My God, what’s wrong with him? Just what does he have?” shouted Agathe Steingadener, clutching her rosary tightly. “Has the devil taken possession of him, just like he did with the priest in Altenstadt?” She broke out in tears. “Holy Mary, Mother of Jesus! The devil is taking our poor souls and won’t even spare God-fearing citizens and priests! My husband went to mass every third day, and we often prayed together at home—”

  “Your husband has a tumor,” Simon replied, interrupting the litany. “It has nothing to do with the devil. But prayer can’t hurt.”

  He didn’t tell the woman that prayer was probably the only thing that could still save her husband. Simon knew that such tumors were sometimes removed at big universities, but here, in Schongau, they had neither the knowledge nor the tools to carry out such a complicated operation. Simon cursed as he rummaged through the shelves in the medicine cabinet, looking for some poppy seed extract, and in so doing, he knocked over a few small phials. It would only partially relieve the man’s pain, offering him, at best, a slow decline into unconsciousness. Everything else was in the hands of God.

  When Simon finally found the bottle, he noticed something moving behind him. His father’s fingers closed around his wrist.

  “Are you crazy?” old Bonifaz Fronwieser hissed in his ear, quietly so the wagon driver’s wife couldn’t hear him. “Do you know how expensive this medicine is? The Steingadener woman will never be able to pay for that!”

  “Shall we let her husband die a miserable death like a beast?” Simon whispered in reply. “He’s in great pain; we must help him.”

  “Then send him to the hangman,” his father replied, in the same low voice. “Kuisl will give him one of his elixirs, and then it will be over. It’s high time for Lechner to forbid that quack from practicing medicine before he poisons half the town with his herbs and elixirs.”

  “Half the town has already been to him, and he’s got more patients than you can ever imagine!” Simon replied in a clear voice.

  Taking the phial of poppy seed extract from his father’s hands, he gave it to the Steingadener woman.

  “Here, give your husband two spoonfuls of this a day in a glass of wine,” he said in a comforting tone. “The drink won’t make the tumor go away, but at least the pain will be more bearable.”

  “Will he get better?” the woman asked anxiously, looking down at her husband. Josef Steingadener seemed to have fallen asleep out of exhaustion. He trembled and twitched, but was otherwise quiet.

  Simon shrugged. “Only the Lord knows that. We’ll help you take him home now.”

  Bonifaz Fronwieser stared angrily at his son but nevertheless gave him a hand in carrying the heavy wagoner out the door and lifting him into a wagon. Agathe Steingadener gave them a few coins, then sat down in the coachman’s box and drove off. She did not wave good-bye. No doubt she was already wondering how she would make out financially without her husband.

  On this day, Simon and his father had three more patients who all came to them with the fever. They were well-to-do citizens, and Bonifaz Fronwieser prescribed them theriac, a wickedly expensive potion made of poppy seed extract and angelica root, which probably wouldn’t help but would at least not make the patients any worse. Simon knew this wasn’t true of all of his father’s medicines.

  While the young physician examined the phlegm his patients coughed up and checked their urine, his thoughts kept turning back to the Templars’ treasure. Could it be hidden in Wessobrunn? Or would they find only another riddle there? In any case, though he was deeply troubled by what the abbot of Steingaden had said, he decided to set out with Benedikta the following day. Just what was it Bonenmayr had said at the funeral? “Have you ever asked yourself who would benefit most from Koppmeyer’s death?”

  One thing clear was clear to Simon. Even though he could never imagine this happy, enlightened businesswoman poisoning anyone, from now on he’d keep a closer eye on Benedikta.

  Simon wished the hangman could come along with them the next day, but Kuisl would have to stay in town to prepare for the upcoming trial. Simon was excited to share with the hangman what they had learned right after the funeral, but Kuisl had been stra
ngely brusque in response, as if he were suddenly no longer interested in solving the riddle. When the physician told him he was departing for Wessobrunn the next day with Benedikta, Kuisl just shook his head.

  “Are you sure it’s safe to do that?” he grumbled.

  “The road is secure,” Simon replied, “now that you’ve caught the robbers.”

  “Have we really caught them all?” Kuisl asked, grinding a few dried herbs in his mortar. He wouldn’t say any more than that. The hangman, completely enveloped in clouds of pipe smoke, continued grinding the herbs to a powder. Simon shrugged and walked back up to town to help his father.

  He was about to turn to the next patient, a scrawny farmer from the neighboring town of Peiting who was suffering from consumption and coughing up sputum, when he heard shouting from the Lech Gate. It sounded like something bad had happened, and throwing on his coat, Simon ran down the street to see what the trouble was.

  A few men had already gathered at the gate, staring at an oxcart just now rumbling down the icy street into town. On top of the wagon filled with straw were the disfigured bodies of two young wagon drivers from Schongau whom the physician knew from his frequent visits to the taverns behind city hall. To the best of his recollection, they were employed by Matthias Holzhofer, the second presiding burgomaster and an influential local merchant. The heads and chests of both men had been hastily wrapped in blood-soaked bandages, and with pale faces, they seemed to be not long for this world.

  A farmer, who drove the oxen with a switch, had trouble moving the wagon forward. “Clear the way!” he shouted. “A new attack! I found them lying in their blood up on the high road above Hohenfurch. Damned robbers, may the devil take them all!” When he caught sight of Simon running alongside the wagon, he stopped and exclaimed, “You’ve been sent by God! See what you can do!” He put the reins in Simon’s hand. “Take the wounded men to your father. I’d prefer the hangman, but I think he’s needed somewhere else at present.”