The Beggar King: A Hangman's Daughter Tale

by Oliver Pötzsch

  Simon thought for a moment, then nodded. “It’s quite possible he didn’t. Your uncle kept his laboratory well hidden. I assume the fireplace is connected to the chimney in the boiler room so no one would notice he was down here working with distillation flasks. A bathhouse operator has to always keep the water boiling, after all, and thus the chimney was always smoking.”

  “But what does that have to do with the patricians?” Magdalena picked up a piece of a glass lens and examined it as if this shard might hold the answer to all her questions. “Until now we’ve assumed the aldermen had my uncle killed because he was one of the leaders of the freemen—retaliation, nothing more.”

  “Apparently it’s not that simple,” Simon replied. “It’s safe to say that someone was looking very hard for this secret room. The terrible mess in the apothecary’s room on the second floor is evidence of that.”

  “Could Mämminger be behind it?” Magdalena asked.

  “He has something to do with it at least.”

  The medicus continued reflecting on this as he made his way through the room, now and then picking up a fragment of pottery or a piece of melted glass. Underneath the toppled bookshelf he found a few scorched boards connected by thin bars, and then, as he continued rummaging around, he came upon a few small blackened bones.

  Animal bones.

  “It appears your uncle was keeping animals in cages down here,” Simon said. “Not especially large ones. These bones could have come from rats or cats.”

  Disgusted, he tossed the bones aside and walked to a far back corner of the room, where a knee-high pile of ash still smoldered. Carefully he reached into the faintly glowing black mass.

  Slowly he sifted the warm ashes through his fingers, letting them fall to the ground. There were bits the fire hadn’t consumed entirely, which shimmered bluish white in the lantern light. Sniffing them, he recognized the same slightly sweet odor he had noticed a few days earlier while inspecting the moldy flour in the bathhouse supply room. Could this enormous pile of ash be simply burned flour? Or was this the remains of some alchemical powder he’d never heard of?

  What the devil had Hofmann been doing down here?

  He suddenly heard a loud crack and stones began falling to the ground. A moment later the world around them seemed to explode.

  “Damn it, the house is collapsing!” Simon shouted. “I was afraid it would. Let’s get out of here fast!”

  Magdalena was already in the front supply room, scrambling like a cat up the rungs. Before Simon followed her, he frantically filled his purse with the bluish ash. Maybe he’d have a chance later to examine the powder more closely. Then he, too, rushed off toward the well shaft.

  A loud thundering sound suggested the beams were breaking apart under the weight of the rubble. Up in the boiler room Magdalena stood amid the melted kettles while rubble and stones hailed down on her.

  “The way out is blocked!” she shouted, pointing at the narrow tunnel now closed off by a mountain of bricks. The roof above them was creaking and starting to sag, and at any moment they knew they’d be buried beneath it.

  “There has to be another way out!” Simon shouted over the deafening creaking and splintering.

  Panicked, he looked around until at last, on the left, he discovered a passageway through the debris barely wide enough to pass through. He pushed Magdalena through the tiny opening, crawled in behind her, and found himself standing in what was once the bathing chamber. Here, too, the roof threatened to fall. The back part of the room had already collapsed completely, but in front, where the door had once been, a new hole had just opened up in the wall.

  After nudging Magdalena through the hole, Simon scrambled through behind her. Just seconds later the entire ruin collapsed behind them with a terrible roar, and a cloud of dust rose up into the sky.

  Coughing and panting, Simon and Magdalena lay on the ground, unable to speak. When the dust had drifted away, they could see Nathan and the other beggars standing nearby.

  “Well done,” the beggar king said, tipping his hat. “Most of my fellows bet you wouldn’t make it out. It sounded out here like a whole load of gunpowder—”

  “Shut your damn mouth!” Magdalena burst out, apparently having regained her voice. “We were nearly killed and you’re taking bets on it! Are you insane? You didn’t say a word about helping!”

  “What could I have done?” Nathan replied meekly in a subdued voice. “I wanted to warn you, but the timbers were already cracking.” Then, lowering his voice, he continued. “By the way, you should quiet down a bit unless you want the entire neighborhood to come running.”

