Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (10 page)

So he remained standing in the middle of the hallway of the whorehouse, understanding that he had been miserably duped.
He had not been sent to Tallinn to turn whores into gentlewomen; he had been sent for other things.

‘You pay me back every penny,' he hissed at the shocked old woman, ‘otherwise I'll tell the Council that you allow Russians to practise sodomy under your roof.'

‘Oh Lord, protect us,' screeched the crone.

‘Exactly,' Cornelis affirmed, adding a couple of choice Flemish words. He spat on the floor and left with a slam of the door. In one moment all his love for Hilde seemed to have evaporated as if it had never been. He had other things to do in Tallinn.

He had to go to the nunnery and then meet with that witch who could summon ghosts risen from the dead.

M
ELCHIOR
DID
NOT
go straight home from the Dominican Monastery but turned his steps uphill and walked between the narrow lanes to the nuns of St Michael. This path was very familiar to him, for he had for many years loved to sit in the courtyard of the convent, in the tavern of their brewhouse, and savour their mint-flavoured beer while having a chat. The tavern was almost straight in front of the Quad Dack Tower, the master of which, Grote, had so unfortunately met his end.

In Tallinn the nuns owned vast lands, and they had been there even before the Order had taken the town and most of Livonia back under its control. As far as Melchior knew, the Cistercians had been established in Tallinn even before there was a town wall. And when it was being built, a couple of hundred years ago, the nuns' extensive pastures and paddocks, their convent house and church remained outside it. Later, however, when the convent house was extended and the church made bigger, the nuns were also enclosed within the town wall, for whose construction they themselves had had to pay. Even now the Cistercians had large gardens and graveyards to the south and east of the church, green patches in the midst of a sea of grey stones, and these properties were enclosed by a low wall along Lai Street. Outside the wall lay the nuns' pastures and gardens, extending as far as the suburb of Süstermaye where the poorer people lived and where there were plenty of taverns.

The town's land and the convent's land had been a source of constant discord between the Council, the convent and the Order, especially when there was a need to extend the town wall or build the tower higher or stronger. The nuns sometimes evaded the issue by saying that they had no money, and if the wall belonged to the town then let the town build it. The Council said, in turn, that the land to which the wall extended now belonged to the town as well as the land beyond the wall. To this the nuns protested strongly, producing a document saying that the King of Denmark himself had decreed the land was theirs. And this brought the vassals of Harju and Viru into the dispute, asking by what right the Council should take away the convent's lands and assets. A mediator had been called in by the Order, and now the Order was in a difficult position, since most of the nuns in the convent were from families of the Harju and Viru vassals and the manorial lords and other loyal subjects of the Order, with privileges confirmed by the Order as well as the town. So the Commander of the Order always had to employ stratagems and diplomacy to conciliate the parties in a Christian spirit, as was the way.

Yet, despite the wrangling, the nuns of St Michael were a part of the town, and the townsfolk loved the convent. In recent years the desire of the Order and of a few merchants to build another religious community in Tallinn had further exercised the Council and the nuns and thus slightly distanced them from the Order. The Council and the nunnery were of one mind on this point, that the town did not need a third religious community because then all three would suffer for it.

Now Melchior was walking along Lai Street towards the oaken back gate set low in the wall. The nuns led a less austere life than the Dominicans. Their lands were expansive, and there was constant building work taking place, as in all of Tallinn. Just a few years ago they had started building a new refectory, and the work was ongoing, although it had stopped for now because the town promised to pay the master builders more if they built the Seaward Gate and carried out work to enlarge the harbour.

Approaching the nunnery's lands from the west the visitor would see before him the beautiful inner side of the town wall and the towers, in front of which lay the towerless St Michael's Church and, beside it, in a square, several other monastic buildings, the chapter house and the Abbess's house. First the visitor had to walk through extensive gardens, an orchard and a paddock. Entering through the gates from the cobbled street, which was noisy and none too clean, the visitor encountered a marvellous sense of peace as if, at one step from the town, he had gone into the countryside, to beautiful meadows, sheep pastures, amid apple trees and birdsong. Monastic air, thought Melchior, monastic air is always distinctive, just as town air is always distinctive.

