Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (11 page)

‘Does that Blackhead come here often?' Melchior asked Gude.

‘Oh, that gentleman who speaks such beautiful German, as if he had doves nesting in his throat? No, I'd never seen him here before yesterday – then he just hung around. He sat here and tried chatting to a couple of people, but who'd want to talk to someone who can't speak the language properly?'

‘He was hanging around?' asked Melchior with interest. ‘Why would he hang around here?'

‘I don't know. He just walked around the convent and then stepped into the tavern and asked whether we sold beer. What fool
would ask whether ale is sold in a tavern? I don't know what we're supposed to sell here – pork or what? The idiot. But all Flemings are like that, I guess. And then – yes, word of honour – he asked about the poor Tower-Master.'

‘You don't say. Did he and Grote know one another?'

‘I don't know. Grote had never mentioned him.'

‘And what did he ask about Grote?'

‘How he came to fall off that tower, and so on …'

‘And how
did
he come to fall off that tower?' asked Melchior. ‘I'd like to know that, too.'

‘Good gracious – do you think I saw it happen?' shrieked Gude. ‘It must have been long after the evening service when the tavern was shut and all the sisters were asleep.'

Gude told him that Grote used to come to the nunnery's tavern quite regularly, but occasionally he went to other places so that the Abbess wouldn't think he was drinking too often when he was supposed to be working in the convent's courtyard. But Gude had never seen him chatting to that Flemish Blackhead – in fact, had never seen that man before yesterday. Melchior tried to steer the conversation around to the ghost, but the saddle-makers were starting to demand more ale. He asked whether Grote had said anything to Gude about a ghost, and the woman looked at him as if he were mad. Melchior assured her quickly that he was just asking, for no reason. Gude was known as a bit of a chatterbox. Sometimes that was useful to him, but it wouldn't be if she started to spread all kinds of stories about him.

He left the tavern and decided to have a look around the Quad Dack Tower before going home. Looked at from the yard, behind the old town wall, the walkway didn't look particularly high, but he knew how misleading it could be to judge height from below. You could get to the Quad Dack Tower only from the convent yard. Melchior climbed up the steps and rattled the big heavy door. As he suspected, it was locked, and a couple of carpenters who were working in the convent's woodshed watched him with unfeigned curiosity. It wasn't an everyday occurrence for the town's
apothecary to wish to climb the town wall. But Melchior went on along behind the nuns' bathhouse to the next tower, the Saun Tower, the lower door of which looked ajar. It was less robust than the Quad Dack Tower, but wasn't that as it should be? From what the Apothecary knew of military matters, the cannons were located in both the Quad Dack Tower and the next one on from the Saun Tower, the Nunnadetagune Tower. It would not make sense to site the two strongest cannon-towers too close together.

There were a couple of shacks and the nuns'
saun
next to the Saun Tower. Melchior recalled that the Council had wanted to pull the
saun
down so the town wall could be strengthened, but, of course, the nuns had firmly resisted this. Their gardens ran beyond the bathhouse, under the slope of Toompea as far as the Nuns' Gate. Melchior went boldly up to the Saun Tower, opened the door slightly and called to see if anyone might be in. An old sentry limped over, grumbling about strangers bothering him when he was having lunch, but then he recognized the Apothecary. Melchior asked him whether he might have a look at the walkway, and the man told him he had better be off. But when Melchior recommended a good cheap salve for a painful leg the guard became more cordial. Melchior chatted with him a while longer and discovered that the keys to the tower supervised by Tobias Grote were now with the nuns until the Council found a new tower-master and that when Grote was in the tower he didn't usually lock the lower door. From this side you could get to the walkway between the Quad Dack Tower and the Nunnadetagune Tower only from inside the Quad Dack Tower.

When Melchior promised to send some salve for the sentry's aching bones the next day – but only if he didn't breathe a word to the Council's doctor about it and didn't tell anyone about letting him on to the walkway – the man shook his hand and said the Apothecary could inspect whatever he liked. Melchior climbed the steps and passed along the walkway, which at this point was at the same height as at Quad Dack. The parapet was the same height, too, reaching up above Melchior's waist.

