Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (17 page)

He passed the pond by the watermill in front of the gate and
carried on along the gravelled road, beside which stood a few taverns and a boarding-house for travellers who arrived too late at night to be allowed through the gate. Then he hurried through the cemetery of St Barbara's Chapel where his father rested under a modest cross. Maybe he should have slowed his pace here, as he usually did, to say a few prayers over his father's grave, recall his words of instruction, but not today. This evening he had something else to do.

St Barbara's was by no means a large chapel; although it was sometimes referred to as a church it was nothing like either St Nicholas's or St Olaf's but was a modest structure with limestone walls, a low tower and a vault, a similar size to one of the smaller townhouses. People came there to pray, and there were two meagre altars, the responsibility of the town's poorer artisans. The graveyard around the chapel was large, however. On one side it extended from the mill by the Seppade Gate to the edge of town and of Toompea, on St Anthony's Hill, over which the Toompea gallows towered, and the boundary of the lands was marked by a stone cross; on the other side it ran along the edge of the highway as far as the western sand dunes, where the town's great gallows stood. The humbler people were buried in St Barbara's because a burial there was inexpensive, and the artisans' guilds would order a simple service of mourning in the chapel. The remainder were laid to rest without even that, and very plainly. If the relatives of the deceased had a coin or two for the churchwarden's assistant and the parish clerk, a brief service was conducted at the graveside, but if there was not even that, or the deceased did not have any kin, the corpse was lowered into the hole in ragged swaddling clothes paid for by the Council. This was best for everyone, as the bodies did not then lie around and cause disease.

The chapel was separated from the cemetery by a low stone enclosure, and at the back of the chapel was a shed where corpses were laid until burial. When an epidemic was visited upon the town, or the corpses had accumulated for some other reason, they were stacked end to end until the gravediggers had prepared a large common grave.

St Barbara's was the largest cemetery in the town, and hundreds of nameless people rested here, those for whom no one could be found to pay for a Christian burial.

Melchior sought out the churchwarden's assistant at the chapel and asked him whether the town guards had brought a corpse here the night before last and, if so, what had become of it. It transpired that nothing had become of it yet; it was lying in the chamber. No relative had appeared, and the next morning he would have to lay it in a hole together with a peasant family from beyond the dunes with two malnourished children who had died from poisoning – they must have eaten forest mushrooms, may the Virgin have mercy on them.

‘But, yes, that tramp is lying here – indeed, someone got here before you, Apothecary,' muttered the man as he hurried back to the altar, leaving Melchior to wonder who had got there before him and why.

A little later he was standing in the bleak and chilly charnel-house, which smelled of decay and putrefaction, with the morbid, sweet stench of corpses. Again he examined the body of the strange young man who had died of his wounds on Rataskaevu Street. If he closed his eyes for a moment the events of that night appeared before him again. He had seen a number of corpses in his lifetime but rarely one that had departed this life just moments before. This body had still been warm, and his spirit would not have been far away. Someone had stabbed him three times with a knife in the chest and belly, three times and very deeply, in a rage, with a desire to kill, the blood running from the wounds in a veritable cascade and not yet congealed.

Melchior shook his head and pushed those memories away. He would examine the corpse because a body can tell you a great deal about a person; even a body that awaits burial and whose breath has long since departed.

The young man's corpse was wrapped in a tattered shroud. Melchior untied it. The body had been washed but not very carefully – the assistant had apparently simply tipped a couple of
bucketfuls of slops over it, so that there were still traces of faeces and blood clinging to it. But there he lay, strangely thin, skeletal and pale, with that face of indeterminate age that might have belonged either to an adult or to a youth.

