Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (36 page)

‘A rock on the head,' repeated Melchior softly. ‘And, of course, you took the torch with you. Grote wouldn't have gone on to the wall in the dark, but no torch was found with the corpse.'

‘It was a good torch,' said Annlin.

‘And the weapon you chose to kill me with was a dagger …' Melchior had been spared a knife attack, but Dorn had suffered a slight wound to the wrist, and raising a knife against a magistrate was a very serious crime indeed.

‘The Master thought that if the poison didn't work … just in case,' said Annlin.

‘You mustn't speak. The Master won't allow it,' howled Hainz.

‘What poison was it?' demanded Melchior.

‘I don't know. The Master gave me a bottle and ordered me to take it because the Apothecary was snooping around too much and asking dangerous questions and would soon work this business out. And when he came to the Guildhall in the evening, he said that the Apothecary already knew too much and wanted to dig open the grave and that in the morning he would go to the Council to complain. The poison must have been too weak and old and didn't work … So since the Apothecary didn't die he would come to kill him.'

Melchior recoiled in horror. He had only just escaped the knife attack and could never have anticipated that the old woman was so quick and nimble.

‘And that poor unfortunate, did you kill him, too?'

‘No, the Master did. It was the Master himself … I didn't kill him … The Master stuck him with a knife, that same knife, the Master killed …'

B
ETWEEN THE
CONVENT
walls it was always quieter and more peaceful, even when the town was buzzing with sensation and everyone was asking each other the news. Everyone had heard something, everyone knew something and that it was startling, weird and incredible, and if anyone knew the whole truth it would be the Magistrate or the Apothecary. They said the Council had Master Goswin taken to a prison cell in the in the Bremen Tower. Just think – Master Goswin, a member of the Great Guild. The town was swarming and seething, and the Magistrate and Melchior had to get away to be by themselves and drink a few tankards of ale in peace at the Cistercians' taproom. Brother Hinric had come with them.

But even in the nuns' tavern there was a smith as well as a servant of a canon, who just happened to be there and who offered to buy the Magistrate a drink if they could hear a bit of gossip. They had managed to shoo Lay Sister Gude away, but she continued to prick up her ears to eavesdrop on what Melchior was saying.

Melchior, Dorn and Hinric were sitting at the rear table of the tavern, and through the window they could see the Quad Dack Tower. They were drinking the nuns' mint beer, which Hinric regarded as a very good brew. They sat in silence, waiting, and only when they had already drunk one tankard did the Knight Kordt von Greyssenhagen arrive in his splendid red hat. The Knight had been to quiz Melchior the previous day about the ghost and Bruys's
will and what hypocrisy the Apothecary had witnessed at the Guildhall of the Great Guild, but Melchior had asked him to wait a day or so to collect his thoughts and … recover.

‘Gentlemen,' said Melchior finally in a slightly tremulous voice. ‘I am going to tell you a couple of peculiar tales, and I admit that without ale I wouldn't be able to get them past my lips. In the year of Our Lord 1349 there lived in Tallinn a merchant named Cristian Unterrainer, who was a wicked and evil man. He had a wife, Ermegunde, but we have to believe that Unterrainer didn't live with his wife in order and decency and wanted physical pleasure only from torture. Now, this woman's maiden name was something like Greyssenhagen, and she was from the town of Colberg, but the Knight himself can tell us more about that presently.' Greyssenhagen nodded sorrowfully. ‘At the same time, seventy years ago, an indecent young monk, Adelbert, came to Tallinn. He would go through the town with his alms-basket, and we can't say who seduced whom, but it is clear that he started visiting Ermegunde and that they enjoyed sinful love. However, in a small town nothing goes unnoticed, and stories reached the monastery. The Prior, Helmich, was a mild-mannered man, and he did not punish Adelbert as he should have. Instead of whipping him he only admonished Adelbert, but passion in the young monk was stronger than his oath of chastity. He was a young man, full of life, and he couldn't give up Ermegunde's love. Passion is sweet and sin even sweeter, so one day he returned to her house when he thought her husband wasn't at home. Unterrainer, however, came upon them, and his revenge was terrible.