He kept going along the path, bowing to the lay sisters working in the garden, and arrived at the church. Then he walked through the new refectory building and the apple orchard until he finally arrived at the Louenschede Tower. The old town wall ended about here, having been demolished to the north. The convent's gardens continued to the stables and houses of Köismägi. He stopped and thought for a moment.

Tobias Grote had fallen between the walls, as Dorn had said. Just here, where the old town wall ended, one could access the strip of land between the walls. This was a sort of no-man's land, a simple, sandy, shingled and weedy patch of earth. The old town wall enclosed the convent's inner courtyard, which contained all kinds of outbuildings, including the nuns' bathhouse, the brewhouse, the tavern, the laundry, the storehouses, the woodshed and the smithy. The old wall was built on to the convent building, so that from where the Apothecary was now standing there was no access to the courtyard. From the area between the walls, however, it was easy to get through the apple orchard and reach the Köismägi stables, where the convent's land was enclosed by a low wall and in which there was a small gate. At night it was closed, but it would not be hard to scale the wall. From this no-man's-land there was no access to the town wall or to the Quad Dack Tower because the only entrance was from the convent's courtyard.

Melchior stood and thought. What could the Tower-Master have seen here that terrified him so? A ghost? Why should the ghost of the Unterrainer house – if it existed at all – haunt Grote at the sisterhood? But since Melchior was now here, he went to the area between the walls and took a look around.

It really was very quiet here; the air hardly moved. The afternoon sultriness was heating the stones of the wall. All that could be heard was a gust of wind in the treetops and the chirruping of the grasshoppers from the gardens. The town wall was supported on the inside by arched niches, and on these a defensive walkway with wooden parapets was built; it was from here that Grote had fallen. The walkway was not very high, Melchior noticed, but if you were to fall, head first or on to the stones, you might indeed be killed. Access to this walkway was from both the Quad Dack Tower and the next tower along, the Nunnadetagune, the ‘tower behind the nunnery', which was between the Louenschede and Quad Dack Towers.

Melchior shrugged and examined the ground. Grote had fallen somewhere here. The soil was uneven, lumpy, full of gravel, puddles, weeds and goat droppings; over by the wall lay the stinking carcass of a cat. Melchior recalled Wentzel Dorn's words and frowned. Grote's corpse had been lying on his back, his face skywards and contorted with horror. His head had been bloody and his bones broken. As he fell he must have smashed his head against a stone. Melchior looked for some such stone and finally found one, at the edge of the old wall. No matter how carefully he looked that seemed to be the only largish stone here on this stretch of ground – an oblong chunk about the size of a couple of clenched fists, the tip of which did indeed seem to be covered in blood. What bothered Melchior, though, was that Grote could not have fallen on it when he fell. And, what was more, how could a person strike his forehead if he landed on his back?

He considered it a little and decided to try to climb up to the wall. From this side he couldn't manage it because there was no access to the Nunnadetagune Tower from the town side, and the lower gate of the Louenschede Tower was locked, which was as it
should be. Melchior hummed to himself as he marched back and around all the convent buildings to the church door, but when he heard the sound of the nuns' singing from within he changed his mind, went back through the gardens around from the direction of Lai Street and a short while later was stepping again into the courtyard from the main gate of the convent. He knew this route well because his beloved brewhouse tavern was right there, and that was where Melchior now aimed his steps.

