Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (28 page)

‘But that doesn't mean that de Wrede wouldn't have,' said Melchior. ‘I will sneak after him, and you can wait for me here or go back to town on your own.'

‘And I certainly will not do that, because I'm not leaving you with the Fleming in the forest,' asserted Dorn.

‘So, Magistrate, after him,' commanded Melchior.

It was now approaching evening. The wind had calmed, and the trees cast long shadows in the forest. The narrow forest track went first uphill among the pines and then down into a bushy landscape. De Wrede could go nowhere but straight along the path, and Melchior and Dorn went after him, trying not to step on twigs or make any other noise. Finally, beyond the thick undergrowth, the bushes began to thin out, and ahead there was a clearing, and a
babbling brook could be heard. Melchior, who was walking in front, raised his hand in warning, and Dorn stopped. Then Melchior crouched and headed for the thick growth at the edge of the clearing. They threw themselves on the ground, pushed branches aside carefully and saw a glade in front of them at the back of which was the bank of a stream and, beside it, a large rock.

De Wrede had settled down to sit on the rock and seemed to be waiting calmly. He opened his sack and examined its contents then he pulled something out of it, examined it and put it back in the bag. Although Melchior already knew what de Wrede was carrying, he was still taken aback.

‘That's a human hand,' whispered Dorn. ‘That's what he cut off the corpse. Did he come here to peddle them, or what?'

‘Who could have been in those graves?' asked Melchior. ‘Three graves, all newly dug.'

‘God, I don't know. One fisherman died recently, and then the sons of an innkeeper died of some terrible disease.'

‘Terrible disease?' muttered Melchior. ‘Some witches want the body parts of people who've died of diseases.'

They waited, and de Wrede waited, too. An hour or so passed, and the clearing grew dusky. Night noises began to sound from the forest. The wind had quite died down, but luckily it still wasn't raining. It was with the onset of darkness that a splashing sound came from the brook, as if someone were crossing a ford. De Wrede started and jumped up. The arrival was an older man. He walked with a stout pinewood stick, and he wore a filthy shirt; his beard was grey, and Melchior guessed that he was barefoot.

‘A farmer,' whispered Dorn.

The brook and the hooting of night birds drowned out their conversation, but some of it could be heard. Melchior had to strain himself to understand – de Wrede spoke German with a Flemish accent, and the farmer seemed to have trouble with plain simple German.

‘Not suitable at all,' said the old man. ‘Too old, too wrong. Better must be, you understand, and from a child.'

‘It was a right foot,' asserted de Wrede, and Melchior did not understand his next words.

The old man grumbled. They argued. ‘Died at the full moon,' said the old man, and then, ‘too old, younger … soul doesn't come out … and the hair …'

De Wrede handed his sack to the old man, who rummaged in it. He took something out – it must have been a human body part, but which one Melchior's eyes couldn't exactly make out – sniffed it and threw it over his shoulder towards the stream. He did the same with the next one, but the third seemed to suit him, and he stuffed it in his own sack.

Finally, the old man took out a human head. It seemed to Melchior that it was a girl's head, but he wasn't quite sure. The old man held it by the hair, examined it from a distance, tried it with his tongue and eventually put that in his sack, too. After that they seemed to be arguing about money. There was talk of three pennies and then of ‘big silver', but in the end a deal was struck. De Wrede paid the old man, and they both went over the stream and disappeared into the gathering darkness.

Melchior and Dorn, however, wandered back along the road by which they had come. It was a long way, and they didn't stop at any tavern, for Mrs Wakenstede and Mrs Dorn wouldn't have liked that. On the way they cursed all Flemings and all Estonian sorcerers. They didn't even stop at the guesthouse for late wayfarers by the town wall, and Dorn raised hell at the gate, demanding that the portcullis be raised or tomorrow morning all the town guards would be hanging on the gallows.

And so they finally got back into town just before midnight.

