Free The Hangman's Daughter by Oliver Pötzsch, Lee Chadeayne Page B

about that. Lechner has forbidden it. I’m supposed to be present all the time.”
    “Say, didn’t Stechlin bring your Anna into the world? And your Thomas?”
    “Well, yes…”
    “You see, she brought my children into the world too. D’you really believe that she’s a witch?”
    “No, not really. But the others…”
    “The others, the others…Think for yourself, Andreas! And now let me in. And stop by at my house tomorrow; the cough mixture for your little girl is ready. If I’m not there, you can just take it. It’s on the table in the kitchen.”
    With these words he stretched out his hand. The jailer gave him the key, and the hangman entered the keep.
    There were two cells in the back part of the chamber. In the one on the left Martha Stechlin lay motionless on a bundle of dirty straw. It reeked powerfully of urine and rotten cabbage. Through a small barred window light fell into the front room, from which a stairway led down into the torture chamber. Jakob Kuisl knew it well. Down there were all the things the hangman needed for the painful questioning.
    At first he would only show the instruments to the Stechlin woman—the red-hot pincers and the rusty thumbscrews with which the agony could be intensified one turn at a time. He would have to explain to her what it was like to be slowly stretched by hundredweights of stone until the bones cracked and finally sprang out of their sockets. Often it was sufficient just to show the instruments to break the victim’s spirit. But with Martha Stechlin the hangman was not so sure.
    The midwife seemed to be asleep. When Jakob Kuisl stepped up to the grill, she looked up, blinking. There was a clinking sound. Her hands were connected by rusty chains to rings in the walls. Martha Stechlin tried to smile.
    “They’ve chained me up like a mad dog.” She showed him the chains. “And the grub is just what you would give to one.”
    Kuisl grinned. “It can’t be worse than in your house.”
    Martha Stechlin’s expression darkened. “What’s it look like there? They smashed everything up, didn’t they?”
    “I’ll go there and have another look. But at the moment you have a much greater problem. They think you did it. Tomorrow I’ll come with the court clerk and the burgomaster to show you the instruments.”
    “Tomorrow—so soon?”
    He nodded. Then he regarded the midwife intensely.
    “Martha, tell me honestly, did you do it?”
    “In the name of the Holy Virgin Mary, no! I could never do anything like that to the boy!”
    “But was he with you? In the night before his death too?”
    The midwife was freezing. She was wearing only the thin linen shirt in which she had fled from Grimmer and his men. Her whole body was shivering. Jakob Kuisl handed her his long coat, full of holes, and without a word she took it through the grill and put it round her shoulders. Not until then did she begin to speak.
    “It wasn’t only Peter who was with me. There were some of the others as well. They miss their mothers, that’s it.”
    “Which others?”
    “Well, the orphans, you know—Sophie, Clara, Anton, Johannes…whatever they’re all called. They visited me, sometimes several times a week. They played in my garden, and I made some porridge for them. They haven’t anybody else anymore.”
    Jakob Kuisl remembered. He, too, had occasionally seen children in the midwife’s garden, but he had never realized that they were almost all orphans.
    The hangman knew the children from seeing them in the streets. They often stood together and were avoided by the others. Several times he had intervened when other children had banded together to attack the orphans and beat them. It seemed almost as if they had some sort of sign on their foreheads that led the others to choose them again and again as victims of aggression. For a moment, his mind went back to his own childhood. He was a dirty, dishonorable hangman’s son, but at least he had parents—a blessing that