“Magdalena…” he sighed. “The name brings many things to my mind.” He paused for a long time. “You do know Mary Magdalene, don’t you?” he asked suddenly. “The woman who was always at our Savior’s side? The patron saint of whores and adulteresses, and unclean women like you…”
She nodded. “My father named me for her.” Her voice sounded strange and grating after having remained silent for so long.
“Your father is a smart man, Magdalena. A…prophet, one might say.” Brother Jakobus laughed, bending his haggard, hunched body down to her like a scarecrow in the wind and passing his long fingers gently over her dress-hands as slender and delicate as a woman’s. “St. Mary Magdalene…” the monk whispered. “You really do resemble your namesake-beautiful and clever, but a pariah. A dirty hangman’s daughter, the scum of the city. A pious whore who secretly devotes herself to the sins of the flesh.”
“But-”
“Silence!” The monk’s voice sounded shrill again. “I know women like you only too well! Haven’t I seen you with your physician friend? So do not lie to me, Daughter of Eve!”
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and finally managed to calm down again. “But you are a believer, I can see that,” he said, laying his hand on her forehead as if to bless her. “Deep inside you, there is a good heart. You women are not all bad. Even Mary Magdalene became a saint, and you, too, can be saved.” His voice fell to a whisper now, and Magdalena struggled to hear what he was saying.
“Do you know the Bible, Hangman’s Daughter?”
He was still holding his hand on her forehead. Magdalena decided to remain silent, and he kept on speaking without waiting for an answer.
“Luke, Chapter Eight, Verse One. Jesus was traveling with a few women he had healed and saved from evil spirits, among them Mary Magdalene, from whom he had driven out seven demons. Seven demons…” The monk’s eyes flashed in the light of the candles. “You, too, are possessed by seven demons, Magdalena, and I will drive them out later, once your task here has been completed. Then you will be pure and good, a chaste maiden. Do not be troubled. We will find a place for you here in the monastery.”
He walked toward the door, but then he stopped and turned around to her again.
“I will save you, Magdalena.”
The monk smiled, then opened the door and disappeared. There was a grating sound as a key turned in the lock, then footsteps that became fainter until they finally faded away.
The hangman’s daughter remained behind with the angels, the evangelists, and a savior. Two women knelt at the foot of his cross and wept.
Simon looked into the rigid eyes of the man laid out on the bed in front of him and put down his doctor’s bag. The medicus didn’t have to listen to his heart, feel his pulse, or put a mirror under his nostrils anymore. He knew the man was dead. Gently, he closed the old man’s eyes, then turned to the deceased’s wife, who stood alongside, whimpering.
“I’ve come too late,” Simon said. “Your husband is already in a better place.”
The farm woman nodded, looking intently at her husband as if her gaze alone could bring him back to life. Simon guessed she was in her mid-forties, but the hard work in the fields, the yearly births, and the bad food made her look older. Her hair was gray and unkempt, and deep wrinkles had formed in the corners of her mouth and eyes. A few rotting, yellow stumps of teeth could be seen behind her cracked lips. Simon wondered if Magdalena would look like this in twenty years.
Simon had been up all night thinking about the hangman’s daughter. How was she doing in Augsburg? Her father had received no news from her yet, though he expected her return at any moment. But because of the blizzard, it was quite possible she’d be further delayed. No doubt she was waiting to join a group of merchants who awaited better weather-and an end to the attacks.
A child’s cry startled Simon out of his thoughts. A girl about four years of age was fondling the face of her dead father, and at the back of the room, six more of the farmer’s children were standing about with lowered heads. Two of them were coughing loudly; the medicus hoped they hadn’t caught the fever, too.
In the last two weeks, over thirty people had died in Schongau from the mysterious illness, most of them the elderly or children. Along the city wall, St. Sebastian’s Cemetery was filling up, and a number of the old graves holding victims of the plague were now being turned over to make room for the new arrivals. Simon and his father had tried everything. They had bled their patients, given them enemas, brewed them a drink of linden blossoms and wild marjoram. Bonifaz Fronwieser had even leafed through the pages of the so-called Dreckapotheke, or Dirty Pharmacy, in search of a magic potion for fever. When his father started mixing dried toads in vinegar and making powder from mouse droppings, Simon ran out of the treatment room, cursing.
“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 Püchner, and she came from an old influential family with political connections.