‘That man was not an ordinary human. He was a monster. He shut his wife and the monk in the cellar, bound them and then tortured and whipped his wife for several days until she died. By law he could have dragged his wife through the town and shamed her in front of the people, but that wasn't enough for him. He forced Adelbert to look on as he tortured and starved her.' Melchior was silent for a moment, took a recuperative draught of ale and carried on, his eyes dull and dark. ‘Next, gentlemen, it
seems to me that after his wife was dead Unterrainer threatened the monk and forced him to choose. Either he would immure Adelbert alive with his wife's corpse or let the monk go free – but only after Adelbert had defiled his wife's corpse while Unterrainer watched.'

Hinric hung his head but nodded silently. Greyssenhagen's face was as dark as a storm cloud.

‘By St Victor,' murmured Dorn. ‘Do you know that for sure?'

‘I can't know for sure, but I can assume so.'

‘But what Unterrainer demanded from the monk,' asked Dorn, ‘did he do it?'

‘A few days later he arrived back at the monastery, troubled and confused,' said Melchior. ‘So, yes, he did. Maybe several times. He wanted to avoid being buried alive. Maybe, gentlemen, maybe Unterrainer cut the foetus of the child that had been fertilized in sin from Ermegunde's body, but I don't know. And Unterrainer kept his word. He let the monk go free because he believed he would never talk about it.'

‘But it could have been so,' whispered Dorn, looking at the Knight, who remained silent. ‘They might have had a child.'

Melchior shook his head, swallowed and continued. ‘Unterrainer was wrong. Adelbert talked about his sin to the Prior and then he put his own hand to it. He castrated himself. He himself chopped off what had led him into temptation and horror. He could no longer live with the knowledge of what he had done with his penis … He could no longer feel that thing every day as part of his own body, remember it, call it to mind, live again through what he had done. But his body was too worn out. He'd lost too much blood, and he died.

‘Prior Helmich was supposed to have Adelbert buried in unconsecrated ground as a suicide, but he didn't. As I said, he was a man with a pliant nature, but he was also cunning. He didn't want too many bad rumours getting out about the monastery. He had managed to conceal how Adelbert died, and he came up with a clever plan. He let a closed coffin be buried and pretended that
Adelbert was in it, having died of a disease. The coffin was empty. The real corpse, I think, he had dragged away by a couple of reliable lay brothers through the little eastern gate and thrown into a hole somewhere under a bush. He couldn't have Adelbert buried on consecrated soil like an honest Christian and give him the sacrament, but neither could he allow the townspeople to know about an indecent brother living in the community. Adelbert's seeming death and burial on monastery land stopped the talk, and it was almost forgotten.

‘Unterrainer, however, did immure his wife's corpse in the cellar and left Tallinn. After a few years, though, the Council had the wall pulled down, and the woman's corpse was discovered. This gave rise to rumours, and since then the Unterrainer house has been said to be haunted. But in Colberg Unterrainer sold his house to one Jurgen Zeneberck who started trading in this town. The house belonged to Zeneberck's heirs for a time, then stood empty until finally Gottschalk Witte bought it when he became a pastor in Tallinn. Since the pastor is in the habit of having himself whipped, anyone on the street could hear his wailings, and that would give extra impetus to the rumours that it was haunted.

‘I must say one more thing about Witte so that you understand everything, but this has to stay between ourselves. I think Witte didn't buy that house by chance, but he wanted to settle there. I think Witte had come across Unterrainer at some point, because Unterrainer became a Master of Flagellants in Germany. He invited others around him and flayed them because that was the only way he could feel virile pleasure, and young Gottschalk Witte and his sister Margelin must have been disciples. Unterrainer told them what had happened in the house and how he had once flayed sinners there. I can only guess that for Witte and Margelin this was the ideal place for penitence. They sought Unterrainer's heir and bought the house from him so they could come to Tallinn … Maybe this was a way to escape because their secret had perhaps got out somehow, and that would be thought heretical. In any case, Witte has himself whipped, and I don't want to think or guess any more
beyond that. And it's not of any great importance either, because this is where the story of the Unterrainer house ends and another story begins.'

