Albrecht Slichting, had several times uttered a loud "no," which, he was well aware, gave them every reason to call him a fool complete with cap and bells. Then the three of them had left Einsiedeln, although it was midwinter and most of the passes were closed.
Then Dr. Roze and Dorothea's confessor cross-examined him about the particulars of the hard journey home: Was it true that he and his daughter, Gertrud, had ridden long distances on horseback, whereas his wife walked the icy roads in paper-thin shoes? Why, when the ice began to break up as they were crossing the Elbe, had he instantly reached out to save his daughter, but — laughing scornfully, what's more! — let his wife be carried away on an ice floe, so that she was saved only by God's help? Could he testify that during the sea voyage from Liibeck to Danzig, Dorothea had several times committed acts of lewdness with a carved wooden figure of Jesus? Had he, on the journey homeward or since their return, noticed anything to suggest that his wife was engaged in witchcraft? And more of the same.
In defense of his riding while she walked every day for four weeks, Slichting cited his age and Dorothea's indestructible good health. He confessed to the laughter, but attributed it to his own terror and to his fear for his wife when he saw her swept away on the ice floe. As for the acts of lewdness with the wooden Saviour, he denied them but owned that the sailors on shipboard had talked and made jokes on the subject. Nor could he supply any evidence that his wife had engaged in witchcraft. True, she stirred the ashes of burnt coffin wood into her Lenten soups, but this she did as a reminder of man's frailty before the Lord God. And when, as happened now and then, she seemed to be worshiping her little bottles of pus, she was undoubtedly praying the Lord to intercede in favor of the lepers at the Holy Ghost and Corpus Christi hospitals.
The commander said nothing. As though in passing, Abbot Johannes Marienwerder asked Slichting about his affairs. When the swordmaker groaned, the abbot, with a glance at the commander, held out the likelihood of new orders. Now that the Lithuanian Jagello was king of Poland, it would be necessary to prepare for war. Then he asked Slichting as though in jest whether, if another opportunity
for a separation from Dorothea should offer itself, he would again be fool enough to cry "no." At this the swordmaker made no bones about calling his marriage a hell, his wife a sanctimonious bitch, and the possibility of getting rid of her the last hope of his declining years.
The dignitaries, including the commander, smiled. At their request, the impoverished Slichting displayed what products of his craft he still had on hand: an enchased dagger in a silver scabbard, two swords of different lengths with gem-studded handles and bird's-head pommels, and a crossbow covered with gold leaf, which the English nobleman Henry Derby had ordered on his way through but neither called nor paid for.
They comforted the swordmaker — the mad Derby would surely be back — and told anecdotes about the young earl, who took as much pleasure in the annual winter campaigns against the Lithuanians as in fox hunting back home in England. Then there was talk of founding — the matter had been under discussion for years — a Brigittine convent on the Swedish model. The body of Saint Birgitta, or Bridget, had lain in state in a chapel beside Saint Catherine's in Danzig, before being moved to the Wadstena Convent in Sweden. But Abbot Johannes Marienwerder held that what the country needed more than another convent was a saint born here, between rivers, nurtured in this flat farming country, and of proved piety. It wouldn't do to have all the miracles happening in Poland.
Then Albrecht Slichting was allowed to leave, and his wife was called into the long, narrow room, with its two tall windows looking across Bucket Makers' Court to the half-timbered cottages and mud huts of Carp Pond on the other side of the Radaune.
Clad in a coarse hair shirt, Dorothea of Montau entered the room. She was forty-one at the time and still beautiful in a way that can only — and not for want of a better word — be termed indescribable. Be that as it may, the room was transfigured by her entrance, and the four gentlemen corrected their posture as though taken by surprise. They pulled their hands with the gnawed fingernails — even Abbot Johannes nibbled — back into their sleeves and sat up stiffly, with
their backs to the two windows. In front of them stood a massive table, empty except for Dr. Roze's writing materials.
Dorothea declined to be seated in the gentlemen's presence. Her tall frame tilted slightly forward, she stood looking with this eye and that eye out of this and that window, as though the April sky, which had been overcast for days, were clear and open. Then she gave the commander a compelling look and, speaking quickly, without emphasis, employing a strange word order, prognosticated woe. She knew the exact date of the battle the Teutonic Knights would wage at Tannenberg, and she knew of their defeat. Perhaps because the date was in the following century, the four gentlemen took refuge in manly laughter. After that the din of the bucket makers could be heard more clearly.
Breaking in roughly, Christian Roze made light of the dire prophecy and went on to castigate her outrageous conduct: What had got into her, giggling during Holy Mass and wagging her tongue in her open mouth like a lewd whore? If she burned moldy coffin wood, then why not the horns of the He-goat? What lover was waiting for her when she ran, laughing raucously, through the streets of the Old City to the Wicker Bastion? Was it true that she could hover two hands' breadth above the ground and walk over water? Is that how she had saved herself from the ice floe on the river Elbe? And to whom had she sold her soul in return for these gifts?
Her mouth twisting slightly and turning upward like that of a fish, Dorothea replied in chains of words that did not always form sentences, but with their end rhymes suggested poetic method.
"When Jesu cumeth for my mouth to kisse,
Our tongues meten in the orifice."
"Swet Jesus pain doth shrood my hed
And nary ash of coffin wud."
"When dark descendeth, than luv min hert rendeth
My Jesu swet I go to mete
His body is my soles delete."
"Always I rise" from the glomby earth
When Jesu sucketh me with his swet mouth."
"My sol I yelde up to Jesu dere
Alwhan he cometh att me with his spere. So lordlings, to your dishes. Ichab ykookt four fishes, Frish herrings for the bord Of Jesu Christ, our Lord."
Abbot and commander, Dominican confessor and doctor of canon law — all were moved by her answers. Surely it could not be Satan who spoke so charmingly out of the poor thing's mouth. That little tongue, which sometimes — yes indeed, to be sure — fluttered rather provocatively, must have been loosed by the Lord God. True, the boundary between carnal lust and spiritual rejoicing was not always clear in this all-rhyming Dorothea's word combinations, but her love for the Lord and Saviour could not be doubted, as the abbot, who was of Alemannic origin, observed with a distinctly Swiss intonation that lent charm to his flat Low German. The scholarly Johannes Marienwerder cited examples of Christian mysticism and likened the words he had heard from Dorothea's lips to the legends of the nun Hrosvita and the poems of Mechthild of Magdeburg. And considering that there is no incompatibility between mystical experience and canon law, provided no heresy is involved, Dr. Roze made it clear that he had no fault to find. The vicar of Saint Mary's agreed, but for safety's sake went on to inquire about one thing and another — the bottled lepers' pus, for instance.