Dancing in the Palm of His Hand

by Annamarie Beckel

  After what seemed an eternity, Freude said, “Herr Doktor Lindner, would you assist in the examination?”

  The physician came toward her. “Where did you get this,” he said, peering at her thigh.

  “An accident with the razor,” said Freude. “She fought me while I was shaving her.”

  To Eva’s horror, Freude forced her to bend over, then touched her where he’d shaved her, in the most private of places, the rod probing. She could hear her heart thudding, her own blood rushing in her ears. The light dimmed, then brightened, then dimmed again. The contents of her stomach rose, too quickly. The vile broth splashed onto the stone floor.

  With a disgusted frown at the putrid pool, Freude jerked her upright and handed her the torn shift, which she hastily wrapped around herself. Lindner walked back to his chair. “I can find no blemish, no mark,” said the physician.

  Freude flashed a knife blade in Eva’s face, then cut a length of hemp from a long coil and tied it around her to keep the torn shift closed. Eva tried not to inhale his hateful greasy stink. “I do not think,” he said, pulling the rope so tight it cut into her waist, “that means the woman is innocent.” He bound her wrists.

  “I agree,” said Father Streng. “We all know what Jean Bodin has written about the absence of the stigma diaboli. The Devil needs to mark only those accomplices whose loyalty he cannot trust. Frau Rosen may enjoy a special trust, such that she needs no mark.”

  Lutz jumped up. “But didn’t we just recommend release for Herr Silberhans because he had no mark?”

  “True, Herr Silberhans had no mark,” said Hampelmann, “but there was no other evidence against him.”

  “Frau Rosen, do you still deny the charges against you?” said Chancellor Brandt.

  “I am innocent.”

  “Show her the first instrument of torture.”

  Freude lifted the thumbscrews from a shelf. He held them close to her face. Her vision blurred. Her bowels churned. The stink of her own vomit made her gag. From a great distance, she heard the chancellor say, “Repeat the questions.”

  Hampelmann stepped toward her. “How did you know Frau Imhof, Frau Basser, and Fraulein Stolzberger?”

  He regarded her coldly, as if she were a stranger, or even worse, a contemptible beggar. Was he still angry, after nearly twelve years?

  “I did not know them.”

  “Where and when did you attend the sabbath?”

  “I have never been to a sabbath.”

  “How did you make Herr Kaiser ill?”

  “I had nothing to do with his illness.”

  “How did you kill your husband?” Hampelmann gave a slight nod toward Freude, who lifted Eva’s bound hands and laid them on the cold polished metal.

  She gulped back a whimper. “I did not kill Jacob.”

  “How do you use white feathers and coloured rocks in your rituals?” said Hampelmann.

  “I have no rituals. I am not a witch. You know that.”

  His eyes held the hard glint and impenetrable depth of blue ice, and Eva understood now that he would not help her, not now, not ever. Wilhelm hated her.

  “Then why is your daughter crippled?” he said.

  “My sin,” she whispered. “She suffers for my sin.”

  “Record her as taciturn,” he said brusquely.

  Chancellor Brandt brought his gold pomander to his nose. “Take her back to her cell, Herr Freude. If she’s not more forthcoming when we question her again, we will be forced to bring in the child.”

  19

  22 April 1626

  Hampelmann stepped out from the darkness just as the Angelus bells started to ring. He blinked in the bright sunlight, then turned toward Saint Kilian’s Cathedral and made the sign of the cross, grateful to be free, finally, of the dank chamber’s chill and the sour stink of the executioner and the prisoners. His gratitude was tempered, however, by the fact that no carriage awaited him. A fortnight earlier his physician had held a cup of his urine to the light, swirled it, and pronounced that Hampelmann still had an excess of black bile. He’d then prescribed at least two miles of walking daily, in addition to hellebore in his pomander, and teas brewed from feverfew and St. John’s wort gathered on a Friday in the hour of Jupiter, the herbs to be obtained only from a licensed apothecary, never a midwife. So now Hampelmann, weary though he was, would have to walk from the Prisoners’ Tower to the marketplace before retiring to his home. Such a bother.