  Simon noticed now that some windows had already opened in nearby houses and curious eyes were watching their little group.

  “I would have called you soon in any case,” Nathan whispered. “There’s something I want to show you. It appears you weren’t the only ones to visit the bathhouse tonight.”

  Taking Simon and Magdalena by the arm, the king of beggars led them to the other side of the burned-out building, where they crouched behind a collapsed stone wall. He pointed to a figure in a black cape who was clinging to the wall of a neighboring house like a bat.

  “My boys didn’t even see him at first,” Nathan whispered. “He must have been prowling around here the whole time, and I think he had the same plan you did. Well, he sure won’t find anything now.”

  “Oh, God, Simon!” Magdalena whispered. “That’s the stranger who was in the garden at Silvio’s house! The man who tried to kill me! He’s coming toward us!”

  Nathan raised his hands reassuringly. “Don’t worry; you have me and my boys here now.”

  “Your boys are blind, crippled old men,” Simon sneered. “Just what are they going to do?”

  “Well, see for yourself.”

  The beggar king pointed to the doorway of a house, where two of his men loitered on the steps. As the stranger approached the ruin, presumably to get a better look, they lurched toward him. Simon noticed one of them was Crazy Johannes, Nathan’s right-hand man.

  “My good fellow, a pittance for an old soldier who lost his sight in the Battle of Rheinfelden,” Johannes croaked, looking very much indeed like a down-and-out mercenary. “Just a kreuzer for a cup of mulled wine.”

  “Away with you!” shouted the stranger. “I have no time for your twaddle!”

  In the meantime the other beggars had reached the man and were jostling him. As the stranger faltered, Crazy Johannes raised a crutch and rammed it between the man’s legs, causing him to fall with a startled cry. Seconds later two more beggars on crutches emerged from the shadows of an entryway and began flailing away at the figure on the ground.

  In one fluid motion the stranger jumped to his feet and pulled out his rapier. The beggars surrounded him like a pack of ravenous dogs, each waving a crutch through the air to hold the man at bay.

  Unexpectedly the man lunged to one side, feinted to the left, then attacked from the right. Johannes let out a loud cry as the blade cut into his shoulder.

  The cloaked stranger took advantage of the momentary confusion to jump onto a dung cart beside a nearby house. The beggars attacked the cart and tried to overturn it, but the man scrambled up to an open window in the second story, climbed inside, and disappeared. Moments later a woman’s scream was followed by heavy footsteps on a stairway. Simon looked up to see the stranger squeezing through a hatch in the roof, then dashing across neighboring rooftops in the direction of the Danube.

  “Damn!” Nathan shouted. “We almost had him!”

  Beggars arrived now from all directions to help their injured companion. In his sooty jacket Simon, too, rushed over to Johannes, whose wound, he saw immediately, was serious. The blade had pierced Johannes’s right shoulder clean through. The medicus was relieved to see that the blood seeping from the wound was dark in color rather than light, meaning the lung hadn’t been injured.

  “Give me a hand!” he shouted, gesturing to some of the beggars. “We’ll c
arry him carefully to the catacombs, and I’ll see if there’s anything I can do for him there.”

  Magdalena was still standing behind the collapsed wall, peering out over the roofs of Regensburg, where the red sun was just beginning to rise. She was so lost in thought she didn’t notice a boy standing directly in front of her. He was about ten years old, had strawberry-blond hair and a face so covered with freckles it looked as if he’d been splattered with mud. At first she presumed he’d come to see the collapsed house, but then she realized he was addressing her.

  “Are you—uh—Magdalena Kuisl?” he asked fearfully. “The daughter of the Schongau hangman?”

  “Who wants to know?” Magdalena snapped, scrutinizing him carefully. “You sure don’t look like a city guard.”

  The boy shook his head shyly. “I’m Benjamin Teuber, the son of the Regensburg executioner. My friends and I have been looking for you everywhere. I have something to give you,” he replied, handing her a folded piece of paper. “It’s a letter from your father.”

  Incredulous, Magdalena took the note. “From my father?”

