Read The Hangman's Daughter for Free Online Page B

them.
    Anna Maria Kuisl, aroused by the noise, opened the front door. Simon looked at her, smiling a little stiffly, while the children tried to jump up on him to see what he had in the bundle over his shoulder. Although she was just about forty, the hangman’s wife was still an attractive woman, who with her raven-black hair and bushy eyebrows looked almost like his sister. Simon had often asked himself if she was not a distant relative of Jakob Kuisl’s. Since executioners were regarded as dishonorable and could only marry burghers’ daughters in exceptional circumstances, their families were often closely related by marriage. In the course of centuries whole dynasties of executioners had formed, and that of the Kuisls was the largest in Bavaria.
    Laughing, Anna Maria Kuisl came out to meet the physician, but when she noticed the bundle on his back, his warning glance, and his defensive gesture, she motioned to the children to leave.
    “Georg, Barbara! Go and play behind the house. Uncle Simon and I have something to talk about.”
    The children, grumbling, disappeared, and Simon was at last able to enter the room and lay the corpse on the kitchen bench. The cloth in which it was wrapped fell to the side. When Anna Maria saw the boy, she uttered a cry.
    “My God, that’s Grimmer’s boy! What in the world has happened?”
    Simon took a seat next to the bench and told her the story. Meanwhile Anna Maria poured him some wine mixed with water from an earthenware jug, which he drank in great gulps.
    “And so you need my husband now to tell you what happened?” Anna Maria asked, when he had finished. Shaking her head, she kept on glancing at the boy’s body.
    Simon wiped his lips. “Exactly. Where is he?”
    Maria shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t tell you. He went up to the town to the blacksmith’s to get some nails. We need a new closet, you know. Ours is full to the bursting point.”
    She glanced once more at the bloody bundle on the kitchen bench. As the wife of the hangman she was more than accustomed to the sight of corpses, but the death of a child always moved her. She shook her head. “The poor lad…”
    Then she seemed to come to herself again. Life went on. Outside the twins romped about noisily, and little Barbara screeched at the top of her lungs. “It would be best if you wait for him here,” she said, getting up from the bench. “You can read a bit while you’re waiting.”
    The hangman’s wife smiled. She knew that Simon often came just to leaf through her husband’s dog-eared old books. Sometimes the physician made up some rather feeble excuse for going down to the hangman’s house to look up something.
    Anna Maria gave the dead boy one more compassionate glance. Then she took a woolen blanket from the closet and laid it carefully over the corpse, so that there was nothing more to see in case the twins came in suddenly. Finally she went to the door. “I must see what the children are doing outside. Help yourself to the wine, if you like.”
    The door closed and Simon was alone in the room. The hangman’s living room was large and spacious and took up almost the entire ground floor of the house. In the corner there was a large stove, which was stoked from outside in the corridor. Next to it was the kitchen table, and above it the executioner’s sword hung on the wall. A steep staircase led from the passage to the upper room, where the Kuisls and their three children slept. Next to the oven was a low, narrow door, which led to another room beyond. Simon ducked under the lintel and entered the holy of holies.
    On the left stood two chests in which Jakob Kuisl kept everything needed for executions and torture—ropes, chains, gloves, but also thumbscrews and pincers. The rest of this threatening arsenal was owned by the town authorities and was kept in the tower, deep down in the dungeons. Next to the chests, the gallows ladder was leaning on the wall.
    But Simon was looking for something