First Melchior examined the face and tried to remember. But he was already sure that, no, he had never seen him before. And if neither he nor the town guards had seen that face, then the youth was not from the town. The face now looked even thinner and odder, with sunken eyes, and somehow despairing and pleading in the composure of death. With his fingers Melchior felt the boy's cheeks, but he felt no beard growth at all. Shouldn't there have been some, even if he had been castrated? Melchior did not know. At the same time something about the skull and the bone structure led him to suspect that he was not so young that no beard would have grown. The teeth? Teeth could tell a lot about a person's age, and Melchior did not recall looking at the teeth of the deceased before in the torchlight. He prised the corpse's lips open. Yes, the teeth, those that were left – maybe half of them – were not those of a child; they were yellow and broken, and from this one could deduce that he had eaten very poorly and probably mainly spoiled food. Now Melchior caught the foul stench coming from the dead mouth that mixed with the stink of the corpse.

But then something in the dead man's mouth caught his attention. He bent closer and forced the teeth apart. The poor man had no tongue. Just like his genitals, his tongue had been cut out, and long ago; evidently the wound had been cauterized with a hot iron.

Melchior's eye now caught many more wounds on the dead man's chest than he had spotted in the dark. There were scratches, abrasions, wheals from lashings, incisions. It seemed that in some places even festering wounds had been cauterized, and when he looked closer at some of them he could see that they were yellow around the outside. Melchior examined the wounds with special interest – it was as if someone had been treating them or rubbing them with ointment – and when he breathed in he thought he
caught the faint whiff of mint. On the corpse's thin arms were circular abrasions; the skin on them had been rubbed away, in places even to the point of festering.

Melchior shook his head. The corpse disturbed him. It spoke of suffering and pain, hatred and misery. This unfortunate creature had a painful story to tell, a story of a life full of suffering that had ended two days ago on Rataskaevu Street in front of the Unterrainer house, a few hundred paces from Melchior's own home.

Now he pushed the shroud aside from the corpse's feet and stiffened with surprise.

He racked his memory to recall how the feet of the dead man had looked, and he was sure that they were
ordinary
feet. The corpse was now naked, of course, but in Rataskaevu Street the unfortunate fellow had been covered with a knee-length hessian cape, and Melchior had cut a piece of it off. Under the cape it had been revealed that the penis had been cut off, but his feet … Yes, Melchior had not examined the feet at the time, but he was sure that the man had had something on his feet, some ragged leather sandals perhaps; if not he would have noticed, he would surely have noticed … But now the corpse's left foot was missing. The right leg was also chafed at the shinbone. The nails were long, dark yellow, curling and in-growing in places, but there was no left foot at all; just a stump was visible, with flaps of skin where it had been hacked off.

How stupid of me, thought Melchior. Of course, the left foot had been in place that night. If it had been chopped off at the time the legs would have been bloody all over – and, what is more, the foot had been removed after death, of that he was sure. He had flayed enough corpses in his time to know what a wound on a dead body looks like. Someone has got here before me and removed the tramp's left foot, he thought, but why he couldn't understand. He knew of no prescription that would require the left foot of a scrawny, wretched boy, nor the flesh, nor the bone, nor the nails. Usually the parts of a person that had curative properties were taken from a healthy person, not a wreck such as this. True, there
were a few special prescriptions that required a dead body at a particular time, a certain kind of death – a person hanged under the full moon or a virgin who had died from lily-of-the-valley poisoning or a man with joined eyebrows whose throat had been cut with a silver knife – but there was no prescription involving the left foot of a wretched, castrated youth. At least, no prescription used by any doctors or apothecaries, but they were not the only ones who cut up corpses.

There are medicines and potions known to all medical people, age-old knowledge written down in Johannes Platearius'
Curea,
described by Copho and Ferrarius, by Trota in his
Practica Secundam Trota,
mentioned by the women of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen. But there are also other kinds of teachings, dark teachings, those that are called black magic. There are sciences and practices about which wise men have warned that they poison a man's soul; these are squalid and contemptuous of God, heretical doctrines, and they are called witchcraft. His father had warned Melchior about such teachings, as he knew something of them himself, but he chose not to share them with his son, either that or he regarded them as too dangerous for him.

