Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (6 page)

‘That I do believe,' mumbled Melchior.

‘Everyone has to earn their living as best they can. It wasn't Magdalena's fault that her husband fell into the hands of the Victual Brothers. And no other love came into her life; she used to say sometimes that her heart was given to her to love only one man. And then she became a housekeeper, and at one stage she was the cook in Master Bruys's house, if I remember rightly. But she got rotten pay, and that was when she started whoring, they say, to keep body and soul together. When that came out, Master Bruys threw her out of the house, being a pious man. And nobody would give her work any longer, because who would ever want a whore under their roof? So she had no choice but to carry on as a woman of pleasure. She would always say that there were even whores in the Bible and that it was a job that would never vanish from this world.'

‘That might be true, too,' mumbled Melchior. ‘But what about the ghost?'

‘The ghost?' repeated his wife. ‘I just happened to be in the
saun
that time, and I suppose they were talking about what they always talk about – but I'm not saying anything about that – and the word
cropped up, and then Magdalena went terribly quiet, which wasn't her way at all. Someone asked her something, and she said to leave her alone. When asked what was wrong she said something like she could no longer see a tomorrow any more because yesterday evening she'd seen Death.'

‘Seen Death?' enquired Melchior.

‘I don't remember her words exactly now, you see, but she said she'd seen a ghost on Rataskaevu Street and that such things did exist, and now she feared her hour was approaching. Then she left.'

‘And the next day she drowned,' noted the Apothecary. ‘If I remember rightly, I was away from home that day …'

‘You were with the Magistrate out beyond the limestone quarry looking for that itinerant doctor who was supposed to have poisoned the goldsmith's son.'

‘It wasn't an itinerant doctor at all,' said Melchior angrily. ‘It was a thief and a bastard who was peddling all sorts of poisonous rubbish as medicines, which he had stolen. And it took two days before we caught him. The Magistrate sent him straight to the gallows. If people like that are allowed to go free the townspeople would have all the honest apothecaries burned at the stake.'

‘Anyway, that day Magdalena was found drowned in the well. After that, though, clean water was allowed to flow through it, and Witte, the Pastor of the Church of the Holy Ghost, blessed the well. And, just to be sure, before that a thief from the prison after a flogging on the pillory had been given water from it to drink.'

‘But Magdalena said she saw a ghost on Rataskaevu Street?' Melchior asked.

‘Yes, she did. And afterwards the women were wondering whether that was the ghost of the Unterrainer house that Magdalena saw, whether it had come to announce her death and whether the death was for her sins. Then I told them to shut up and not to tell their children such tales. If they'd been in Magdalena's place half of them would have been whores, too. But, well, as the Holy Virgin is my witness, I didn't say it to them quite like that.'

‘The ghost of the Unterrainer house,' murmured Melchior.
There had been talk of its hauntings ever since Melchior was a child, but even though he had spent his whole life on Rataskaevu Street he had never seen nor heard a phantom. But the stories about that house stubbornly persisted – in fact, so stubbornly that the house had stood empty for years, until now, when the new Pastor of the Church of the Holy Ghost, Gottschalk Witte, had bought it and was living there with his sister. On those occasions when she came in to buy medicine for her brother's disturbed sleep Pastor Witte's sister had always caused some unease in Melchior. He sometimes suspected that she wasn't always in her right mind, with her sparkling eyes and strange words.

But this story of a ghost and the Unterrainer house – Melchior had never taken it very seriously. Against demons and ghosts we are protected by our holy faith, the saints and care of the soul, of that he was quite sure.

‘It's getting late,' Keterlyn decided then. ‘Let's not start talking about ghosts in the middle of the night and call down bad luck on ourselves. Let's blow out the candle now, and you'll come with me to the marriage bed.'

‘I've not the slightest objection to that,' replied Melchior, but he knew that some unarticulated thought was slipping through his head at that moment – some recollection, some snatch of a sentence, something connected with the ghost, to death, the sea and beer, but it was so vague that he couldn't catch it. There was something else he had heard about the ghost and about death, but where and when?

