“Well, as a bathhouse owner you really should know that. It’s henbane, also known as stinking nightshade or dog’s-piss root,” Kuisl elaborated with obvious satisfaction. “It’s found in many witch’s brews because it’s said to have magical power, but primarily it’s used as a strong anesthetic. Along with opium, mandrake, and hemlock, it is often used in sleeping sponges-things you no doubt have heard of.”
“Sleeping sponges?” Simon asked, perplexed. In fact, he did use such sponges himself occasionally. Soaked in narcotics, these sponges were placed over a patient’s face during operations to calm them down or, if necessary, make them unconscious. It was extremely hard to adjust the dosage-a bit too much of the liquid, and the patient would never wake up.
“Do you think someone drugged the prostitute first and then killed her?” he asked breathlessly.
Kuisl nodded. “Probably not just the prostitute. It had to be someone who knew a lot about medicine. The right quantity to use on a sleeping sponge is something known only to members of four guilds, in my opinion.” He counted them off on his fingers. “Doctors, bathhouse owners, midwives, and-”
“Hangmen,” Simon gasped.
“Indeed. I’ve used sleep sponges a few times myself to relieve a condemned man’s pain. It’s a drug preferred by hangmen and their journeymen. Anyone who understands suffering and death must also know about healing.”
Simon stared at the underlined paragraph describing the recipe for preparing such a sleep sponge. “I’m assuming you aren’t the person who underlined this paragraph and entered the notes in the margin?” he whispered.
Kuisl shook his head. “That was Bartholomäus, I know his handwriting.” The hangman knocked the dead ashes out of his pipe, stretched, and slowly rose to his feet like a giant who’d been sleeping for a long time in his cave.
“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask my brother and his servant Aloysius a few very unpleasant questions.”
“Morning is breaking, the sun will soon. . uh. . will soon. . set.”
“Rise. The sun will soon rise! Damn it, is it so hard to read from a script?”
Sir Malcolm tore at his hair, staring at Barbara, who was standing along with four other actors on a sort of balcony above the stage. Barbara could feel a knot in her stomach, and blood rushed to her head. They’d been rehearsing all morning, and by now she’d begun to doubt she really had that wonderful talent that both she and Malcolm thought she had. Her role was actually not that large. At first, Barbara had felt disappointed to discover she had so few lines to speak.
By now, even those few lines seemed too much for her.
“Daylight is breaking, the sun will soon rise,” she declaimed loudly this time, looking up at the ceiling as if morning had indeed arrived.
Sir Malcolm nodded contentedly, then turned to Markus Salter, who was standing in a threadbare red cape next to Barbara.
“Ah, behold and be appalled. Speak of the wolf, and he will come. What will. . what will. .” Now Salter also stumbled in the text, and Sir Malcolm rolled his eyes angrily as if he were a wolf himself.
“Good Lord, Markus,” he fumed. “How many times have we performed this play? Five? Ten?”
“It seems like a hundred,” Salter groaned.
“Then I really don’t understand why you’re so distracted. As the king, you have fewer lines than any of us. Just what’s wrong with you lately? Always tired, apathetic, late for rehearsals. .”
“I have to rush to get all the costumes and props,” Markus replied in a soft voice. “And then at night I have to retranslate Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and this complicated Love’s Labour’s Lost. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to find the right rhymes?”
“No, I don’t. But I do know something else. None of you have understood yet that this is the most important damned performance of the entire year.” Malcolm glared at each of the actors, one by one. “If we mess up this time we’ll be spending the winter in some barn with the oxen and asses. Is that clear to all of you?”
Apologetic murmurs came from the actors before they continued, with Sir Malcolm interrupting frequently to correct something or roll his eyes theatrically when someone forgot a line.
Barbara took a deep breath, concentrating fully on her next lines. They were performing Peter Squenz, a comedy by a certain Andreas Gryphius. She’d scarcely had time to sit down and read the play through. It was about a group of simpleminded workers who performed a play for the king and his court, and failed in a comical fashion. Barbara’s role was that of Princess Violandra, and she had little more to do than to flutter her eyelashes, look pretty, and occasionally say something funny. Sir Malcolm took the main role, that of the shoemaker Peter Squenz. Barbara observed with amazement how he could turn himself into a simpleminded clown using just a few gestures, making it look so natural and easy. It seemed he could assume the part of almost any character at will. Stuttering like a toothless old farmer, he had just bowed submissively to the king in the balcony.
“Herr. . Herr King! There are lots of f-f-f-fools at your court.”
The more Barbara thought about their performance the next morning at Geyerswörth, the queasier her stomach felt. Malcolm had promised her a splendid costume that would be made especially for her that evening. The old one was in the actors’ wardrobe wagon, which had been in an accident just outside Bamberg and fallen into the river. For the rehearsal she wore her simple gray dress with a soiled bodice. Her legs were trembling, and she didn’t feel at all like a princess but more like a housemaid who didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing.
I never should have agreed to do this, she thought.
But then she thought of Matheo, languishing in a dungeon not far away. Sir Malcolm had vowed that Matheo would certainly have wanted her to play the part that night, if only because the actors needed warm, safe quarters for the winter.
“Peace! Peace! Pax vobis! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Back away, back away!” Sir Malcolm cried in his role as Peter Squenz, as another actor dressed in a tattered lion costume crawled across the stage on all fours. Barbara could only hope the bishop had a sense of humor.
“Master Lion, be gone,” Sir Malcolm intoned while covering his eyes in a dramatic gesture. “Be gone from-”
At that moment there was a loud clatter outside one of the windows. Barbara turned around just in time to see a falling shadow through the bull’s-eye glass.
“Damn it! Those are surely Guiscard’s spies,” Sir Malcolm shouted. “To hell with them!” With amazing agility he jumped down from the stage, ran on his long, gangling legs to the window, and opened it.
“Scoundrels!” he shouted, shaking his fist. “It won’t do you any good, Guiscard. We’re better than you!”
When Barbara ran to the window, she saw down below, in the courtyard of the wedding house, a ladder that had fallen over, and alongside it a man struggling to his feet while rubbing his arms and legs before hobbling away. She could see Guiscard hiding in one corner of the courtyard. The French theater director sneered.
“Aha! Peter Squenz. Mon dieu, what a trite, dull piece,” he crowed in his feminine-sounding French accent. “For that, the bishop will surely give you quarters-in the pigsty. That’s the best place for this farce.”
“We’ll see about that, Guiscard. Get ready for a very, very cold winter. Then you’ll have all the time in the world to make up your own plays, you ignorant, thieving fool.”
Malcolm closed the window and took a deep breath as if trying to pull himself together again.