“But, Father,” she said with a look that had always bewitched him since she was a little girl, “if you don’t tell me, Simon will. So tell me!”
“You’d better keep a close eye on your Simon.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You know exactly what I mean. He’s doing more than just making eyes at this woman from the city.”
Magdalena blushed. “How can you say something like that? You have hardly ever seen them together,” she cried. “And besides…I don’t care who Simon flirts around with, anyway.”
“Then it’s all right.” He walked over to the stove and threw another piece of wood on the fire, sending sparks into the air. “It’s much more important for us to learn who the workers were in the church.”
Magdalena had trouble focusing her thoughts on anything but Simon. They had been a couple for more than a year, even if they couldn’t act like one openly. She cursed her father for suggesting that Simon might have something to do with another woman.
“Why are you concerned with the workers?” she said finally, trying to pick up the thread of the conversation. “You certainly don’t believe that-”
“You heard it,” her father interrupted. “The workers opened the crypt, and even if Baumgartner swears up and down that none of them were down below, I don’t believe it. Someone poked around down there.”
“And then killed the priest?” Magdalena gasped.
“Rubbish!” Kuisl exclaimed, spitting on the floor, something he only dared to do when his wife, Anna Maria, wasn’t home. At the present, she was up at the market in town with the twins.
“Naturally, none of them is responsible for what happened to the fat priest,” he continued. “But they weren’t able to keep their mouths shut, either. We’ve got to find who they spoke to, and I’m sure we’ll have the murderer then.”
Magdalena nodded. “The murderer learned about the crypt and was afraid Koppmeyer would find out too much, and that’s why he killed him. That could be what happened,” she said, mulling it over.
The hangman opened the door so that clouds of tobacco smoke and fumes from the stove could drift out, and an ice-cold breeze blew through the room.
“So what are you waiting for?” he asked.
“What do you mean?” Magdalena said, with some irritation.
“You wanted to help me snoop around, so go find the workers who were in the Saint Lawrence Church and talk with them. Talking with men and making eyes at them is something you can do, can’t you?”
Magdalena grimaced at him, then put on her cape and walked out into the cold.
When Simon walked in the front door, he realized it would probably be some time before he would be able to continue reading the little book about the Templars. Sitting on the bench by the stove were three citizens of Schongau, all of whom looked like they needed more than just a few words of consolation and a cheese compress. Simon knew them all. Two were farmers from the area whom he had often seen in the marketplace. The third was the Schongau blacksmith’s journeyman. He was coughing up reddish-yellow mucus, which he thoughtfully spat into some brown rags. Nevertheless, some kept spattering onto the wooden floorboards, which were only sparsely covered with dirty reeds. The faces of the patients were drawn, beads of sweat stood out on their foreheads, and all of them had dark rings around their eyes and faces the color of wax.
To drive away the poisonous miasma, old Fronwieser had been burning lavender and balm, and it smelled like Easter mass in the little room. Simon didn’t think these vapors did any good. He had read, in fact, that diseases were carried by dirt and bodily fluids, but his father considered this to be just newfangled nonsense. As the blacksmith’s journeyman on his left went into a new fit of coughing, Simon cautiously moved one step to the side.
“Isn’t it nice that the young gentleman finally showed up. What kept you so long in Altenstadt? A nice little supper with the priest?” Bonifaz Fronwieser entered from the adjacent room holding a smoking pine chip and a few more sprigs of lavender. At one time, as a dashing young army surgeon in the Great War, he had been an imposing figure and had made eyes with many a pretty girl, but now, stooped over with thinning gray hair, he looked older than his fifty years, and all that remained of his former self was his piercing, alert eyes. And his harsh tone.
“I’ve been waiting for you for hours!” he snapped softly enough that the three patients on the bench couldn’t hear. “I have to pay a visit to Master Hardenberg, a member of the city council. He’s come down with it, too! And instead, here I am fooling around with a few farmers who can only afford to pay me with a few eggs, at best!”
He poked his withered index finger at Simon’s chest. “Tell me the truth-you’ve been keeping company with the hangman again and sticking your nose into those filthy books! People are already gossiping, and you’re giving them a reason to.”
Simon rolled his eyes. Bonifaz Fronwieser hated the hangman, who he thought was corrupting his son with books and his unorthodox methods of healing.
“Father, the priest-” he said, trying to interrupt his father’s harangue, but his father cut him off nevertheless.
“Aha, so that’s it! No doubt you were partying with the fat old codger, eh? Hope you enjoyed your meal, at least,” he croaked. “His housekeeper at least is supposed to be a good cook!”
“He’s dead, Father,” Simon said softly.
“What?” Bonifaz Fronwieser seemed irritated. For a moment, he wanted to continue his litany of complaints, but now he hesitated. He hadn’t reckoned with this news.
“Koppmeyer is dead, so there were some things that had to be done,” Simon repeated.
“I’m…I’m really sorry,” the older physician grumbled after a short pause. “Did he have this fever, too?”
Simon eyed the three patients, who looked at him partly out of curiosity and partly out of fear. Then he shook his head.
“No…It was something else. I’ll tell you later.”
“Very well,” his father grumbled, falling back into his familiar role. “Then get to work. As you can see, there are still a few of the living here and they need to be treated.”
Simon sighed, then helped his father in examining the patients. There wasn’t a lot to do: fetch a few dried herbs for a potion, listen to a few chests, check tongues, the usual sniffing and observing of urine samples. Simon had no illusions-most of this was just cheap playacting performed to give sick people false hope and take their money. Even doctors with university degrees couldn’t usually tell very much. The two Fronwiesers were just as helpless in the face of this fever, which had been spreading around Schongau for a full two weeks and had killed a dozen people. People were getting chills and pain in the joints, and some died suddenly overnight. Others survived the first onslaught, only to be overcome with terrible coughing fits soon after.
It made Simon furious to stand by helpless in the face of this epidemic. His father, on the other hand, seemed to have resigned himself to it. The relationship between them was tense, to put it mildly. As the town doctor of Schongau, Bonifaz Fronwieser hoped his son would someday follow in his footsteps. But Simon didn’t want anything to do with his father’s old-fashioned methods-enemas, bloodletting, sniffing old men’s urine. The young medicus preferred to occupy himself with the books that the Schongau hangman was always lending to him. He had long ago worked his way through the box of leather folios that Jakob Kuisl had given him as a present almost a year ago, and he longed for more. Even now, as he was occupied with treating the three patients, he couldn’t help but think again about the theories of controversial scientists. Currently, he was rereading the work of an Englishman named William Harvey, which dealt with the circulation of blood in the human body. Was it possible that blood consisted of tiny animalcules…?