  Benjamin nodded and rubbed his toes together bashfully. “He gave it to my dad and asked him to find you and give it to you. And then I have a message for you from my father.”

  “What’s that?” Magdalena asked.

  “That your dad is a thick-skulled, pigheaded, low-down bastard.”

  The hangman’s daughter smiled. There was no greater compliment anyone could give her father.

  9

  REGENSBURG

  NINE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING, AUGUST 22, 1662 AD

  THIS MORNING THEY began with the rack straightaway.

  In silence the Regensburg executioner removed Kuisl’s bandages and bound his arms behind his back. Perceiving shadows behind the wooden lattice, Kuisl knew the doctor and the three inquisitors were already present. He fixed his eyes on the lattice as if by sheer force of will he might see through it to finally get a look at the man who’d set this awful trap for him.

  Since Teuber had visited the cell to care for his wounds, only a single, agonizing night had passed and Kuisl had slept little. Instead, he’d spent the whole time brooding over the name Weidenfeld and where he might have heard it before. It was clear now that the third man whose face was hidden behind the lattice was an avenging angel risen out of his past. The same stranger had made all the inscriptions on the cell wall to remind the hangman of a time he’d long ago banished to the remote corners of his memory. The ghosts of the war had risen again, and the worst among them was hiding here, in the torture chamber in Regensburg behind a wooden lattice. Who was it? And why was he pursuing him?

  P.F.K. Weidenfeld…

  Kuisl moaned softly as the executioner strapped him to a modified ladder rack. The herbal ointment Teuber had spread on his wounds was a blessing but in no way a cure. Now Teuber tied Kuisl’s hands, already bound together behind his back, tightly to an upper rung of the rack. Sharply filed wood pyramids bored into his wounded flesh while the weight of his body pulled him inexorably downward along the rungs, prying his shoulder joints apart as he slid. Still, that wasn’t the worst: Teuber tied a noose around Kuisl’s legs, then attached it to a roller at the bottom of the instrument. When the executioner turned the roller, the victim’s arms would be pulled farther and farther upward, behind his back, until his shoulders would at last rip from their sockets.

  “We begin the second interrogation,” the older man intoned from behind the lattice, a voice Kuisl now knew belonged to the president of the council, Hieronymus Rheiner. “Kuisl, you can save yourself a lot of pain if you simply confess that—”

  “To hell with you, you dirty bastards!” Kuisl shouted. “Even if you cut me to pieces and throw me into boiling water, it wasn’t me!”

  “It’s quite possible we’ll do just that,” the third voice replied sardonically. “But first we’re going to try the rack. Teuber, turn the crank.”

  Drops of sweat appeared on Teuber’s brow, and his lips pressed into a thin line. Nevertheless, he moved the roller about a quarter turn, just enough for Kuisl’s bones to crack audibly.

  “Don’t make this unnecessarily hard on yourself,” admonished the youngest inquisitor, presumably Joachim Kerscher from the Regensburg tax office. “The evidence is overwhelming. We all know you committed the murder, but by Carolingian Law we need your confession.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Kuisl muttered.

  “Blast it, we caught you red-handed! Right alongside the two corpses!” Hieronymus Rheiner fumed. “God knows you are guilty! He’s looking down on you now!”

  Kuisl laughed softly. “God isn’t here. Only the devil’s present in this room.”

  “This isn’t working,” the third man said icily. “Teuber, keep turning. I want to hear his bones break.”

  “But Your Honors,” Teuber spoke up cautiously. His face looked pale and bloated in the torchlight. The merry sparkle in his eyes had disappeared, and he seemed to have suddenly aged by years. “Were I to proceed too quickly, Kuisl might pass out, and then—”

  “Who asked your opinion, hangman?” the third inquisitor snarled.

  Doctor Elsperger, who until that point had been sitting silently on the wooden bench, now stood up and cleared his throat.

  “Teuber isn’t entirely mistaken,” he said. “From appearances the accused may indeed become unconscious. Then we’d have to terminate the procedure prematurely.”