‘How could he fall from here?' wondered Melchior, and the sentry replied that anything was possible when one was very drunk.

‘But it's never happened to anyone before,' he continued, ‘and I can't work out how he was so unlucky. It had been raining heavily and it was foggy.'

Melchior made himself trip and stumble on to the parapet, but there was no danger of falling. True, if the Tower-Master had wanted to climb on to the parapet and reach out to look at something hidden by the eastern flank of the Quad Dack Tower, something in the convent yard, then maybe …

‘Any number of accidents can happen, can't they?' said the captain of the tower. ‘A person doesn't appreciate that he might lose his footing or something. It was foggy and slippery. Maybe he dropped his torch and –'

‘Torch?' asked Melchior quickly. ‘But, of course, he must have had a torch. It isn't wise to walk along the town wall in the dark. But was there a torch down there where the body was found?'

‘I don't know. I can't see between the two walls from here.'

‘That's true.'

‘The town wants to build the wall higher and stronger here, you see,' the man explained. ‘All sorts of builders have been here measuring, and even that Knight of the Order, Greyssenhagen himself, came here. Apparently he's quite an expert on walls and cannons. The Council asked him, so he came. He explained something to Grote.'

‘Interesting. What was that?' asked Melchior cautiously. He had heard that the Master of Jackewolde was something of an expert when it came to fortifications. Hadn't he even assisted in the building of the Order's fortresses somewhere down south? And if he were doing something for the town, it would surely be for a lot of money.

‘I didn't hear that,' the man replied petulantly. ‘He criticized poor Grote angrily, waved his arms about – he must have thought that the tower was badly defended or something. Why don't you ask the Council?'

Melchior nodded and looked up, but as he did so he saw the Flemish merchant de Wrede again. The man had stepped out from behind the nuns' bathhouse and stopped unexpectedly when he saw the Apothecary on the town wall. He quickly turned around and vanished behind the
saun
again.

But the man carried on chatting, about how human life is strange, you can survive battles, you can be jabbed with spears and lances, you can be chopped with a hatchet, but in your own home your foot can slip, you fall down and that's that, may the Lord have mercy on your soul.

Melchior agreed. It was more than remarkable – and stranger still was the grimace of horror on the face of the dead Tower-Master.

O
N
ARRIVING
HOME
Melchior discovered Keterlyn gossiping intensely at the counter with an old woman. The hour was late, and usually at this time there would be no more customers, just a few thirsty for a restorative dram while on their way past. Melchior stopped on the threshold, for Keterlyn threw him a confidential glance. But the old woman also sensed that someone had entered the pharmacy, and she turned around. Melchior recognized Annlin, the housekeeper at the merchant Goswin's house on Rataskaevu Street, now of advanced years, and near whose dwelling they had found the corpse yesterday. Last night she had been quivering and goggle-eyed with horror as the town guards examined the dead body, but now the woman's curiosity had presumably got the better of her and she had come to ask the Apothecary what had happened the previous night. Perhaps Goswin had sent her.

Seeing Melchior, the old woman curtseyed to him and said she really must be going; the Master had only sent her out for some wax, but she'd stayed on grinding away like an old mill.

‘Not at all,' Keterlyn assured her. ‘I was the one doing the asking, and neighbours should catch up now and again, otherwise life would get very dull.'

‘And which salve may I give Master Goswin?' asked Melchior. He did indeed recall that over the autumn and winter he had sold the merchant several medicines – potions compounded of juniper
berries, caraway, camomile, celery and buck's blood, which must have been for pain in the legs, and also his famous paste made of salvia, marjoram, dill and plenty of peppermint oil that was an effective remedy for headaches.

‘Oh, Mistress Keterlyn has already found it,' responded Annlin. ‘It's the same one, I think, that took away the Master's leg pain last winter.'

