The Hangman's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

Klingensteiner was forty years old and had already survived a dozen confinements. Only nine children had been born alive; five of them had not seen their first spring. Four daughters remained to Maria Josefa, but her husband still hoped for an heir. The midwife, feeling inside the mother’s body, had already established that this time it was a boy. It seemed to be alive, but with every hour that passed it became more likely that neither mother nor child would survive the struggle.
    Maria Josefa screamed, raged, and wept. She cursed her husband, who mounted her anew after every birth like a randy goat, she cursed the child, and she cursed the Almighty. As dawn broke, the midwife was sure that the boy was dead. For a case like this she kept an old poker handy with a hook on the end that she could use in an emergency to pull the child out of the mother’s body like a chunk of meat, sometimes piece by piece. The other women in the stiflingly hot room, the aunts, nieces, and cousins, had already sent for the parish priest; the holy water for an emergency baptism was ready over the fireplace. But then, with a last scream from Mother Klingensteiner, the midwife succeeded in grasping the boy’s feet. He slid out into the daylight like a newborn foal. He was alive.
    It was a robust child. And probably the murderer of his mother, thought Martha Stechlin, as she looked at Maria Josefa’s pale, panting body and severed the umbilical cord with her scissors. The smith’s wife had lost a lot of blood, and the straw on the ground was red and slimy. Her eyes were sunken like those of a corpse. But at least her husband had his heir now.
    The birth had taken all night. In the morning Martha Stechlin prepared another strengthening decoction of wine, garlic, and fennel and washed the mother; then she went home. Now she was sitting at the table in her room and trying to wipe the weariness out of her eyes. About noon the children would look in on her, as they so often did recently. She herself could not have children, although she had brought so many into the world. It made the midwife happy that Sophie, little Peter, and the others came to visit her frequently, though she sometimes wondered what the children found to like in a forty-year-old midwife with her salves, pots, and powders.
    Martha Stechlin felt her stomach rumble. She suddenly realized that she had eaten nothing for two days. After a few spoonfuls of cold porridge from the pot above the hearth, she wanted to tidy up thoroughly. She was missing something. Something which at all costs must not fall into the wrong hands. Perhaps she had just put it down somewhere…
    Shouting was coming from the market square. At first it was only indistinct, a murmur of voices, quiet but menacing, like the angry buzzing of a swarm of hornets.
    Martha looked up from her bowl. Something had happened out there, but she was too tired to go to the window and find out.
    Then the shouts came nearer. Steps could be heard, people running across the paved market square, past the Stern Inn and into the narrow alley, up to the Küh Gate. Now Martha Stechlin could hear a name emerging from the confusion of voices.
    It was her name.
    “Stechlin, you witch! To the stake with you! Burn her! Come out of there, Stechlin!”
    The midwife leaned out the ground-floor window to find out exactly what was going on, and a fist-size rock hit her directly on the forehead. Everything went black and she sank to the ground. When she came to herself she saw, through a mist of blood, that the door to her house was being forced open. With great presence of mind, she jumped up and threw herself against it. Several legs were trying to force themselves through the opening. Then the door fell shut. From outside came angry shouts.
    Martha searched in her dress for the key. Where could it be? Someone was pushing at the door again. There, on the table next to the apples, there was something shiny. While the midwife held the door shut with