‘I
T IS AN
evil family,' Keterlyn told Melchior, ‘the Kibutze. They're sorcerers. They aren't proper Christians. I have heard of them, but my family has never had any contact with them nor had anything to do with them. They live down that way, in the woods beyond Reppen's Pastures, and if they go to church it's only out of hypocrisy. There are those quacks and witches who help people in need, mix potions and boil up medicines as you do, but there are also those who call forth the spirits of the dead – and not like the Redeemer – to chastise them. They call them out, talk with them about things beyond the grave and command them. I think it is only demons from hell who come out when summoned, and they steal people's souls away.'

‘These sorcerers seem to take money, too,' muttered Melchior.

‘The Wizard of Iinistagana, who really does know how to help people, only takes money from those who have got better from his treatment. He has no use for human body parts at all. He simply picks plants from the meadow and from the forest floor, boils them up and charms them with spells.'

Keterlyn had mentioned the Wizard of Iinistagana before, who he was related to and how. As far as Melchior understood it, this man was, in his own world, the same as an apothecary in the town; he mixed cures and boiled potions. But there was another sort of sorcerer, one who wanted to open that gate that has been closed shut by the saints and the laws of the Lord God, and if such a witch
got it open it was not human souls that came out but the minions of Satan.

It was Monday, and the noon lunch-hour. Melchior's bones were aching from the previous day's journey. He had closed the shop and was taking a meal in the kitchen. For lunch Keterlyn had cooked him a little piece of pork and two turnips and a carrot. As a side dish Melchior was chewing some dark bread baked the day before yesterday, on which he had rubbed garlic, and sipping some ale. He was sitting in the kitchen and had received a scolding for the previous night's adventure. All the more diligently had he been working in the pharmacy this morning and tied up a largish sum for any possible eventuality. The town's doctor had visited and berated him as to why the mixing of his prescriptions was taking so much time lately, and Melchior had replied that he was a witness of the town's boundaries and had to go and inspect them occasionally. Three times he had sworn the oath of an assistant bailiff before the Town Council, and if the Magistrate demanded it, he had to fulfil it. And then a servant had come from the Great Guild and had invited the Apothecary, by authority of the Knight Greyssenhagen, to the Guildhall of the Great Guild on Wednesday where Master Arend Goswin was being approved as a new patron of St Bridget's, defending the interests of the convent before the town and the Council. That startled many people but not Melchior. He recalled Goswin's tears at Master Bruys's funeral and the anguished heart with which he spoke of his own spiritual torment. Yes, if anyone were to carry on Master Bruys's enterprise it was Arend Goswin and no one else.

And, of course, in the morning Melchior had had to tell Keterlyn where he had been until late last evening and why there was no smell of ale on him like other decent men coming home from the Guildhall rooms after midnight.

‘I'd like to get together with your Wizard of Iinistagana some time,' said Melchior, wiping his greasy chin on his sleeve. ‘Maybe he has something useful to teach me. Pharmacy, as my father used to say, never ends and is never complete. There's always something
new to find. The new becomes old and then the old becomes new again.'

‘He never visits the town. And there are several other things he doesn't do – like hunting murderers or ghosts.' As Keterlyn said this rather pointedly Melchior thought it wiser to keep quiet and carry on eating. ‘One thing I have to tell you,' Keterlyn continued, ‘if you're still hunting that ghost. I heard at the market from the wife of Rosen the Saddler, who is a good friend of the wife of Kogge, the merchant, that it was their daughter Ursula who had been at home crying and talking about a ghost at the Unterrainer house.'

Melchior raised his gaze from his plate with an alarmed expression. ‘Ursula? The one who is in love with Simon, Casendorpe's apprentice, and thinks no one knows about it?'

‘That's the one,' said his wife. ‘A few days ago apparently. Ursula was terribly upset and cried at home and admitted that she'd heard the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street.'

‘She must have been with Simon at the time. I should go looking for that boy.'

Afterwards, though, their conversation shifted back to why Melchior couldn't stay at home and get on with his job and earning bread for his family. For instance, what business did he have in going over to Marienthal?

