As Simon leafed through the Greek’s text he wondered why he and the hangman could not simply leave the case of the midwife alone. Probably it was precisely this rejection of the obvious, this continuous probing prompted by curiosity, that created a bond between them. That, and a good portion of obstinacy, he thought with a smile.
All of a sudden his finger stopped on a page. Next to a drawing of the human body there were drawings of a few symbols for alchemistic ingredients. One of them showed a triangle with a squiggle below.
It was the old symbol for sulfur.
Simon knew it from his university days, but now he remembered where he had last seen this symbol. It was the symbol that the linen weaver Andreas Dangler had shown him, the same symbol that his foster child Sophie had drawn in the dirt in their backyard.
Simon pushed the book across the table to Jakob Kuisl, who was still crushing herbs in the mortar.
“This is the old symbol I told you about! The symbol Sophie drew! Now I recognize it again!”
The hangman looked at the page and nodded.
“Sulfur…the stink of the devil and of his playmates.”
“I wonder if they really…?” Simon asked.
Jakob Kuisl chewed on his pipe. “First the Venus symbol, and now the symbol for sulfur…well, it is strange.”
“Where did Sophie learn such symbols?” Simon asked. “Only from the midwife. She must have told her and the other children about them. Perhaps she did teach them witchcraft after all.” He sighed. “Unfortunately we can no longer ask her about it, in any case not now.”
“Nonsense,” the hangman growled. “The Stechlin woman is no more witch than I am. The children probably discovered the symbols in her room, in a book, on vials, bottles, who knows where.”
Simon shook his head. “The symbol for sulfur maybe,” he said. “But the Venus symbol, the witches’ symbol? You said yourself that you’ve never seen such a symbol in her house. And if you had, then she would be a witch after all, wouldn’t she?”
The hangman continued crushing the herbs in the mortar even though they had long been ground into a green paste.
“The Stechlin woman is no witch, and that’s that,” he growled. “Let’s forget about her, and instead find the devil who is going through our town and kidnapping the children. Sophie, Clara, and Johannes, they’ve all disappeared. Where are they? I’m sure that when we find them we’ll also find the solution to the puzzle.”
“That is, if the children are still alive,” mumbled Simon. Then he became lost again in his reveries.
“Sophie did see the devil. It was down by the river,” he said finally, “and he asked about the Kratz boy. Not long after that, the boy was dead. The man was tall, he had a coat and a hat with a feather in it and a scar across his face. Also he is said to have had a hand made of bone, at least that’s what the girl thinks she saw…”
Jakob Kuisl interrupted him. “The serving girl at Semer’s inn also saw a man with a skeleton hand in the lounge.”
“True,” said Simon. “That was a few days earlier, together with a few other men. The maid said they looked like soldiers. Then they went upstairs to meet someone there. But who was that?”
The hangman scraped the paste from the mortar into a jar, which he sealed with a piece of leather.
“I don’t like it when soldiers hang around our town,” he growled. “Soldiers only bring trouble. They drink, they rob, they destroy.”
“Speaking of destruction…” said Simon. “Schreevogl told me the night before last that not only is the Stadel destroyed, but on the same evening someone was at the building site for the leper house. Everything was razed to the ground there. Could that too have been the work of the Augsburgers?”
Jakob Kuisl dismissed this with a wave of the hand. “Hardly,” he said. “They’ll only welcome a leper house here. Then they hope that fewer travelers will stop in our town.”
“Well, then perhaps it’s wagon drivers from somewhere else who are afraid of catching leprosy in passing by,” remarked Simon. “After all, the trade route runs not far from the Hohenfurch Road.”
Jakob Kuisl spat. “Well, I know plenty of Schongauers who are just as afraid of that. The church wants the leper house, but the patricians are against it because they fear that business travelers will stay well clear of our little town…”
Simon shook his head. “And yet there are leper houses in many large cities, even in Regensburg and Augsburg…”
The hangman walked over to the apothecary’s closet to put away the jar. “Our moneybags are cowardly dogs,” he told Simon over his shoulder. “Some of them come and go regularly here at my house, and they tremble when the plague is still in Venice!”
When he returned he was carrying a larchwood truncheon about the length of his arm over his shoulder and grinning. “We need to take a closer look at that leper house in any case. I get the feeling that too many things are happening all at once for it to be a coincidence.”
“Right away?” Simon asked.
