Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street (9 page)

‘Yes, it is a very good book, and Master Bruys hoped that he could die in his own home and that he would spend his last energies on the prayer
Profiscere anima Cristiana,
which he wished to say with the Pastor of St Nicholas's, turning to all the saints that he held dear. Sometimes he visited the monastery to ask advice on how to keep himself from the five temptations of the devil in his last days. But God ordained otherwise, and he died on his pilgrimage at Marienthal. His servant and the new Abbess of St Bridget's were beside him in his final moments. I know. They brought me word from Marienthal.'

‘Nevertheless,' said Melchior, ‘we know how he
wanted
to die, and we know that he was old and feeble, but we don't know
how
he died.'

Hinric shook his head with regret, as if his friend's doubts pained him. ‘What sows the seeds of doubt in your mind and sets you looking for a murderer once more?' he asked.

‘May St Cosmas assist me if I'm mistaken. I can't answer your question. There are so many evils in the world which people can cover up so well. But, look, there are several facts that seemed to me to be connected. Grote and Bruys die at almost the same time, Bruys in the daytime and Grote at night – although Grote wasn't to know that. Grote says that the previous night he'd seen the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street, and he asks God to bless Master Bruys. And people in Tallinn have talked of the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street for years. There was a woman, Magdalena, a prostitute – you might have heard of her – who had once served Master Bruys and who also said that she'd seen the ghost, and the next day she drowned in the well. Those ghost stories, for their part, are connected with the Unterrainer house, which is next door to that of Master Goswin, with whom Bruys had once, maybe about twenty-five years ago, had a major quarrel. And last night, in front of the Unterrainer house, the town guards found the corpse of some young beggar or tramp whose genitals had been cut off and whom neither I nor the
guards had ever seen before.' Hinric crossed himself and quickly recited a prayer. ‘As I recall,' continued Melchior, ‘that ghost story about the Unterrainer house goes back a very long way and is somehow connected with the Dominicans.'

‘Yes, it is,' said Hinric at length. ‘But it really goes back a
very
long way. Let the dead lie in peace, Melchior. Let the Lord God and his angels take care of them. Let the spirits of the dead be in peace.'

Melchior sighed, took a sip of ale and said, ‘But do the spirits of the dead leave the living in peace?'

W
HAT
WAS
KNOWN
as the Red Convent in Tallinn was a modest-looking two-storey house in a street running along the wall east of the Seppade Gate, where, with the Council's approval and to the pleasure of some men of the town, a number of single women accommodatingly offered their charms. There is not a single town of any size or importance that has got by without such an establishment, and neither had Tallinn; it was a necessary evil, and it had even been acknowledged by a number of holy men that if there were no public women all undertakings would be overrun by the desires of the flesh.

When Cornelis de Wrede, a merchant from Antwerp, once again found himself striding towards the Red Convent on this August day he was thinking that he was doing two things in Tallinn about which his mother, father and uncles had most sternly warned him: he was placing the family business in jeopardy, and he was falling in love with a whore.

The first thing was actually simpler, because Cornelis believed that what he was doing was right and proper – and wasn't that why he had been sent here to faraway Tallinn? If you're alone, you must decide alone and take responsibility for your decisions, and Cornelis was not afraid of responsibility; he was prepared for it if things were to turn bad.

The second was harder. His father had sought out a bride for him from a decent family, a well-mannered and virtuous lass and
pretty good-looking as well. She was the daughter of a rich merchant in the town of Antwerp and a seventh child, which meant that the women in that family tree were as fertile as needed and their broad hips and swelling bosoms promised de Wrede the abundant continuation of the line.

This summer, however, Cornelis had discovered here in Tallinn that he did not want to share his bed with any woman other than a whore named Hilde, who slept with men at the house they called the Red Convent and had agreed readily to Cornelis's proposal that she leave behind her whoring, make a pilgrimage to the town of Aachen – just in case – and wear penitent's clothes so as to appear, redeemed, before Cornelis's parents and …

And Cornelis de Wrede knew no more beyond that. Beyond that it was more complicated because his father was a stern man and would certainly not agree to such a marriage, at least not at first. Beyond that things would depend on how Cornelis got on with his most important task in Tallinn. Maybe then his father would close his eyes to the fact that his middle son wanted to marry a former prostitute.

