The Hangman's Daughter

Simon threw on his black overcoat with the shiny copper buttons, ran his fingers through his black hair, and straightened his beard in front of the small mirror in his study. The shoulder-length mane and the Vandyke beard, which was again fashionable, made him appear older than his actual age of twenty-five. Some Schongauers regarded Simon as a dandy, but he didn’t care. He knew that girls saw the matter differently. The ladies of Schongau liked him on account of his dark and dreamy eyes, his well-shaped nose, and his slim figure. Moreover, he was well-groomed. He still had all his teeth; he took regular baths. And he had rose-scented perfume delivered specially from Augsburg, as expensive as his meager salary permitted it. It was only his height that bothered him. He didn’t stand taller than five feet, so he had to look up to most men, and to some women as well. But of course that could be remedied by high-heeled boots.

The knocking had now become a regular hammering. Simon hastened downstairs and flung the door open. Outside was one of the tanners who worked down at the river. His name, Simon remembered, was Gabriel. The physician knew him from an earlier occasion. He had put his arm in splints last year, when he had gotten himself into a drunken fight at St. Jude’s Fair. Simon put on an official mien. He knew what he owed to his profession.

“What’s the matter?”

The tanner regarded him suspiciously. “Where is your father? There’s been a bad accident down on the Lech.”

“My father is over at the infirmary. If it’s urgent, you’ll have to make do with me or with the barber.”

“The barber’s sick himself…”

Simon furrowed his brow. He still was regarded only as the physician’s son here in town, even though he had studied medicine in Ingolstadt and had been his father’s assistant in treating all possible ailments for almost seven years now. In recent years he’d even cured people on his own. His last case had been a dangerous fever. For days and days he’d applied cold ankle wraps and poultices to the cooper’s little daughter and administered a new medication to her: a powder of ground-up yellow bark that came from the West Indies and was known as “Jesuits’ Powder.” The fever had indeed subsided and the cooper had been grateful enough to pay two guilders more than his due. And still townspeople didn’t trust him.

Simon gave the man in front of him a defiant stare. The tanner shrugged, then turned to walk away. Over his shoulder he cast a disparaging glance at the physician.

“All right, come along then, if it isn’t too late already.”

Hurriedly, Simon followed the man and entered Münzstrasse along with him. It was the day after Saint George’s, and most tradesmen had already opened their first-floor shops hours ago. Saint George’s Day was also when maids and farmhands entered service on the farms surrounding Schongau. Accordingly, a great number of people were already about in the streets. On the left, clanging noises emerged from the blacksmith’s shop where an alderman’s horse had just been shod. The butcher next door had just slaughtered a pig, and thin rivulets of blood were trickling between the cobblestones, so that the physician had to step over them with one long stride in order not to soil his new leather boots. A few yards farther, a baker was selling fresh bread. Simon knew that it must be full of husks and would crunch between the teeth when you chewed it. Only the aldermen could afford real white bread these days, and only on special holidays.

And yet, Schongauers had to be glad to have anything to eat at all in that eleventh year after the end of the Great War. In the last four years, crops had twice been practically annihilated by hailstorms. In May of last year, a terrible rainstorm had caused the Lech to flood, and the town mill had been washed away. Since then, Schongauers had to take their grain to Altenstadt or even more distant towns to be ground, which, of course, was more expensive. Many fields in the nearby villages were left fallow, and farms lay abandoned. A third of the population had died of the plague or hunger in the past decades. Those who could, kept livestock in their houses and lived on cabbage and turnips from their own kitchen gardens.