  Placing his broad-brimmed hat firmly on his head and tucking his ledger under his arm, he began his trek, crossing Neubaustrasse to Dommerschulstrasse. He made a wide arc around the ragged beggars clustered near the arched gate of the university. Not wide enough. A hump-backed old woman limped toward him, her toothless gums mouthing pathetic entreaties. He tossed a pfennig at her so she wouldn’t come close enough to touch him with her filthy clawing hand.

  Beauty. His whole being craved beauty. He recalled a small, but charming courtyard along the route to the marketplace. He hurried toward it, striding quickly and resolutely past throngs of beggars and stray dogs. Two of the curs were locked in flagrant coitus. A circle of grubby children had formed around them, pointing and laughing. Disgusted, Hampelmann averted his eyes.

  When he finally arrived at the courtyard, he sighed with relief. He leaned against the stone fence and embraced the garden’s beauty: the shiny yellow flowers, the fragrant white ones, and the bell-like blooms dangling from a gracefully arched stem. The unopened buds were pinkish, the open ones blue. Borage, that’s what it was called. Maybe. He wasn’t sure. Helena would know, just as she would know the names of the yellow flowers and the white ones, and the buds that had not yet opened. His wife would know the name of the handsome bird, with the rusty face and breast, that warbled from the cherry tree. Helena had time and leisure to learn the names of flowers and birds, to walk among them, to meditate on beauty. She could read poetry: Martin Opitz, and the lyrical couplets of Würzburg’s own poet, Walter von der Vogelweide. Burdened by duty, Hampelmann had time only to visit the poet’s grave in the Lusam Garden, and there, to meditate on his personal defects and to struggle to write his own mediocre couplets. Every hour of his day was devoted to his responsibilities to Würzburg and the Prince-Bishop, his responsibilities to God. He could not afford the time to contemplate what was serene and beautiful and good, but only what was sordid and despicable and ugly.

  That hadn’t always been so. He touched his fingertips to his mouth and recalled the sweetness of Eva’s lips. She’d been beautiful. She was still beautiful. Thinner than he remembered, but then he’d never seen her naked. And she still had those alluring eyes that were brown one moment, green the next, with gold flecks that caught the light. There’d been a time when he could spend hours meditating on the beauty of those eyes, a time when he could believe that Eva was good as well as beautiful.

  The nameless bird stopped singing. Hopping closer, it flicked its tail. Excrement fell onto a yellow blossom. Hampelmann turned away and walked slowly toward the marketplace. Eva was like that bird, or one of the Prince-Bishop’s canaries, beautiful and blameless on the outside, her voice sweet, but all the while dropping bits of filth all around her. She used her beauty to seduce men, to tempt them, then polluted them with her vile filth. All the men who came to his father’s house had wanted her. Hampelmann had seen the yearning in the hungry eyes that followed her when she served the men wine. Throats cleared and words stuttered as their tongues flicked over bloodless lips.

  Hampelmann continued on, passing peddlers and merchants closing up their stands for the day. The air was redolent with the stink of rancid pork and spoiled fish, last fall’s rotting cabbage. He picked his way carefully around the piles of refuse.

  In the middle of the marketplace, locked in the pillory, stood a plump woman in tattered clothes, her age indeterminate because she wore a brightly painted shame mask, so heavy it pulled her head forward. Blasphemy. That’s what the sign posted above her said, which Hampelmann had already sur
mised from the mask’s long red tongue.

  He turned away from the woman and her monstrous mask, and her equally revolting crime, and gazed upon what he’d come so far to see: the magnificent Mary’s Chapel with its tall arched windows and the stone figures of Christ’s apostles adorning its outer walls. It had been built upon the site of a former Jewish synagogue. Hampelmann crossed himself. A triumph of the true faith. The chapel’s beauty and grace delighted his weary eyes. He studied the intricately carved sandstone figures of Adam and Eve flanking the chapel’s south portal. Eve, naked and alluring, yet seemingly innocent, even as she held the apple at her waist, just below her girlishly rounded breast, and the serpent twined up her leg. Just like Eva, thought Hampelmann. Eva, who was still seductive, even when shaved of her chestnut hair and dressed in a shapeless linen shift. Even her name suggested witchcraft: Eva, Eve. The Devil’s accomplice, the primordial temptress leading men into sin. The words of Der Hexenhammer sprang to his mind. For though the Devil tempted Eve to sin, yet Eve seduced Adam. And as the sin of Eve would not have brought death to our soul and body unless the sin had afterwards passed onto Adam, to which he was tempted by Eve, not by the Devil; therefore she is more bitter than death...More bitter than death, again, because bodily death is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling and secret enemy.