‘Even I didn't know what I was looking for, and I don't know whether I found what I wasn't looking for or whether I found out that what I thought was true was false,' replied the Apothecary. Hearing this Keterlyn felt like emptying the pan over her husband's head. But Melchior sipped his ale and told her what he had seen and heard there.

‘Very odd,' said Keterlyn, ‘very odd and very strange.' And she looked at her husband seriously with astonished eyes.

Melchior put his piece of meat back on the plate and took a big quaff of ale. ‘Are you thinking of those words of Master Bruys about the Lord God and refuge?' he asked at length.

‘No, I'm thinking of the five strange coincidences between Master Bruys and that unknown tramp's corpse.'

‘I don't understand,' muttered Melchior. But soon he did, and soon he cursed himself that it hadn't occurred to him before.

‘It occurs to me that someone wanted to make that tramp like Master Bruys,' said Keterlyn. ‘Bruys wasn't able to talk before he died, and the tramp had his tongue cut out. Bruys was an old man and couldn't have children any more, and the tramp had also had his manhood cut off. Bruys couldn't walk before he died, and the tramp had a foot sawn off after he died, so it was as if he couldn't have walked. Bruys flagellated himself, and the tramp had been flagellated.'

‘That's it. That's it,' Melchior cried. ‘Why didn't I see that straight away? But the fifth thing? What was the fifth coincidence?'

‘The fifth is that they're both dead, and both died on practically the same day. But one died by himself and the other was killed.'

‘One day's difference,' said Melchior. ‘The tramp was killed when the town already knew about Bruys's death. Bruys died during a downpour, and …' He stopped in mid-sentence. ‘The rain was bucketing down,' he suddenly whispered. ‘It was terribly heavy rain. They couldn't send word from the convent that Bruys had died. Oh, St Cosmas. And those other things, woman, those other things – those other things might mean something quite different.'

Keterlyn shook her head. As usual, her husband's talk was starting to get confusing. ‘What's the significance of that downpour?'

Melchior was about to answer, but then a knocking was heard from the shop. Keterlyn rushed to answer and found the bad-tempered joiner Ditman at the door, who grumbled as to whether the Apothecary was going to have too long a lunch-hour because he urgently needed a strong mixture to ease a stomach ache, that one made of bitter herbs.

Melchior returned to the pharmacy, decanted some stomach medicine and extracted the price of three stoups for two of them from the joiner. A little later the next customers arrived – he had to work and mix cures, but his mind was constantly on Keterlyn's words. Five coincidences. Five. And yet, shouldn't one of those be
the key? Even if it wasn't precisely what Keterlyn supposed, something that explained everything and announced to him … something more terrifying than resurrection from the dead.

Among those who came into the pharmacy Melchior's eye was caught by an elderly woman named Margelin Witte, the sister of the Pastor of the Church of the Holy Ghost, from the Unterrainer house. As always when he saw her Melchior was slightly startled. The strangest thing was that, although the Pastor's sister must have been over sixty, she was still an attractive woman, and it was written on her face that decades ago she must have been quite a beauty. And yet, despite the comeliness, there was something forbidding, something cruel about her. Sometimes Melchior thought the woman was insane, but then he was not quite sure. Margelin looked after her brother; they had no housekeeper or servant. She didn't often go around town, and she was regarded as a stranger because she had come to Tallinn only two years before. But she lived in the Unterrainer house, in front of which that tramp had been killed and in whose cellar there might still be immured the body of the wretched Brother Adelbert.

This time Margelin needed something for wounds, something strong that would stop them festering. Melchior conjured up his most sympathetic face, offered Margelin a sweet – ‘free of charge to a neighbour' – and asked for what kind of wounds and who needed this medicine.

‘For the Pastor of the Church of the Holy Ghost,' said Margelin. ‘Do you have any lily-of-the-valley wine, Apothecary?'

‘I do,' said Melchior, ‘but the thing is, without the approval of the town doctor I'm not actually allowed to make it. But, you know,' he said more quietly, bending in closer to Margelin, ‘if I could have a look at those wounds with my own eyes I dare say I could prescribe that medicine without the approval. Lily-of-the-valley is poisonous; it's dangerous.'