“She’s in bed up in her room!” the woman lamented. “Please Mary, Mother of God and all saints, don’t let it be this fever! Don’t let this happen to my Clara!”
Simon hurried up the wide staircase and entered the room of the sick girl. Clara lay in her bed coughing, her pale face peeking out from a thick comforter.
Her stepfather, Jakob Schreevogl, sat anxiously at the edge of the bed. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Fronwieser,” he said, standing up. “Would you like something to drink-perhaps some coffee?”
Simon shook his head, noticing with concern that the patrician peered back at him with vacant eyes. The councillor looked like he was in a trance. Just the evening before, he’d returned with the hangman from their trip with Karl Semer, and clearly, he was severely shaken by the news of his daughter’s sickness.
Simon bent down to look at Clara. “Clara, it’s me, Simon,” he whispered, but Clara didn’t react. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing fast. In her sleep her whole body shook from time to time with a coughing fit. The physician placed an ear to her chest and listened to her breathing.
“How long has she been this way?” Simon asked, trying to speak over the crying and wailing of Schreevogl’s wife, who had followed him into the room, anxiously passing rosary beads through her fingers.
“Just since yesterday,” Jakob Schreevogl replied. “The fever came on in the evening, very quickly. Since then we haven’t been able to talk to her. Good Lord, woman, be quiet for a moment!”
The praying stopped. “Does she have the fever, Simon?” Maria Schreevogl asked through tears. “You can tell me! Oh, good Lord, does she have it?” She stared at the medicus wide-eyed.
Simon hesitated. The sudden onslaught of the illness, the rasping cough, the high fever-everything pointed to Clara’s having been infected. Once more the medicus cursed himself for not having been able to ask Magdalena to pick up some medications for him in Augsburg. Perhaps the apothecaries there even had the Jesuit’s powder! But now it was too late.
When Simon remained silent, that was sign enough for the patrician woman.
“St. Barbara, I will lose her!” she moaned. “St. Quirinus, help us!” She fell to her knees, fingering her rosary beads again.
Her husband tried to ignore her and turned to address Simon in a serious voice. “What can we do?”
Simon struggled to look him in the eye. “I’ll be honest with you, Schreevogl,” he said. “I can make a compress for her and a cup of tea, but that’s about all. Beyond that all we can do is wait and pray.”
“Saint Primus, Saint Felicianus, be with us in our hour of need and sickness!” Maria Schreevogl’s voice turned shrill as she placed a chain of sacred amulets around Clara’s neck.
“That will never cure her, woman,” said Jakob. “Better to make her a cup of linden blossom tea. I think the cook still has some in the kitchen.”
Maria hurried out the door wailing, and Simon bent down again over Clara.
“I’ll put a salve on her chest,” he said. “One of the hangman’s recipes-calamint, rosemary, and goose fat. That will at least alleviate the cough.”
He opened Clara’s shirt and began applying the salve, leaving the chain with the saint’s images in place-it couldn’t hurt, in any case.
As he rubbed the salve on, his gaze fell on the individual figures pictured on the chain’s silver coins, each engraved with a figure and a name, just as in the basilica in Altenstadt-St. Barbara, St. Quirinus, St. George, and of course, St. Walburga, patron saint of the sick and of women in labor.
But there were some here whom he had never heard of-St. Ignatius, who kept watch over children and difficult births; St. Primus again; and St. Felicianus, to whom Maria Schreevogl had prayed earlier.
Suddenly Simon stopped rubbing the child’s chest and reached for two amulets on the chain in front of him, staring at the names.
St. Primus, St. Felicianus…
The two amulets felt like two clumps of ice in his hand. How could he have been so blind?
With a choked voice, he turned to Jakob Schreevogl and asked, “Can we withdraw for a moment to your library?”
The patrician raised his eyebrows. “Do you think you might be able to find a medicine for this sickness there? I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you. My collection of medical books is limited.”
Simon shook his head. “No, I’m looking for a book on the lives of the saints.”
“On the lives of the saints?” Jakob Schreevogl looked back at him in astonishment. “I think my wife has something like that. But why-”
“Let’s just go to the library. For the time being, there’s nothing else we can do here, in any case. If my suspicions are right, I’ll soon be able to buy Clara the best medicine in all of the Priests’ Corner. And a Paracelsus bound in gold leaf for you. You have my word on that.”
Jakob Kuisl set out on the painful mission. He almost felt like a condemned man on the way to the scaffold. The strong coffee the day before had helped him over the worst of his hangover, but his head still felt like a sack full of stones. But it wasn’t the headache that troubled him the most; it was that he had broken his word.
When the bailiff Johannes saw the mood Kuisl was in, he quickly stepped aside to allow the hangman to enter the dungeon.
“A load of work, ain’t it?” he called after him. “It will be a bloody show on Saturday when you break the prisoner on the wheel. I hope everyone has a ball. You’ll break every bone, heh? I’ve bet two hellers that Scheller will still be screaming the next day.”
Kuisl ignored him and trudged straight to the cell holding the robber chief and his gang. A quick glance assured him that this time, in contrast to the last, there were blankets, water, and fresh bread. The sick boy, too, seemed better. The medicine appeared to have helped.
Hans Scheller stood directly behind the bars, his arms folded. As the hangman approached, the robber chief spat in his face.
“The gallows, huh?” he growled. “A clean, quick matter? Bah! Damn liar! It’s going to be slow, one blow after the other, and I trusted you, you goddamned hangman!”
Jakob Kuisl slowly wiped the spit from his face. “I’m sorry, whether you believe me or not,” he said calmly. “I tried, but the authorities wanted to see screaming and wailing. So be it,” he said, stepping right up to Scheller. “But we can still put one over on these fat cats,” he whispered softly so that those standing around couldn’t hear.
Hans Scheller looked at him in disbelief. “What are you thinking of?”
Jakob Kuisl looked around to see if anyone was listening, but the other robbers were too wrapped up in their own concerns, and the bailiff Johannes preferred to wait outside. Finally, the hangman took a little leather bag out of his coat. He opened it, and a little brown ball rolled into his wrinkled hand, a pill no larger than a marble.
“One bite and you’ll be with our Lord,” Kuisl said. He held it up like a valuable pearl. “I made it especially for you. You won’t feel any pain. Just put it in your mouth, and when I strike, bite into it.”
Taking the pill in his slender fingers, Scheller gave it a closer look. “No pain, you say?”
Kuisl nodded. “No pain, believe me, this is something I understand.”
“And what about the big show?” Scheller whispered. “The people will be disappointed. I’ve heard they sometimes hang the hangman himself if things don’t go as planned. They’ll think you haven’t done your job right.”
“Let me worry about that, Scheller. Just don’t take the poison now or the aldermen might decide to take out their anger on the others. Afterward, I’d have to break the boy on the wheel, too.”
The robber chief was silent for a long while before turning back to the hangman. “Then it’s right what they say about you, Kuisl.”