‘However, he was a lay brother, and that is not the same as an ordained Dominican.’
The town’s pastors and the Dominicans will always find something to fight about, Melchior mused. He stood up and saw Freisinger do the same.
‘Sires, sires,’ Freisinger cried out, raising his beer tankard. ‘As host I ask that you do not bicker here within our guildhall – we want to avoid arguments and fights. We have not gathered here in order to pass judgement upon anyone.’ He looked towards Melchior and added, ‘Does the Sire Apothecary wish to say something?’
Melchior took a deep breath, sipped his beer and then addressed Rode. ‘Esteemed Sire Rode, I wish to ask whether you know of any reason by which you can claim with conviction that Brother Wunbaldus’s corpse may not be buried in the cemetery’s blessed soil? If this reason does exist then speak up; if not then let us drink to ratify this so that truth might rise higher than rumour.’
Rode appeared uneasy. He spread his hands and looked around pleadingly, but everyone shouted, demanding a reply.
‘Even if I did know …’ he said, stammering. ‘That is, if I were able, then I …’
‘Sire Rode’s tongue is bound by the holy secrecy of the confessional,’ Prior Eckell declared.
‘That is true,’ Rode asserted. ‘Brother Wunbaldus came to the Church of the Holy Ghost yesterday – that is fact; however, his confession is a secret of the holy sacrament, and I may not speak of it.’
This came as a surprise to most present, even to the Commander, Melchior noted. Yet Eckell then raised his hand, and the uproar slowly subsided.
‘You may, Sire Rode, because I free you from your obligation to keep secret the holy sacrament,’ the Prior said. ‘I may do this under canon law. The abbot of my monastery in Lund has given me this right, and the Bishop of Tallinn is also subject to his word. I free you from your obligation to keep the confession secret.’
‘I don’t know whether here and now is the proper time and place, Prior?’ the Commander exclaimed. ‘Sire Blackhead?’
It was unheard of, shocking, that a pastor be freed from keeping the secrecy of the confessional in a guildhall. Melchior noticed Hinricus speedily approach the Prior and whisper in his ear, but the old Dominican merely shook his head. He was agitated and unsettled, but he was certain of his privilege and his rights.
Freisinger called for silence, consulted a pair of Blackheads and finally declared, ‘In the name of the Brotherhood of Blackheads, I allow this to be done. And what is more, I demand it. If Wunbaldus can help us find a murderer from beyond the grave, then speak, Sire Rode, speak.’
Rode was still having doubts. He admitted that he was not that familiar with canon law and pointed out that the Council and the Bishop of Tallinn were his superiors.
Dorn reassured him. ‘Fear not, Sire Rode. Even I have heard – and I believe that the esteemed Prior may confirm my words – that the secrecy of the confessional is not sacred when the confessor has taken his own life. He then no longer has a right to the divine sacraments. Is this not so?’
‘That is true indeed,’ the men rumbled in consent.
‘Speak, Sire Rode, speak,’ Eckell demanded, ‘and do it quickly because I must soon ask Hinricus to lead me to our infirmary. Speak and fear not. I free you from secrecy. I hold myself responsible and assure you that God will soon allow light to be shed on the truth, and even you will understand. Speak.’
Rode prayed, and the Commander promised that Tallinn’s bishop would confirm everything the Prior had said if needs be. Pastors had been freed of their obligations to secrecy on previous occasions.
A clear sense of relief could be heard in Rode’s voice when he at last finished praying, squeezed his wooden cross tightly in his hands and rose with determination. He certainly seemed to doubt whether what he was doing was correct by canon law, but it evidently brought him some relief.
‘I will speak, I will speak,’ he sighed, and everyone around him fell silent. ‘And may all the saints be my witnesses that I do this in the firm belief in the secrecy of the holy sacrament and in the confidence that the man to whom I administered confession yesterday is not worthy of it. Esteemed Commander, Prior, sires, last evening when I was locking the door to the Church of the Holy Ghost a man whom I recognized as the Dominican Lay Brother Wunbaldus stepped into the church. He called to me that he wished to confess and strode quickly towards the confessional bench. He went so quickly that when I caught up with him he was already sitting and saying that his burden of sin was grievous.’