  A secret enemy. Years ago Eva had seduced him into promising her marriage. She allowed his kisses, but rebuffed anything more. So he offered to marry her, and in the daze of lust, almost believed the promise himself. Eva, so accomplished at deception, was not fooled. Hampelmann ground his teeth as he recalled her stance – imperious, hands on hips, as if she were a lady of noble birth – when she reminded him that he was still subject to his father’s will and that Herr Doktor Hampelmann would never allow his son to marry a woman of such low birth, a maidservant with no dowry. She did not believe, she said, that he could summon the courage to defy his father and risk his inheritance.

  Infuriated by her impertinence and inflamed with desire, he’d pressed himself against her, forcing his mouth on hers, his hands groping. The memory of his own base lust made him wince, but his shame dissipated when he recalled Eva’s coy affectation of horror, as if she’d not invited his advances in the first place, as if she were innocent.

  Hampelmann spat into the street. Innocence. Feigned innocence. All women were guilty, even the purest, of leading men into sin and ruin. It was as Saint Jerome had written: woman is the gate of the Devil, the path of wickedness, the sting of the serpent. And Ecclesiasticus: For many have perished by the beauty of a woman, and hereby lust is enkindled as a fire.

  The evening breeze off the Main lifted the brim of Hampelmann’s hat and brought to his nose the river’s fulsome odour. It was a fine spring evening, yet everything smelled foul: the river, the piles of garbage in the marketplace, the refuse outside the butcher shops, the unwashed bodies passing by. The stench nearly made him gag. He brought his pomander to his nose.

  He really should warn Lutz about Eva’s seductiveness, let him know just how skilled she was at pretending innocence. Hampelmann turned away from Mary’s Chapel and began walking toward his home on Hofstrasse. But then he’d have to admit that he’d known Eva, known her quite well, in fact.

  Eva’s real nature, the lustful eagerness he’d discerned, showed itself soon after his father announced his betrothal to Helena. Within days, Eva went out and seduced a master baker, a vulgar old widower eager to marry. Sinned with him – before they were hastily wed. She’d even admitted as much today, conceding that her daughter’s crippled foot was the result of her sin.

  A few paces ahead, Hampelmann saw a skinny dog sniffing around the doorway of a closed butcher shop. He was tempted to kick the mangy cur out of his way, a bitch nursing pups by the look of her drooping teats, but he knew she might whirl around and bite him. He gave her a wide berth.

  The sun was low in the sky, gilding splendour and squalor alike with its golden glow. He quickened his pace. Helena would have ordered supper to be ready soon, and she pouted when he didn’t return home on time. It was a pretty pout, but annoying all the same. She simply didn’t understand the importance of his work. She’d ask a question or two, but when he tried to answer, her lovely ivory face would crumple in bewilderment, law being far too complex for even the intelligent female mind.

  Yet her questions lingered, dark wrinkles in the smooth white sheets of his logic, and he’d wake in the middle of the night, plagued with doubts, his skin cold and clammy. Was it possible that he and the other commissioners were condemning innocent women? Or was the Devil using Helena to plant these very doubts in his heart? To bolster his resolve, Hampelmann would go to his library to re-read Der Hexenhammer and books by Jean Bodin, Peter Binsfeld, Henri Boguet, and Martin Delrio. Sitting within the warm glow of candlelight, he’d remind himself that the popes had blessed and encouraged these very writings. And then there was Father Streng, a Jesuit of formidable intelligence – and absolute certainty about what he knew to be true. His habit of quoting authorities grated, but it also reassured. How could such a brilliant man, quoting other brilliant men, be wrong? Calmed, Hampelmann would return to his bed to sleep a few more hours.

