The bailiffs opened a trapdoor on the ground floor. From there, stairs led down to a sooty room with coarse stone walls. In the corner to the left there was a stained rack with a wooden wheel at the head. Next to that sat a brazier in which several pairs of pincers had been rusting away for years. Here and there, stone blocks with iron halter rings lay on the floor. A chain with a hook dangled from the ceiling. Yesterday a bailiff had brought thumbscrews and more pincers from the Ballenhaus and thrown them in a corner. In another corner there was a stack of rotting wooden chairs. The torture chamber looked neglected.
Johann Lechner looked around the room with the torch. Then he regarded the hangman reproachfully.
“Well, you could’ve tidied up a little in here.”
Jakob Kuisl shrugged. “You were in such a great hurry.” Stoically, he began to distribute the chairs. “And it’s been a while since the last interrogation.”
The hangman remembered it well. It had been four years since he had tied the forger Peter Leitner’s hands behind his back and fastened them to the hook in the ceiling. They had tied forty-pound boulders to his feet, and then his arms broke and he whimpered his confession. Previously, Kuisl had tortured him with thumbscrews and red-hot pincers. The hangman had been convinced from the start that Leitner was guilty, just as now he was convinced that Martha Stechlin was innocent.
“Goddamn you, get moving! We don’t have all day!”
The clerk slouched down in one of the chairs and waited for Jakob Kuisl to find seats for everyone present. With his two enormous hands the hangman struggled to lift up a heavy oaken table and put it down hard in front of Lechner. The clerk gave him another look of disapproval, then he took out his inkwell and quills and spread a parchment scroll before him.
“Let’s get started.”
Meanwhile, the witnesses had taken their seats. Martha Stechlin cowered against the far wall, as though looking for a mouse hole through which to make her escape.
“Let her undress,” said Johann Lechner.
Jakob Kuisl looked at him with surprise.
“But didn’t you first—”
“I said, let her undress. We want to search her for witches’ marks. If we find any, we’ll have proof she’s guilty and the interrogation can proceed all the more swiftly.”
Two bailiffs approached the midwife, who was huddled in a corner, her arms crossed in front of her. The baker Michael Berchtholdt licked his thin lips. He was going to get his show today.
Jakob Kuisl swore silently. He hadn’t expected that. Searching for witches’ marks was a common way of hunting down witches. If there were strangely shaped birthmarks on a suspect’s body, that was taken as a sign from the devil. Often the hangman would then perform the needle test and push a needle into the putative witch’s suspicious birthmark. If no blood came out, she was certain to be a witch. Kuisl knew that his grandfather had ways to avoid bleeding during the needle test. That way, the trial was over sooner, and the hangman got his pay sooner.
The sound of ripping fabric interrupted his thought. One of the bailiffs had torn off Martha’s stinking, soiled garment. Underneath, the midwife was pale and skinny. Bruises on her thighs and forearms bore witness to yesterday morning’s fight with Josef Grimmer. She pressed back against the cellar wall, trying to cover her breasts and genitals with her hands.
The bailiff pulled her up by her hair. She screamed. Jakob Kuisl saw how Michael Berchtholdt’s little red eyes groped the midwife’s body like fingers.
“Is that really necessary? At least give her a chair!” Jakob Schreevogl had jumped to his feet and tried to restrain the bailiffs, but the clerk pulled him down again.
“We want to discover the truth. And for that we have to do it. And well, all right, let the Stechlin woman have a chair.”
Reluctantly, the bailiff pushed a chair to the center of the room and sat the midwife down on it. Her frightened eyes darted back and forth between the clerk and the hangman.
“Cut off her hair,” said Lechner. “We want to look for witches’ marks there as well.”
As the bailiff was stepping toward her with a knife, Kuisl quickly grabbed the weapon from his hand.
“I’ll do that.”
Cautiously he cut off the midwife’s straggly hair. Tufts of it fell to the ground around the chair. Martha Stechlin wept softly.
“Don’t be afraid, Martha,” he whispered into her ear. “I won’t hurt you. Not today.”
Johann Lechner cleared his throat. “Hangman, I want you to search this woman for witches’ marks. Everywhere.”
The baker Berchtholdt leaned over toward the clerk.
“You don’t really believe he’s going to find anything,” he muttered. “He’s hand in glove with the Stechlin woman. I’ve seen it myself how she slips him herbs and goodness knows what else. And Keusslin’s milkmaid told me that—”
