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quickly got over it,” Magdalena replied. “Besides, it’s mostly the homes of the patricians that are empty.”
    “I don’t care what happened here long ago,” wailed Barbara, who was shuffling along slowly at the end of the line. “I’m just tired. Hopefully, Uncle Bartholomäus’s house is not a ruin, too. I should have stayed home, where the town fair is going on now, with dancing and—”
    “I fear the houses were abandoned for another reason,” interrupted her father, who was paying no attention to his younger daughter’s whining. “A reason even more dreadful than the war, if such a thing is possible. I heard about it even far away in Schongau. A grim story.”
    Magdalena looked at him, puzzled. “And what was that?”
    “I think Bartholomäus should tell you. I suspect he knows more about it than he wants to.” The hangman started walking faster. “Now hurry up and come along before your sister’s whining gets the guard’s attention.”
    Silently, he plodded on through the fog, while somewhere beyond the city walls, the wolves continued their howling.

    Adelheid Rinswieser paused for a moment and listened. The howling of the wolves grew louder, like cries of children, long and shrill. The silver disk of an almost-full moon was just rising over the pine trees.
    The howls of the animals were still far off, deep in the forest. Nevertheless, Adelheid’s heart beat faster as she crept through the dense forest of pines and birches outside the walls of Bamberg. It was not at all unusual for wolves to be found in this area. Even twenty years after the Great War, many parts of the country were still devastated and villages abandoned by their residents, and only wild animals remained among the ruins. But no wolves had been seen in the Bamberg Forest. Their fear of people with clubs, swords, and muskets was just too great, and they preferred to relieve their hunger with a sheep or two grazing in the meadows south of the old castle.
    Unless their hunger was greater than their fear.
    Trembling, Adelheid pulled her coat tightly around her and kept walking farther into the forest. Now, at the end of October, it was already miserably cold at night. If her husband had learned of this nighttime adventure, he surely would have forbidden it. It had been hard enough for her to convince the watchman at the Tanggass Gate to open the door for her at this time of night. But what the apothecary’s wife was searching for could also help the watchman’s wife—and hence, grumbling, he had finally allowed Adelheid to pass.
    Branches snapped beneath her feet as she passed gnarled pines reaching out for her like fingers. In the distance, she could see the watch fires at the city wall, but otherwise it was pitchdark among the trees. Only the moon showed her the way. Once again she heard the howling of the wolves and instinctively hastened her pace.
    She was searching for the fraxinella plant— Dictamnus albus , a rare, lily-like flower considered a sure method for aborting unwanted pregnancies. Often young women came in secret to see her or her husband at the court pharmacy near the great cathedral on the hill, pleading for a medicine to save them from shame and public humiliation in the stocks at the Green Market. Her husband usually turned away the poor things or sent them to a midwife outside the city gates, as abortion—or even assistance with an abortion—in the Bamberg Bishopric, as elsewhere, was punishable by death. But Adelheid always felt pity for the poor women. Before her marriage to the honorable pharmacist Magnus Rinswieser, she, too, had had a few affairs and had gotten into trouble. The old midwife Frau Traudel, over in Theuerstadt, had helped her then with fraxinella, and she felt an obligation now to help others.
    The old woman had also revealed to her that fraxinella should be picked only when the moon was full. The flower was also called witch’s flower or devil’s plant , and it was very rare in this