  Arriving at the gates of his house, Hampelmann paused a moment to consider the solidity of the stone, a bulwark against the world, a refuge protecting his wife and daughter, who had little comprehension of just how evil the world could be. A docile shepherd trotted close and sat just beyond the gates. The dog neither moved nor made a sound until Hampelmann stepped through and stroked her head. “Good girl, Wache.” Such a pleasing and obedient temperament, he thought. So unlike the mongrels that roamed the streets. Perhaps at the next Lower City Council meeting he’d propose that stray dogs be rounded up and killed rather than allowed to roam free to breed more starving curs to harass the citizens of Würzburg and to entertain the beggars with their lascivious behaviour.

  He went into the house, the shepherd following close behind. He handed his hat to a doughy-faced maidservant. “Wine, the Stein Silvaner, in the library,” he said, trying to hide his disdain for her ugliness. He’d deliberately asked Helena to hire homely maidservants. He wanted no man who entered his household, including himself, ever to be tempted.

  Hampelmann walked toward the back of the house, toward the library, Wache at his heels, and pushed open the heavy wooden door. Anna lifted her sweet face from the book in her lap. Now there was beauty: a heart-shaped face, creamy alabaster skin, a delicate, but noble profile.

  “Hello, Papa.”

  He laid the ledger on his desk, then stepped close to her chair. “What are you reading, Leibchen?” He stroked her silky hair, which was so pale it was nearly white, the same colour as his own. It was tied back by a blue satin ribbon. A blue satin flower bloomed over one ear. A strand of hair caught between his fingers and came away in his hand. He tucked it into a pocket in the lining of his breeches.

  “A book of poetry Mama picked out. Martin Opitz. I don’t like it very much.” She thrust out her lip petulantly, then quickly pulled it back and looked down into her lap.

  “Where is your mother?”

  “Out in the garden, trimming dead blooms. I was helping her, but she sent me in here to be out of the sun.”

  If Helena was still in the garden, thought Hampelmann, supper was not yet ready. There was time for some reading. The maidservant slipped quietly into the room and set a goblet on the desk.

  “What did you do today, Papa?”

  “Legal business, Leibchen. It’s complicated, and not for the ears of little girls. Read a bit longer, then we’ll have supper.”

  Pouting prettily, just like her mother, Anna bent her head over the book.

  Hampelmann slid a thick leather-bound volume from the shelves and sat down at his desk. Wache lay on the floor beside him. Opening the tabs on Discours des sorciers by Henri Boguet, a French lawyer and judge, Hampelmann turned to the worn pages he’d read again and again: I would yet have it plainly k
nown that I am a sworn enemy to witches, and that I shall never spare them for their execrable abominations and for the countless numbers of them which are seen to increase every day so that it seems that we are now in the time of the Antichrist, since among the signs that are given of his arrival, this is one of the chief, namely, that witchcraft shall be rife throughout the world.

  Hampelmann nodded. Yes, he should not let his concern for protecting the innocent get in the way of extirpating witches. The world was nearing the end-time, and the righteous were at war with evil. This was not the time to be cautious.

  He flipped to another well-worn page. It had always puzzled him that witches craved fornication with the Devil, though they invariably described coitus as painful and without pleasure. As his finger trailed down the page, he recalled the lecherous mongrels. The Devil uses them so because he knows that women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such agreeable provocations; moreover, there is nothing which makes a woman more subject and loyal to a man than that he should abuse her body.

  Hampelmann turned then to the real reason he’d selected that book from his collection: Boguet’s arguments justifying the calling of children as witnesses against their parents. Hampelmann was uneasy that Chancellor Brandt intended to call Eva’s daughter to testify against her. Calling children as witnesses, especially when they were required to testify against their own parents, was not permitted in any other kind of legal proceeding. But then again, Boguet argued, the crime of witchcraft was so secret that sometimes the only witnesses were the woman’s own children. Boguet even went so far as to recommend the execution of children who confessed to joining their mothers in witchcraft, reasoning that once they were in Satan’s clutches they seldom reformed. Hampelmann wasn’t so sure. On the one hand, he preferred giving children the benefit of the doubt. If they failed to reform, they could always be executed later, before they’d done too much harm. On the other hand, if Boguet was correct in his estimate that there were nearly two million witches in Europe, multiplying upon the earth even as worms in a garden, perhaps the commission should grasp the opportunity to execute them whenever it could, as early as possible.