The Hangman's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

nobody had bothered even to remove the child’s wet shirt. Simon ripped it open, revealing a ragged landscape of stabs. Someone must have slashed at the boy in an insane rage. Light-red blood was oozing from a fresh, sizable cut at the back of his head. Simon assumed that the boy had been trapped between the floating logs. His face was black-and-blue, but that, too, could have been done by the logs. The gigantic trunks developed a tremendous power in the stream and could crush a person like a piece of rotten fruit.
    Simon put his ear to the boy’s chest. Then he took a small mirror and held it under his broken, blood-smeared nose. No breath was to be seen. The boy’s eyes were wide open. Peter Grimmer was dead.
    Simon turned to the bystanders, who were watching him in silence. “A wet cloth,” he demanded.
    A woman handed him a linen rag. Simon dipped it in the Lech and wiped the boy’s chest clean. When he had washed off all the blood, he could count seven stabs, all of them around the heart. But despite the deadly wounds, the boy hadn’t died at once. Gabriel the tanner had told Simon on their way down to the landing that the child had been murmuring to himself until just a short while ago.
    Simon turned the boy on his belly. With a vigorous tug he ripped open the shirt on the back as well. A groan went through the crowd.
    Beneath one shoulder blade there was a palm-size sign of a kind that Simon had never seen before—a washed-out purple circle with a cross protruding from the bottom:

    For a moment, there was total silence on the pier. Then the first screams rose. “Witchcraft! There’s witchcraft involved!” Somebody bawled: “The witches have come back to Schongau! They’re getting our kids!”
    Simon passed his fingers over the sign, but it couldn’t be wiped off. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Its dark color made it look like a demonic sign.
    Josef Grimmer, who until then had been leaning on a few friends, staggered toward the corpse of his son. He regarded the sign briefly, as if he couldn’t believe what he saw. Then he shouted to the crowd, “He has that from the Stechlin woman! The midwife, the witch! She painted that on him! She killed him!”
    Simon remembered that lately he had indeed seen the boy at the midwife’s place several times. Martha Stechlin lived up at the Küh Gate right next to the Grimmers. Ever since Agnes Grimmer had died in childbirth, the boy had often turned to her for consolation. His father had never forgiven Stechlin for failing to stop his wife’s hemorrhaging. He held her responsible for his wife’s death.
    “Quiet! We don’t even know whether…”
    The physician tried to shout down the furious howling of the mob, but in vain. The name Stechlin spread across the pier like wildfire. Already some people were rushing across the bridge and up to the town. “The Stechlin woman! The Stechlin woman did it! Run for the bailiff; let him get her!”
    Soon nobody was left on the pier except Simon and the dead boy. Even Josef Grimmer, filled with hate, had followed the others, and only the rushing of the river could be heard.
    Heaving a sigh, Simon wrapped the body in a dirty linen cloth that the washerwomen had left behind in their hurry and shouldered the bundle. Stooped over, puffing and panting, he wended his way toward the Lech Gate. He knew that only one man could help him now.

CHAPTER
2
    T UESDAY
A PRIL 24, A.D . 1659
N INE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
    M ARTHA STECHLIN STOOD IN HER ROOM, DIPPING her bloodstained fingers in a bowl of warm water. Her hair was matted, deep rings appeared under her eyes, and she had not slept for nearly thirty hours. The birth at the Klingensteiners’ had been one of the hardest this year. The child had been lying wrong. Martha Stechlin had smeared her hands with goose fat and felt deep into the mother’s body to turn the unborn child round, but it had slipped away from her again and again.
    Maria Josefa