‘That's an excellent mixture,' chuckled Melchior. ‘It's good for several ailments. It heals wounds and, if you make it into a liquid and drink it, helps in cases of poisoning. And, of course, for leg pain you have to boil oat gruel as well. But how is Master Goswin doing?' Actually, there should have been more to the question – how is Master Goswin doing now that his former arch-enemy Bruys is dead? But Annlin didn't catch – or didn't want to catch – that, so she simply told him that her Master had plenty to do and was eating very frugally, that he didn't have much appetite in the heat, he just wanted light food, but old Annlin didn't know what light food was and cooked as she had learned to cook so that a person would have strength and his soul would stay whole within him.

Annlin was not actually all that old, probably less than sixty, but some women look older than their age. Her dark hair had gone grey long ago, and she walked with a slight stoop, although she seemed quite brisk and nimble otherwise. She had long bony arms and fingers. Once she might have been quite good-looking, and she had lived at Master Goswin's house on Rataskaevu Street for as long as Melchior could remember … at Master Goswin's house next door to the Unterrainer house. Which reminded him that Annlin must know that old ghost story or would at least have heard of it. When he was about to ask about it in a polite way he saw that Keterlyn was glancing at him again slyly. Melchior shrugged – evidently his wife had already taken care of that question.

But Annlin, who was fumbling in her efforts to get going, had in her tale of Master Goswin's eating habits skilfully swung around to the previous night, to the effect that her Master was old now and had to sleep a lot and eat frugally, but how could he get any sleep
with people being stabbed and with screaming in the street at night?

‘Did he hear screaming yesterday?' asked Melchior, and Annlin replied that her Master – thank Heaven – had been asleep and didn't really wake up, but in the morning he had asked his servants what the commotion had been on the street in the night. Annlin could respond only that someone had been killed and the town guards had been making a noise outside. ‘So you don't know who it was that was killed?' ventured the old woman.

‘Some stranger,' replied Melchior. ‘The town guards had never seen him before. He seemed to be some young man or even a boy. Must have been someone from the outskirts.'

‘I suppose so,' agreed Annlin. ‘But, forgive me, Mr Apothecary, for staying here chatting for so long. Really, my Master was expecting me back ages ago. Good health to your family, and may St Agnes bless your happy children.'

‘Thanks for your good wishes, neighbour,' Keterlyn responded politely. ‘And may the saints' blessings continue for your family, too.'

‘Oh, my family is just me and old Hainz,' sighed Annlin, ‘and sometimes Mr Goswin, too, because he's very sickly now. My only son left home years ago, and he's a stablehand with the Bishop of Tartu.' There was a tinge of pride in that last sentence, Melchior noticed. Annlin fumbled a little more and was gone. Melchior went straight up to his wife, took her in his arms and kissed her on the mouth.

‘You have a nice way of greeting your wife,' Keterlyn said at length when she was free of her husband's embrace, ‘as if you hadn't seen her for years.'

‘Actually I've been visiting a few religious establishments,' chuckled Melchior. ‘But when a woman gives you such a sly look she's only got one thing on her mind – that's what I learned when I was an apprentice in Riga.'

‘I don't want to hear about all that debauchery. But I was winking at you because Annlin and I were having a chat about the
very thing that we discussed yesterday evening – the ghost at the Unterrainer house.'

‘Interesting,' said Melchior. ‘How did that come up?'

‘It didn't actually come up, but today I've been bringing it up with all the women on our street, as you would have asked me to if you hadn't rushed straight off into town this morning.'

‘I might very well have asked you,' admitted Melchior. ‘You're a very perspicacious wife.'

‘The wife of an apothecary, especially one like you, has to be perspicacious,' replied Keterlyn with a smile. ‘Yesterday evening you seemed curious about the ghost at the Unterrainer house –'

‘And then an unknown tramp was killed in front of that very house. It does look like the work of the devil, doesn't it?'

Keterlyn uttered something rapidly in Estonian meant to keep evil spirits away. She then told Melchior that she had discussed the Unterrainer house with everyone who had been into the shop and then she had been to the
saun
and on various errands to the baker's and the butcher's and brought up the subject of the ghost everywhere. It was known that some stranger had been knifed to death in the street the previous night, and some said that it portended no good for the Unterrainer house.