Only the Prior’s heavy breathing pierced the quiet. All eyes were fixed on Rode, as if he were about to relay to everyone the Pope’s confession.
‘He said that he had thrust the Word of God away from him and that greed had driven him to criminal acts. He did not allow me to speak or to question. He said that he had killed two people; he said that he had cut off their heads; he said that one of them was a high-ranked Knight of the Order and the other a master mason –’
Rode’s words were buried in shouts of outrage. Everyone leaped up, knocking beer tankards flying, and a pair of mutts scampered out from beneath the table, howling and running to cower in the corner. Only Melchior remained seated as if he had not heard anything surprising, although only the more acutely did he thus observe the others.
The Commander’s thunderous and enraged roar drowned out the other men. ‘Wunbaldus? It was Wunbaldus? The brewer?’
Melchior noticed that Eckell wished to say something. He was waving his arms in the air wildly, but no one paid attention. Only Hinricus stood near him, supporting him and attempting to hold him back. However, the old monk ripped himself free of Hinricus’s grasp. He wanted to speak, but it was as if his words were caught in his throat.
When Freisinger had succeeded in quietening the men, Rode continued, ‘Yes, he said those very words. He said he had killed two men, that he had done what he had to do, although he also knew that these sins had ruined his life. He said he could no longer bear to live – he recognized that he no longer had the right to live. He would not hear me and said that he only had one step left to take. He was to drink from the cup that he had filled with his two murders.’
‘Did that filthy miscreant say why he killed Clingenstain?’ Spanheim shouted, incandescent with rage.
‘No, he did not. He said nothing after stating that a cup of poison now awaited him …’
A screech cut through Rode’s speech. ‘You poisoned … It is poison. You …’ It was Prior Eckell whose frantic voice silenced everyone.
Hinricus had drawn a couple steps back from the Prior, but Eckell rose up and then almost immediately collapsed. Melchior initially thought that it was hysteria that had knocked him off his feet, although he realized in the next second that it must be something else. Everything happened very quickly and yet in slow motion. Eckell had shrieked these words, leaped up then lurched and collapsed over the long guild table a split second later. He was unable to breathe and tore his tunic open at the front with a flailing motion. He tore something from around his neck that flashed like silver, yanking it with such force that the leather cord snapped. The Prior threw it somewhere, at someone, towards the table. Melchior could not make sense of what was going on. The object fell between the benches.
Hinricus jumped up to support the Prior, but Eckell pulled himself out of his grasp, extended his hand towards the table and croaked, ‘You knew. You …’
But there the man’s words stopped as his breath reached its end. He fell to the floor, and, as he did so, grabbed at Commander Spanheim, who stood nearest to him. He seized the Commander’s black scapular and tore at it like a madman. Everyone jumped to their feet and saw how the old monk – his eyes red with rage, fear, insanity or something else entirely and his face distorted into an anguished grimace – lashed his arms wildly around himself and brandished the Commander’s scapular like a cross to drive out an evil spirit. Eckell pulled the cloth down over his head then slumped to the ground.
Melchior bolted to his side and held back the crowding men. He watched as the Prior thrashed and twitched convulsively, gurgling and inhuman groans of pain emerging from his throat as he then doubled over, vomiting and heaving. All his intestines burst forth in an instant, and the life in Eckell’s eyes faded. If his eyes had indeed focused on a particular person during his moment of death, Melchior could not determine who.
‘Father, Father,’ Hinricus cried. Someone roared that the town doctor must be called. Another shouted, ‘Poison? What poison?’ ‘Lord have mercy, he is dying,’ someone cried, then suddenly – as if the Archangel Gabriel himself had commanded all to be silent for an instant so that the dying soul could spend its last earthly second in peace – everyone fell silent. They stood and stared at the old man twitching before them, the spark of life already extinguished in his eyes. Eckell’s body lived for just one more inhalation of breath, and then out from between his vomitcovered lips slipped a final sigh. Prior Baltazar Eckell could no longer hear this himself, though. The Dominican Prior Baltazar Eckell was dead.