As a merchant abroad Cornelis had had to join the Brotherhood of Blackheads. This made it easier to get on and much more straightforward when arranging business deals and communicating with the townsfolk. The Blackheads were a peculiar society. Some of their young men had, like him, come from abroad, from German towns and from Burgundy, but there were also some from Sweden and from Riga. Most of them, however, were the sons of local merchants as well as those who were not yet married, had not become citizens or had set up in business independently. The Blackheads got on well with the Dominicans and kept an altar at their Church of St Catherine. They organized extravagant drinking feasts and tournaments. They kept a tavern at their guildhall and were the most lively company in the town. They were respected, they were honoured, they had good relations with the Great Guild, the Council and with the ruling Order itself – as long as the Order was not at war with the bishops. There was some old secret
connected with the Blackheads, something very unsavoury, which none of them wanted to talk about and about which most of them knew only rumours. At the beer table Cornelis had, however, managed to extract a few details from the guildsmen. It had happened about ten years ago, when the Blackheads were still a young guild, and at their head was a certain Clawes Freisinger from Cologne. Freisinger had breathed some life into the Blackheads, joining the brotherhood, which at the time existed in name only, and made them what they were today. But then he had vanished from the town, and no one seemed to know exactly where he had gone or why he left. Some said he would return to Tallinn because he had bills to settle. And so there was some old secret about which the current Blackheads had not the faintest notion but for which Freisinger had almost paid with his life. And implicated in all this was Melchior, the Tallinn apothecary, because he had solved some crime. It was said of the Apothecary that he was a clever man and especially resourceful when it came to tracking down killers.

I need to keep an eye on him, Cornelis had decided.

Now Cornelis was standing again in front of the Red Convent, his heart beating painfully and his palms sweating. He had not even eaten properly today. Milling around were all kinds of farmhands, peasants, sack-makers and other ordinary people; a few of them sneered at him. The door opened unexpectedly, and out of it stepped a nobleman with a magnificent red hat who cast a mistrustful sidelong glance at Cornelis. That hat was a very fine piece of handiwork. There were few in Tallinn who wore such things, although in Flanders it was the height of fashion, and the richer townsfolk were already wearing them. That man must be one of the kinsmen of the vassal, one Greyssenhagen, recalled de Wrede. He was a little surprised that such a noble gentleman would be visiting a whorehouse – but we all have our own little pleasures, he figured. The Council did not recommend that married men or the clergy from the town go to brothels, but, as for the subjects of the Order, Cornelis knew of no prohibition. The Knight cast one more suspicious look at the Fleming and disappeared towards the Seppade Gate.

In fact, at this very moment Cornelis should have been somewhere else, at an actual convent – that of the Holy Sisters of St Michael – looking around and listening out to see what he could make of the rumours being spread there from the tavern behind Seppade Gate since yesterday when Dorn had been chatting about the death of the Tower-Master.

‘He had a face on him like he'd seen a ghost. And, from what I hear from Melchior, poor Grote had been to visit the Apothecary, and when Melchior happened to ask whether he had seen a ghost he was terribly frightened, as if he'd really seen something from beyond the grave, may the Holy Virgin have mercy on us …' Those had been Dorn's words, and Cornelis's blood had run cold as he heard them. He ought to investigate; he ought to go to the spot where the Tower-Master had died.

It was because of a ghost that Cornelis had for the first time come to
this
convent, too. He had come looking for the prostitute Magdalena who had seen a ghost and then fallen into the well. That had been in the spring; it had been the first time he had stepped over the threshold of the Red Convent, paid his money and been allowed to choose from among the girls brought to him, and that was when his gaze had fallen for the first time on the flaxen-haired Hilde.