As he stretched out his hand to the candle, a shout could be heard outside the window. Then another, and he saw someone running past with a torch.

‘Must be the town guards,' guessed Keterlyn when Melchior emerged from his thoughts and looked curiously towards the window.

‘I'll just take a peep and see what's going on,' said the Apothecary.

When he opened the door, he almost collided with a town guard carrying a torch.

‘Mr Apothecary,' he cried. ‘A blessing that you're still up. Have you seen anyone running past here?'

‘I don't think so,' replied Melchior. ‘Or if I did, it was some man with a torch.'

‘That was Joachim, the town guard. Nobody else?'

‘No. But what's happened?'

‘A person has been struck down, right here. Seems he's still breathing. Mr Apothecary, would you …'

‘I'm coming,' shouted Melchior. ‘Still breathing, you say?'

All Keterlyn saw was her husband rushing out of the room – even forgetting to take his hat. She sighed, shrugged and went to bed, leaving the candle to burn for her husband.

M
ELCHIOR
COULD
SEE
that one guard was bent over something lying on the ground in the torchlight. Another guard, who had come in answer to the first guard's call, ran with Melchior and then carried on towards the gate on Pikk Hill. Joachim, the third guard, had rushed towards St Nicholas's.

He recognized the guard bending over the recumbent form as Peter Kylckme, a distant relative of Keterlyn's non-German family. This man had beckoned to him from a distance, and Melchior ran over to him. All the town guards knew that the Apothecary was a favourite of the Magistrate and an authorized town sentry.

‘We heard screams,' said Peter to Melchior. We came here from Pikk Street and found this here. He still seems to be breathing – may the saints have mercy on him.'

Melchior kneeled down and looked at the human form lying on the ground. The first thing he saw was blood. The man's jacket was soaked with bright-red blood. But he was no longer breathing. This man was dead. He had died just a moment ago, because …

Melchior pulled up his jacket and revealed a scrawny body. Blood still seeped from his wounds. There were three deep wounds on the body, two to the chest and one to the stomach, any one of which could have been fatal, as far as Melchior could see. You could sew such wounds up and apply any whatever potions or lotions, but God would still call a man with such injuries. There was nothing left for him on this earth.

‘Who is this boy?' asked Peter. ‘I don't think I've ever seen him. He's terribly thin.'

‘Give me some light,' demanded Melchior. He studied the dead man's face.

‘He was alive. I swear, he was still alive when I got here,' said Peter. ‘He was breathing and shaking and trembling, and then he breathed really deeply … and then he must have gone. That was the last breath … when the soul leaves the body … it must have been.'

‘These wounds are fresh,' said Melchior. ‘Good God,' he whispered after taking a closer look at the dead man's face. He had not seen this man before either. Or, rather, this wasn't a man, it was a boyish form. Or a young man, it was hard to say. And he was very, very thin. The boy's head was twisted backwards in his death throes, the chin forced upwards and his chapped, bitten lips might still have been letting out the sigh of death. In the torchlight the spectral-looking face seemed pale and sunken; the cheekbones and jaw could be made out under the fragile skin. This was not a beautiful face – in fact, rather an ugly one, somehow frightening. But what was most astonishing were the boy's eyes. They were bulging but at the same time half closed, as if death had overtaken them in the middle of blinking. But this face was as unfamiliar to him as it was to the town guard. If Melchior had seen such a face before it would certainly have stayed in his mind. There are faces that you never forget, and this was one of them.

Then Melchior examined the boy's frail body. His bones didn't seem to have any flesh on them at all. When he had wiped away the blood he saw an emaciated frame, hardly a man's, so delicate and slender it was, so prominent were the breastbone and other bones.

‘This young man has been living in great hunger,' said Peter, and Melchior had to agree. Certainly this boy had not been used to eating every day, and since Livonia had been hit by crop failures for the past couple of years this came as no surprise. And yet … and yet there was something strange about this young man. His face, so delicate and frail, although contorted in its death throes, did not seem to be the face of an Estonian. Melchior could not quite
explain the feeling to himself. The boy was of short stature and so lanky and emaciated that it was a wonder that he had remained alive at all. His arms and legs were like whip handles; there was hardly any flesh on them, and the legs were stunted from the knees down. On his arms the dark veins were visible under the delicate skin.