‘He is dead. St Catherine and Mother of God, he is dead. Our beloved prior is dead,’ Hinricus whispered, falling to his knees beside the body. He wept.
Everyone now grasped this fact.
The men backed away from the corpse haltingly, and only Hinricus remained at the old man’s side, praying. Tears streamed down his young face from beneath his closed eyelids. Prior Eckell’s dead body lay curled up in a puddle of his own purged innards, his frozen expression containing pain and … anger.
Anger? thought Melchior. Oh, it was anger all right. The Prior had grasped the truth in the final moment of his life, but he had taken it with him to the land of the dead.
‘Poisoned,’ someone whispered.
Poison? Absolutely. There could be no doubt of that. Melchior heard disquieted, frightened voices whispering around him, ‘What did he say about poison?’ ‘Who poisoned him?’ ‘What did he actually say?’ ‘Has he been poisoned?’ Everyone drew away from the body. The breath of poison could still be there.
‘The Prior said someone poisoned him,’ Hinricus said abruptly and loudly. His eyes remained shut and his face was wet with tears. He spoke to everyone at once and to no one at all. ‘St Catherine, this truly cannot be possible. Then he, he … grabbed the Commander …’
‘What now?’ Spanheim sputtered. ‘He fell on to me, he was in his death throes.’
‘Yes, but he said that someone had poisoned him.’
‘Send for the doctor,’ someone shouted again.
But Freisinger’s voice then sounded, ‘There is nothing more the doctor can do here. Someone should send rather for the Dominicans, who might properly care for the Prior’s body.’
The Blackhead pushed his way through the horrified guests and approached the corpse. He kneeled down next to Hinricus.
‘Oh, heavenly grace, he believed he had been poisoned. He believed he had been poisoned at the Brotherhood of Blackheads.’
This fact now struck everyone. Poison was a dreadful, stealthy weapon. All knew of it, but people were only poisoned in foreign lands far away and never here in Tallinn. Poison had no place within the safety of the town walls. Poison had even less of a right to trespass into the rooms of the Blackheads’ guildhall, on to the sacred Smeckeldach table, on to the trays filled with tankards of beer and plates groaning with meat. Every townsman present – merchants and masters alike – now stared with open mouths and frightened expressions at the plates and cups from which they had just eaten and drunk.
‘He said that someone had poisoned him,’ Freisinger echoed gravely. ‘Sires, Commander, that is not possible.’
‘I must run, I must … I must take word to the brothers. I must inform them of this awful news, I must …’ Hinricus muttered, rising to his feet.
‘Of course. Go, run, monk,’ the Commander barked.
Hinricus now began to move quickly. He was suddenly overwhelmed by many thoughts and many words. ‘Yes, I must go. To the monastery … Yes, I must tell the almsdealer that the Prior is dead and that he must now give out alms to the townspeople. Yes, I must leave at once …’ He drew further away and at a faster pace with every step until he reached the door, by which time he was already running. No one watched him leave. It was Dorn, who, surrounded by the great disorder, finally proposed that someone should also inform the authorities.
‘We don’t know what message we should take,’ Melchior reasoned.
‘What do you mean, what message? He’s dead, poisoned, just as he himself said,’ the Magistrate huffed in bewilderment.
‘Yes, but what did he say precisely?’ The Apothecary’s voice was loud enough that the other men fell quiet and pricked up their ears. ‘He certainly wanted to speak – he wanted to say many things – but he was unable to get the words out.’
‘I heard precisely,’ Freisinger said. ‘He said, “You poisoned.”’
‘Yet who did the Prior have in mind? Did he accuse anyone?’ Melchior asked. No one replied. Melchior noticed that a few men cast glances towards the Commander, although Spanheim did not see this himself. The Apothecary then cleared a path through the crowd and bent down close to the Prior. His death had not been pretty; it had not been the death of a clergyman. Eckell had departed in fits of torment, and a lump even rose in Melchior’s throat when taking in the disfigured body. He leaned over the corpse and inspected it carefully, lightly squeezing the dead man’s joints, raising his limp hand, peering at his fingers and fingernails, parting the Prior’s hair away from his temples and touching his face, sniffing at his mouth. As the minutes passed, a look of incredulity crept over the Apothecary’s expression. Melchior stared at a clump of Eckell’s grey hair in his palm, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. Others gathered around him, but no one dared step any closer to the body.