  “Elsperger, you’re right,” old Rheiner responded from behind the lattice. “We must proceed slowly. Teuber, just a quarter turn again, no more.”

  The Regensburg executioner, who was leaning silently against the rack, didn’t seem to hear the inquisitor at first.

  “Pardon, Your Honor. A quarter turn, as you command.”

  As Teuber cranked the roller, Kuisl could feel his arms about to be wrenched from their sockets. This pain only intensified as the pyramid-shaped wedges dug ever deeper into his back. Kuisl closed his eyes and hummed the old nursery rhyme he’d first heard in an army encampment outside Breitenfeld long ago. Soldiers’ wives hummed it in their children’s ears to soothe them while villages burned on the horizon. Kuisl himself had sung it to send his little sister, as well as his own children, off to the land of dreams.

  “Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home…”

  “Kuisl, stop this foolishness and confess!” young Kerscher warned him. “It’s over for you.”

  “Your house is on fire…”

  “Good Lord, confess!” Rheiner shouted.

  “Your children will burn…”

  “Confess!”

  Kuisl spat at the lattice. “Go to hell, you potbellied little pricks.”

  For a moment everyone fell silent, and the only sound was Kuisl’s labored breathing.

  “A lovely song,” the third inquisitor said finally in a malevolent tone. “Unfortunately you’ll never again sing it to your children. You do have children, don’t you? And a beautiful wife, as well. What’s her name? Anna-Maria, I believe.”

  He repeated the name, pronouncing each syllable slowly, almost lustfully. “An-na-Ma-ri-a.”

  The Schongau hangman struggled to get up, while his bones cracked and his left shoulder snapped out of its socket. This devil knew his wife? And his children, too? What did he have planned for them? Had he already taken out his vengeance on them for some crime their husband and father committed decades ago? Though the pain almost caused Kuisl to faint, he spat a stream of bile in the direction of the wooden lattice.

  “You goddamned swine!” he screamed. “Come out here and show me your goddamned face so I can rip the skin off it!”

  “You’re a bit confused,” the third man calmly replied. “You’re the one whose face we’re going to tear to shreds in a little while.”

  “I implore you to show a bit more respect, colleague,” Rheiner scolded. “This is an interrogation. One might almost think the accused has somehow wronged you personally… Elsperger?”

  The g
aunt surgeon sprang up from the bench. “Your Honor?”

  “Is the subject still fit for interrogation?”

  Elsperger approached the Schongau hangman and examined his crippled arm in the dim torchlight.

  “His left shoulder seems to be dislocated,” he said finally, “but the right one still looks in good shape.”

  “Respiration?”

  Elsperger nodded. “He’s still breathing. This man is as strong as an ox, if I may say so. I’ve never seen—”

  “Nobody asked for your opinion,” Rheiner said. “Esteemed colleagues, may I suggest the left arm be untied and we continue with the right? And as far as I’m concerned, we might as well get started with the hot poker. I’m certain we’ll have our confession soon. Teuber, take down the left arm, and we’ll continue with the right. For God’s sake, Teuber, what’s the matter with you?”

  The Regensburg executioner wiped the sweat from his brow as his gaze went blank. “Pardon, once more,” he stammered. “But I believe the man has had enough for today.”

  “Another person determined to have his say!” the older councilman groused. “Where are we? In a ship of fools? Now hurry up and do as we’ve ordered, or I’ll cancel the two guilders you’re to be paid for the day’s work.”

  When Teuber loosened the shackles, Kuisl’s arm collapsed like an empty wineskin. Then the executioner reached again for the crank.

  “Good Lord, confess, will you!” Teuber whispered in Kuisl’s ear. “Confess, and it will be over!”

  “My dear, sweet twins…” Kuisl whispered, on the verge of passing out. “Lisl, my Lisl, come and I’ll sing you to sleep…”

  “Teuber, crank the damned roller at once,” the third man snarled. “Or must I come out and do it myself?”

  With a clenched jaw, the Regensburg executioner once again began turning the crank, as Kuisl continued singing the nursery rhyme over and over.

  The melody would echo in Teuber’s mind the entire night.