‘What happened behind the monastery walls can stay there,' said Dorn. ‘How do you know all this, though? That's what I don't understand.'

‘Brother Lodevic told me some of it – Prior Helmich had used the story as a lesson. There were holes in this tale, though, because all the gossip said something about castration. Something had leaked out of the monastery somehow, and gossip like that has great power – there's no smoke without fire, as they say. The townsfolk had to remember what sort of person Unterrainer was, and I couldn't understand how the business of castration had attached itself to Adelbert's story and why. I didn't believe that Unterrainer would have dared to raise his hand against a reverend brother and shed his blood. And I thought about that poor tramp whose corpse was found in front of the Unterrainer house, and I admit that I thought all sorts of mad things, but I had to know. If that monk really was buried in the Dominican cemetery then … Anyway, Adelbert couldn't have already been castrated when he arrived back at the monastery because Helmich couldn't have kept that under wraps. I had to know, and I asked to have that grave dug up. The grave was empty, so I thought he had to have killed himself. The rest I guessed.'

‘Prior Moninger knew,' said Hinric. ‘It was entered in the scroll that is passed down from one prior to the next and which other eyes don't see. The story is that Adelbert knew he was dying and asked permission from the Prior to be castrated before he died because he didn't dare, with that appendage with which he'd committed the most grievous sin, to hope for resurrection. What sort of sin it was, the Prior doesn't write, but Adelbert didn't want to go to the other world in that physical form. He didn't want to appear before Christ with that sinful organ. The Prior couldn't castrate him, but he let Adelbert do it himself, so he felt guilty about his death.'

‘So did that monk really … with that woman's corpse … ?' Dorn fell silent, looking inquisitively at Hinric.

‘It was written that Adelbert had confessed his sins, and the most grievous one was that he'd been forced to defile a corpse, and for that he would never find redemption,' said Hinric quietly.

‘But now I think the esteemed Knight wants to tell us something,' said Melchior. ‘He has found out the truth about the Unterrainer house, which was one reason why he bought a house in the Lower Town, I think. But now he will soon hear about the ghost.'

‘Yes, I'll tell you,' said Greyssenhagen. ‘It's not a long story. Ermegunde was my great-aunt. My grandfather, who held a Junker estate in Pomerania in the service of the Order, had eight children, five daughters and three sons. He married the daughters off to other Junkers, but Ermegunde didn't have children, and her husband was killed fighting the Poles. No one wanted to woo the barren Ermegunde, but a merchant from Colberg promised to take her because he didn't want children anyway. He also demanded a dowry, and Grandfather helped him, with his own money, to buy a house in Tallinn. Only when the merchant had set off with Ermegunde did my grandfather hear that the man was a flagellant with followers. They all sang psalms and paraded around and whipped one another until the blood flowed. But by then it was too late. Unterrainer had left with his wife. I have to say that it wasn't at all usual in Pomerania for a Junker's daughter to be given in marriage to a townsman, but Ermegunde didn't want to be forced into her only other option in life, to go into a convent. A few years later word reached my grandfather that Ermegunde, who was already over thirty by then, was finally expecting a child. The next messages didn't arrive for years, and they said that Unterrainer had long since departed from Tallinn and that Ermegunde's corpse had been found immured in his cellar. No one knew anything about the infant.'

‘Jesus,' cried Dorn. ‘So what happened to the child?'

‘I don't think we'll ever know,' said Melchior, ‘and maybe it's best
that way. And I don't
want
to know any more details because what I have to tell you now is quite difficult enough as it is.'

‘No,' said Greyssenhagen, ‘I don't suppose we'll ever know. That story is told in my family, and when fate brought me to the Tallinn area I started to hear about a haunted house where Ermegunde had once lived – and I wanted to know. I bought the house next door, but I didn't find out anything further, only rumours and women's gossip, until one day I heard that the apothecary on my street was hunting the Rataskaevu Street Ghost. I'm afraid I don't have anything more to tell you.'