“I can’t do anything more for you now,” Barbara said finally, “but perhaps tomorrow we can go together to my uncle’s house.”
Salter laughed bitterly, but his laughter soon gave way to a fit of coughing. “Are you out of your mind?” he gasped. “If those idiots out there just stop to think for a moment, they’ll figure out you’re the niece of the Bamberg executioner. They’ve been looking for you for a long time. Does anyone here in town know you? Did anyone see you before you appeared on the stage with us?”
“I don’t know,” she replied hesitantly, all of a sudden feeling exposed and helpless. “I visited the marketplace a few times with my sister, and then there’s Katharina, Uncle Bartholomäus’s fiancée, of course, and old Jeremias, the custodian of the Wild Man-”
“No doubt the tavern was ransacked a long time ago,” Salter interrupted. “After all, that’s where the actors were lodged. And they surely asked Jeremias about us.” He looked at her attentively. “Do you really think this Jeremias wouldn’t betray you to the guards to save his life?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know,” Barbara wailed. “Probably not, but that means that I can never return to my family.”
“At least as long as they live in the house of the Bamberg executioner.” Salter nodded with determination. “After everything that happened tonight, neither of us can show our faces in Bamberg again. It’s likely that all the guards in the city are out looking for us actors.”
“But where can we go, then?” Barbara wailed. “I want to go back to my family!”
Markus patted her on the head. “I’ll think of something, Barbara, I promise. But first, we should get some sleep. You’ll see, tomorrow things will look much better.”
Barbara didn’t believe him, but nevertheless she put on one of the warm robes and laid her head in his lap as Markus hummed a little tune for her. It sounded sad and dreary, but it calmed her down, and soon thereafter she fell asleep from exhaustion and grief.
14
THE HOUSE OF THE BAMBERG EXECUTIONER, MORNING, NOVEMBER 2, 1668 AD
That morning, among the Kuisls assembled in Bartholomäus’s home, there was a strange mood of despondency mixed with anticipation. Until then, they had scarcely had a chance to talk with one another. The injured Matheo was still upstairs in the bedroom, catching up on his sleep as he recovered. The wine mixed with herbs that Jakob had given him the night before finally provided him relief from his bad dreams-a good fortune not shared by most of the others present. All of them were pale, and the dark rings under their eyes bore witness to the strenuous day and night preceding.
Now they were all seated around the scratched table in the warm main room, while the boys were outside playing hide-and-seek along the city moat with the neighborhood children. The boys’ new friends came from a family of dishonorable gravediggers, so the parents had no objection to them playing with the Kuisl boys.
Magdalena rubbed her tired eyes. She had fervently hoped her sister would come back to them after that chaotic night, but Barbara hadn’t returned-neither to Jeremias nor to the executioner’s house.
Simon and his friend Samuel had taken the deranged suffragan bishop back to his room for observation. By now he had quieted down and lay there motionlessly. Bartholomäus later found an exhausted Simon in the area near St. Martin’s Church, and they’d both finally returned long after midnight. Magdalena had been relieved to learn that Simon hadn’t been bitten by a werewolf, but what he told her about the horrible transformation of Sebastian Harsee had deeply shocked her. Was it possible a person could change into a beast in the presence of all those witnesses?
“Last night, the whole city went mad,” said Bartholomäus, who until then had been quietly eating his porridge out of the communal bowl. He had just returned from a brief check of the city dungeon. “But at least the city guard has gotten everything under control,” he continued. “They gave those young thugs a good spanking and sent them all back to their mothers. But people are also saying that at least two of the actors were killed last night and then strung up like dead cats for the general amusement of the crowd. Now, no one will admit to doing it, and Captain Lebrecht evidently has better things to do than look for the perpetrators.” He sighed deeply. “The rest of the actors have been thrown in the dungeon, and no doubt I’ll have to deal with them soon.”
“Is Barbara among them?” Magdalena asked, her heart pounding. Simon had already told her and the others that Barbara had been in the performance the previous day. Jakob had groaned and cracked the knuckles of his huge fists, but otherwise he seemed astonishingly calm.
Bartholomäus shook his head. “Barbara has disappeared without a trace, as has a certain Markus Salter, by the way, the hack who writes the plays-or copies them, for all I know.” Then he turned serious. “Things look really bad for the director himself, this Malcolm. They found a few magic items in a secret compartment of his chest-a pentagram, black candles, and a human skull. Now they’re saying he used them to conjure up the werewolf.”
“Sir Malcolm probably used the objects in one of his plays,” Magdalena speculated, “perhaps for Doctor Faustus, which involves sorcery, after all.”
“And then he locks them in a secret compartment?” Bartholomäus frowned. “I’m not so sure about that. The council, in any case, doesn’t buy a word of it,” he said, then turned to Simon. “You attended the performance yesterday, didn’t you? Was Malcolm behaving strangely?”
“Uh. . not that I was aware of.” Simon looked up from a book he’d been paging through. It came from Bartholomäus’s little collection of books in the main room. “I don’t think Harsee’s madness has anything to do with the actors,” he added. “It’s probably some strange illness. The poor fellow is almost completely paralyzed, and only his eyes keep flitting nervously back and forth. If that’s a werewolf, then it’s a pretty pathetic one.” He rubbed his temples with exhaustion. “But it’s still strange that such an illness, if that’s what it is, breaks out at the very moment everyone is talking about werewolves here.”
Simon sighed and set the tattered book aside. “I’ve spent half the night racking my brain over this, but unfortunately all the books here are about veterinary medicine, and that doesn’t help.”
“Don’t disparage Zechendörfer’s Hippiatrica,” Bartholomäus interrupted. “That’s one of the best books on medicine ever written.”
“Yes, when you’re treating horses with stomach gas from eating too much hay, or shoeing them because of a broken hoof,” Simon replied. He nodded toward the other room. “That applies also to the certainly excellent works about rearing, training, and treating dogs, but here we’re dealing with something more complicated, with a human element.”
“You can learn all sorts of things from animals, Master Medicus,” Bartholomäus shot back. “For example, humility and modesty.”
Jakob was about to give him a harsh rebuke, as well, but Georg, who was sitting next to his father, put his hand on his arm to calm him down.
“I know that we Kuisls like to fight,” he said in a firm voice, “but now isn’t the time for that. Let’s think instead about whether to pursue the course that old Jeremias suggested yesterday. Since Barbara has disappeared, we should probably be using all our resources to find her as quickly as possible. Everything else is secondary.”
Jakob Kuisl looked at his son in astonishment, not knowing what to make of Georg’s newly acquired confidence.
“Well, I’ll be damned, you’re right,” he said, a bit less gruffly. Then he pointed toward the ceiling. “On the other hand, the young lad that Barbara is so crazy about is lying up there in bed, while his friends are sitting in the dungeon awaiting their execution as alleged werewolves. What do you think Barbara will say if her own uncle whips their battered bodies to death, perhaps as early as tomorrow? Well?” He looked across the table at Bartholomäus, who grimly returned his gaze. “Have you thought about that?”