‘The Prior believed he had been poisoned, but how could he know this?’ Melchior murmured. ‘He suffered pains, yet he was an old, sick man and had been no stranger to pain for quite some time. I fear that the monastery infirmarer is not the best bloodletter.’
‘You are right, Melchior. How did the Prior work out that he had been poisoned?’ Freisinger said suddenly. ‘I can swear in the names of all the saints that he cannot have been poisoned. It is simply not possible. I can swear, I can swear that no one in our kitchen has mixed poison into –’
‘That would be madness,’ shouted one of the servants. ‘I bought all of the meat and other foods personally.’
A shocking thought had surfaced in the Blackhead’s mind. He walked over to the table at which the Prior had been seated and seized the dead man’s beer tankard.
‘We all ate the same food and drank the same beer,’ he declared. ‘It simply cannot be that only the Prior swallowed poison. You see, here is his plate on to which food was served from the same tray as ours. Here is his cup, and the beer is from the same cask.’ Freisinger grabbed a bone from the Prior’s plate from which the old man had gnawed the softer meat.
‘Sire Blackhead, under no circumstance should you try …’ Melchior shouted, but Freisinger had already made up his mind.
‘The good name and honour of the Brotherhood of Blackheads are as important to me as the Scriptures. In the name of truth and justice, you are all witnesses.’ And with these words Freisinger bit from the shank of meat, drank every last drop of beer from Eckell’s tankard to wash it down and stuffed a piece of gravy-soaked bread into his mouth.
Someone shouted out in fear.
‘Do not dice with death, Freisinger,’ came Tweffell’s voice.
Nevertheless, Freisinger stood up and placed the empty tankard upside down on the table.
‘You are all witness to the fact that no one is fed poison by the Brotherhood of Blackheads,’ he declared. ‘You see that the Prior’s food was not poisoned, that his beer was not poisoned. I live and breathe, and, if the Lord wills it, I will still breathe tomorrow morning.’
‘If that was arsenic, and I believe that
it was arsenic, then the pains should begin after a few seconds. Arsenic does not take effect in a heartbeat but still with extreme swiftness,’ Melchior spoke seriously.
‘Arsenic? Arsenic, you say?’ came Spanheim’s voice.
‘Yes, I said arsenic,’ Melchior replied. ‘I am familiar enough with apothecaries’ wisdom to believe that it was arsenic by which Brother Wunbaldus perished and that arsenic also put an end to Prior Eckell’s days.’
‘Arsenic? That dreadful poison?’ Kilian exclaimed.
‘Yes. I believe this based on what Magister de Ardoyn wrote in his Book of Poisons. The knowledge contained in that book was passed down from the Berbers and the Romans. Every apothecary must recognize poisons, and there is likely no other poison in the world as fearful as arsenic. It has no colour, no scent, no taste. It is not bitter, not sweet, not sour, yet when it has made its way into your veins it causes hellish pain and kills quickly. There are few attributes by which an apothecary can say that a person has swallowed arsenic, and the majority of them – as Magister de Ardoyn writes – are similar to the signs of ordinary food poisoning or cholera. However, when I now look upon the unfortunate Prior’s corpse, then –’
‘Arsenic or not, here I stand alive and well because there could not have been a speck of arsenic in Prior Eckell’s food or drink,’ Freisinger interrupted. ‘And whoever says that the Prior was poisoned at the Brotherhood of Blackheads’ is a liar.’
‘You are a bold man, Freisinger,’ grunted the Goldsmith. ‘But are you not too bold, perhaps?’
‘What in heavens do you see, Melchior?’ Dorn asked, ending the exchange.
Melchior slowly raised his head. ‘When I observe this body and recall what De Ardoyn wrote about arsenic then I would say with all certainty that this man died of arsenic poisoning. Look here, you can pull his hair out easily; and see, white lines have appeared on his fingernails. These are sure signs that the poison was arsenic, although …’
Apothecary Melchior and the Mystery of St Olaf's Church Page 23