There was a playful glint in the woman's eyes; she was amusing, she was kind and inviting, and although at first Cornelis didn't even want to go to bed with any of these whores – or at least, so he assured himself – at that moment he no longer doubted or speculated about fidelity to his future spouse. He probably hadn't been thinking of anything, not even the task his father had sent him to Tallinn to undertake. He had paid and allowed himself to be led by Hilde into a chamber where there was just a stuffed straw mat. Hilde had slowly let her cloak fall away from her and stood in her nakedness before him, her straight white hair falling on to her delicate shoulders, her small, pert breasts begging for tenderness, her broad hips anticipating his embraces and her bare-shaven vulva demanding kisses. She was a woman of small build, a good
head shorter than Cornelis, and she was everything a man could want from a woman. Even her teeth were beautiful, glistening and snow white, not like those of ordinary prostitutes.

Cornelis was not quite sure how Hilde had ended up in a brothel. Hilde herself had told him three different stories, the only common thread being that bad people were to blame, people who wished her ill and left her with no inheritance, so perhaps Hilde was the daughter of some rich foreign count. But revenge and redress for injustice – weren't these matters close to Cornelis's heart?

From that day on Cornelis was bewitched; every week he found time to step into the Red Convent, and he never took any other woman. He made connections in Tallinn, he sought merchants who took grain from the countryside to the town, which he would then buy to export to Flanders. He sought out Russian merchants who knew the cheapest sources of bearskins and those who wanted Flemish cloth, glass and spices from him. He was a diligent man, and he had much work to do, but there was never a week when he forgot to visit Hilde, bringing her some gift – maybe a hairclip or a dainty morsel of food. Gradually they started talking about the future. Cornelis wanted to take the girl with him to Antwerp as his secret bride, and Hilde asked whether she could then start to wear jewellery and bearskins, which she would not be allowed to do in Tallinn, not even if they were given to her. And they
were
given to her with the promise that she could wear them in Flanders.

The previous week Cornelis de Wrede had made a deal with the Red Convent that he would buy Hilde's freedom and pay for her board and lodging if she no longer slept with other men. As soon as Cornelis had arranged his affairs in Tallinn he would take her away as his wife. That was a dream that would not be easy to realize, but have people not realized the most important things in their lives based on dreams? A lot of money was required for Hilde, and that money was not Cornelis's own – it was money from his father's and uncles' trading company – but he had promised to pay it.

He stepped over the threshold of the house, and the old woman
who kept the place greeted him with a sly sneer. ‘Sir is coming so early today,' she uttered in a screeching voice, smirking repulsively. ‘We weren't expecting sir.'

‘Where is Hilde?' demanded Cornelis.

‘But little Hildekins has visitors,' replied the old hag, giggling obscenely. ‘Russian merchants. They wanted to pick out one girl, and one of them had been with Hildekins before, and now he's brought his friends with him. There are quite a few of them in Tallinn and they have –'

A blood-red fog rose before Cornelis's eyes. His arms flew into a spasm and were almost reaching for the old crone's throat. His voice was hoarse and breathless.

‘We made a deal,' he finally blurted out. ‘And I forbade – forbade, do you hear, you old bitch – I
forbade
her to sleep with other men.'

‘Oh, sir, don't upset yourself,' exclaimed the crone, waving her arms about. ‘No need for sir to be afraid. You'll still get a good price for her in Flanders. She'll be just as beautiful for ten more years, so even bishops would go for her – of course – and sir will get good money for her.'

‘I
forbade
it,' shouted Cornelis shrilly.

‘Ah, how can sir ever forbid it here, when Hildekins herself wanted it? She has to earn a living, too. These Russian merchants pay well, and we're not going to start peeping at what they're all up to in there …'

Cornelis shoved the old woman out of the way. He wanted to storm into Hilde's room, but then he realized – even at the height of jealousy and rage he had enough cool common sense – that he didn't want to see what some hairy, uncouth Russian traders were doing with Hilde. At that moment he seemed to sense his father appearing to wag his finger at him and saying, ‘In the name of all the saints, son, didn't I warn you? A whore is always a whore. She only wants your money and nothing else.'