The tavern was kept by a lay sister, Gude, a plump middle-aged woman whose arms were like oak beams and her face as round as a pumpkin. Gude hailed from the Order's lands somewhere to the east of Tallinn, where she and her husband had been servants on the vassal's estate. When her husband died Gude sold all her worldly possessions and came, with the estate owner's permission, into town to St Michael's Convent. Here she cooked meals for the nuns and did some gardening, but mostly she sold beer in the tavern. It would be hard to find a more suitable woman for this job because, if required, Gude could lay several men flat with her bare hands and her voice was so powerful that when she screamed everyone started with fright. In the convent's tavern there was regularly a need for this skill because the nuns sold beer for more hours in a day than the Council thought decent. Sometimes it might be that the men's chatter at night became too loud, and there was no woman more capable than Gude to quieten them down. The convent got a good income from beer sales, however, and sometimes, when the Council found itself at odds with the nuns over something, Wentzel Dorn had to come to the convent to impose a fine for staying open for too long and disturbing the nocturnal peace of the town. Naturally, Dorn did this reluctantly because he also liked to sit in the brewhouse tavern on occasion, but he had to undertake the wishes of the Council. Certainly there was no one better than Gude to give Melchior the lowdown on all the gossip and rumours from the convent.

So this afternoon Melchior was boldly stepping over the threshold of the tavern, calling out a loud greeting to Gude and
asking for a stoup of the nuns' best mint-flavoured ale. There were not many people here – a few weavers from Köismägi, a couple of apprentice cobblers and saddle-makers. At a table in the back Melchior noticed a foreign merchant, whom he must have met at some drinking session in the Blackheads' Guildhall. If he remembered rightly, he was from Antwerp and his name was de Wrede.

‘Good God, it's Mr Apothecary,' shouted Gude in shrill greeting. ‘Haven't seen sir around here for a good week or so. Is your throat dry? I know just the medicine for that – one much better than a stoup of mint ale.'

‘I don't know … What could that be?' asked Melchior.

‘
Two
stoups of mint ale, brewed with the blessing of St Michael himself,' replied Gude as she filled the cups from the keg and placed the foaming beer in front of the Apothecary.

‘I can't say no to that,' laughed Melchior.

Gude immediately asked him his news – how the children were growing, how was Mistress Keterlyn's health and what was going on around Rataskaevu way. When Melchior had told her everything and assured her that the twins were growing well and Keterlyn was in the best of spirits and good health, he, in turn, enquired about the nuns' news and asked her what she knew about the tragic event of Master Tobias Grote falling to his death.

‘I was weeping about that yesterday morning,' replied the lay sister sadly. ‘Yes, he fell to his death, and a fine intelligent man he was. He wasn't old, not one whose time had come, not at all. A terrible story – why should anyone die in such a senseless way?'

‘That I can't say,' grunted Melchior. ‘But you know what I heard? The Magistrate himself told me – and maybe the sisters who found him saw it, too – that he had a horribly contorted face, as if he'd seen a ghost.'

‘Oh, yes,' Gude shrieked. ‘The nuns were horribly frightened when they saw him.'

‘And, what's more,' said Melchior, ‘before he died Master Grote had mentioned to a few people that he'd seen the Rataskaevu Street Ghost. Tell me what I'm supposed to make of that. I've lived most
of my life on Rataskaevu Street and never seen a single ghost or spirit there.'

‘Mr Apothecary must be thinking about the ghost of that filthy woman, eh? Oh, yes, I've heard of it, but I haven't seen it – may the holy angels protect me.'

‘The very same, I suppose,' Melchior confirmed, although he didn't remember exactly which ghost was supposed to be haunting the Unterrainer house, as he'd heard any number of conflicting stories about it.

‘And nobody's able to say what sort of death they'll die,' said Gude with a sigh.

Melchior turned his head, and his gaze crossed that of the Flemish merchant's. Melchior flinched. The Fleming, who had been concentrating on his jug of ale when the Apothecary stepped in, had now raised his head and was looking at Melchior. Or, rather, he was observing him furtively and with great interest, his body taut as a bowstring. He was tense like a person trying very hard to overhear what others are saying. But when Melchior turned towards him de Wrede quickly looked away, but not so quickly that Melchior didn't spot it. De Wrede – Melchior now remembered that his name was Cornelis, Cornelis de Wrede – had been straining to eavesdrop on their conversation. Melchior bowed in his direction, but the Blackhead pretended not to notice. His attention seemed to be diverted to something outside the window. He drained his jug and left.