Melchior felt that he should leave now. His head was starting to swim from the stench of the corpse, and it was hard to breathe. He cast one last look over the poor young man's body, and more and more questions came flooding into his head. Were those three knife-wounds supposed to ease the suffering of the poor man and send his soul where earthly pain no longer has any power? Or were they meant as the final blow in his sufferings? Who could hate such a pitiful creature so?

He staggered out of the mortuary and felt his legs becoming numb. He was no longer sure whether it was from the corpse's stench or whether the dead man had bewitched him. The fresh air just increased his giddiness. All that suffering, pain and torture – suddenly all this was too much for him. He felt that he wanted to scream and cry; he wanted to rail against the world's spiritual agonies and pains; he felt that he was no longer able to control his
own mind; demons had come from somewhere, tearing his soul apart and filling it with a frenzy, with madness and rage. He tried to hurry, but his legs wouldn't obey him; he reeled along the path towards the wall of St Barbara's Chapel, and before him spread the cemetery, full of the graves of poor sinners. How much pain and suffering, how many lost souls and shattered hopes. His father was resting here, and his face in its death throes appeared once again before Melchior. And then his father's last, enigmatic words, ‘Saint, remember, fear'. Melchior had not understood those words. Who was this saint that he had to keep in mind and fear? But his father was granted no more time, and he expired with those words on his lips.

The curse of the Wakenstedes was taking over Melchior's faculties. He could get no help from anywhere. A wave struck him right there at the chapel gate. There was no Keterlyn, and he had none of his medicinal drink, which sometimes helped him a little. Melchior had no choice. A moment before turning into a screaming madman he was able to collect himself enough to strike his head hard against the wall of the chapel's enclosure. He felt an extreme pain but a relief, too, that his reason carried on into that twilight hidden behind the black veil.

Apothecary Melchior Wakenstede collapsed with a bloody head wound in front of the wall of St Barbara's Chapel.

M
AGISTRATE
W
ENTZEL
D
ORN
apprehensively eyed his friend, whose head was bandaged and who was walking as if every step caused him the tortures of hell – but who, despite this, kept busy in the pharmacy preparing medicines, although on this occasion for himself. Dorn knew that Melchior was from time to time overcome by an attack, which Dorn believed to be epilepsy but he was not sure, and the Apothecary did not deign to talk about it much. If Melchior wished he would tell him; if he didn't, then it was none of the Magistrate's business. The message the previous evening, though, that the Apothecary had been found at St Barbara's Chapel with his head split open, had worried Dorn greatly. Melchior was inquisitive, Melchior was on the trail of murderers, but murderers could be cunning and cruel, and when Melchior was pursuing someone he might become the quarry himself. So Dorn had hurried straight to Rataskaevu Street, taking the Council's barber with him, but Keterlyn had reassured them – her voice calm, grateful and cheerful but her eyes tearful and deeply sad – no, Melchior was quite all right, St Nicholas be praised; he had simply stumbled and fallen. His head was indeed cut, but it was nothing serious. At Dorn's insistence the barber had nevertheless looked at the wound and applied a new bandage. Melchior, however, had assured them in a feeble voice that he was not yet going to meet his Maker, and if the Magistrate would come back the next day there would be much to talk about.

So here was Dorn now, full of questions and a little concerned as well. The pharmacy was closed today, when no one was mortally ill. There were such times when the Apothecary had to heal himself. Melchior stumbled around the shop and explained to his friend that sometimes, when too many humours, such as phlegm, accumulate in a man's head the head becomes drowsy and the person may collapse and become ill. Now his head was bursting with pain, although the wound was no longer a concern, and he was making his famous salve, which was supposed to take away pain, for himself. He rubbed various salves, marjoram and fennel into a juice, added a larger amount of peppermint and mixed it with butter to make a greenish-yellow ointment. When the mixture was ready it was allowed to stand for a while to draw and then smeared on the wound. And while the salve was drawing Melchior smeared rose oil on his temples, because that was supposed to help, too.