‘Some beggar or tramp,' guessed Peter. ‘Look, Mr Apothecary, he's had nothing at all to eat. He must have been escaping famine somewhere in the Order's lands by coming into town. If he'd lived near by he could at least have got hold of some fish and a crust of bread or gone to the almshouse …'

‘That might be so,' muttered Melchior. He was now looking at the jacket that covered the body. In fact, it was not a jacket but some sackcloth with holes cut into it. The garment scarcely reached the boy's knees.

By then the other two town guards had returned. They were panting. They had been running, but it was hard to run in the dark while holding a sword and a torch.

‘Nobody,' said the guard called Joachim, who had come from St Nicholas's. ‘The gate up to Toompea is closed, but if he'd slipped through the churchyard, over to the stables and gardens behind the church, or by the wall between the Estonians' houses …'

‘Yes,' said Melchior. Behind St Nicholas's Churchyard and Seppade Street there are many shadowy courtyards and vaulted passages. It would have been easy for the murderer to get away.

‘So what happened to this little chap?' asked Joachim.

‘Dead,' Melchior affirmed. ‘No doctor could have helped him. He suffered some very deep knife wounds.'

‘Heaven have mercy. Who is he?' asked the other guard. ‘He's still just a boy.'

‘I don't know. I've never seen him before. Must be someone from outside town,' Peter answered.

‘So he must belong to somebody,' said Joachim. ‘Do you have any use for him, Mr Apothecary? A very fresh corpse, too – you might get some medicine or something from it.'

‘He's too scrawny,' said Melchior pensively, ‘and I don't know how old he is. If he were a young man in his prime and a redhead, you could get some strong medicine out of his thigh muscles. If you cut them to shreds, sprinkle them with myrrh and aloe and marinade them in spirits, dry them when the moon is full … But he must be too young. And you wouldn't get a good belt for back pain out of the skin either – it is too poor. What are you going to do with him?'

Peter shrugged. ‘I guess we should take him to the mortuary at St Barbara's; sure they'll dig a hole there to bury him themselves if no one claims the body. The Council won't allow corpses to be left lying around. But how are we going to get him there now, at night?'

Melchior was thinking. Yes, a young and strong and recently dead man or woman, from a body like that you can extract good medicines, but this boy really in too poor a shape. Wiser doctors than he always wanted body parts from vigorous men and women for medical purposes. True, this boy had just died, and the life force – such as it was – should still be in his limbs, but you couldn't take out any fat, because there wasn't any. The skull and the brain would yield a good medicine if boiled up, but Melchior had never done that; he didn't know precisely how to do it. Besides, he wouldn't dare to dissect the corpse if he wasn't quite sure that no relative would claim it. But now his nose was assaulted by a faecal smell emanating from the body, and that reminded him that he could boil an elixir for strength from the semen of a freshly killed man. And no relative could have any objection to that if it were collected in a bottle. A couple of vassals from Toompea had paid a very good price for a drink made from the semen of some robbers executed at Võllamägi last year.

‘So what's to be done, Mr Apothecary?' enquired Peter. ‘Shall we take him to St Nicholas's Churchyard now and lay him under a bush until the morning, or do you want to do a little dissecting?'

‘Maybe,' muttered Melchior. This boy couldn't be so young that he wouldn't yield some semen. Melchior pushed the upper body of
the corpse out of the sackcloth, revealing the midriff. He was taken aback. Peter, too, leaning in closer, gasped and whispered, ‘St Catherine and the hairy devil.'

There, where the man's penis should have been, was just a withered stump. The boy's sex organs had been ripped out, and the remaining flesh had been scorched. The poor boy had been castrated. Melchior noticed that this had been done long ago, because the wound had healed. The scrotum, too, had been chopped off, so there would be no semen at all in the body. This was a ghastly sight, painful for any man to look at.