Apothecary Melchior and the Mystery of St Olaf's Church (13 page)

‘Yes, indeed, I knew him,' Tweffell spoke emphatically, ‘quite well enough to say that he was a greedy scoundrel, a thief and a crook from head to toe, who only wore a monk's cloak to hide his dreadful avarice and impudence.'

‘Those are strong words,' Melchior noted softly as he nodded to the Alderman in greeting.

‘Aha, Melchior,' Tweffell exclaimed upon seeing the Apothecary, ‘my good neighbour and lifesaver. The Council has employed you once again as its spy, eh? Well, I know not whether the words are strong, but they are true, that I swear. If you are searching for someone in Tallinn who bore enmity against Clingenstain then such a man stands before you.'

Dorn started and waved his hand in the air feverishly. ‘Master Merchant,
Master Merchant
, have some discretion.'

Tweffell appeared not to possess such discretion, however. ‘There is nothing to hide here. Each and every merchant of the Great Guild knows that whoever does business with the Commander of Gotland will be swindled
if he is lucky
, and it would only be by good fortune that he
would not be robbed of the very clothes he stands up in. That deceased Commander was an absolute lout,' Tweffell sputtered.

‘Then perhaps you know someone who may have borne such great enmity towards Clingenstain that he would go so far as to dispatch him from this world?' Melchior asked.

The merchant scowled at Melchior for a moment and then harrumphed. He lowered his voice and leaned in closer to the Apothecary and the Magistrate.

‘Hear, let me tell you something,' he said. ‘The Order is our overlord, is it not? As are the bishops, who are ordained by the Lord's great love to maintain order and justice by the word of God or by sword and to beseech the Almighty for our happiness and blessing. Yet not a single Order castle nor bishop's stronghold will stand if it has not food to eat nor clothes to wear nor silver dishes and fine wines from foreign lands, tools and everything else that their farm boys do not craft on their own. No. They receive only grain and meat from their lands, and they produce a great deal more grain than they or their farmers are capable of consuming themselves. Thus they have grain but have no cloth or silverware and cannot grow salt on their fields either. And therefore they require merchants to transform their grain into gold and to bring back expensive English broadcloth, Burgundy wines and silver dishes for them. In order for a merchant to do this he must also receive his own profit to feed his family and maintain his household, to put something aside for his later years and to have masses said for his salvation. For a merchant's salvation is jeopordized by engaging in trade; there is no escape from that, as otherwise you would be neither a merchant nor anything else. And so his coins must also be donated on occasion to a church that will pray for the happiness and for the soul of each one of us. Yes, that is how such things must be. The Order provides us with land, with Lübeck law and the entitlement to exercise this right by counsel and by force when anyone violates it. The town of Tallinn is the Order's harbour. The Order cannot survive without merchants, and merchants cannot survive without the Order. So it has been, and so it must remain. We must believe in and trust the Order and they us in return, as there is not one without the other.'

Dorn listened and nodded. ‘That is the truth, sire, the truth.'

‘Of course it bloody well is,' Tweffell barked. ‘I myself know it. Yet what comes to pass when one Knight of the Teutonic Order is a liar, a
thief and a crook? What happens then? What happens is that a merchant no longer desires to purchase any goods from the Order nor sell it anything in return. A merchant will buy furs from Novgorod, purchase grain from an Order vassal and sell it to Lübeck; then he will receive the money and procure from Lübeck silver plates, English broadcloth and a few casks of sweet Rhineland wine. No longer will he sell anything to the Teutonic Order. A merchant is a town citizen; he has his rights, and so does the town. Tell me what will become of the Order then.'

‘The entire Order cannot become so steeped in lies and robbery that merchants will no longer purchase its goods,' Melchior pointed out.

‘Not the
entire
Order, not yet, but one drop of tar can ruin a barrelful of honey. If you ask me whether or not I am glad that Clingenstain is deceased, then I will tell you that, no, I am not, because now my ship and my gold will never be returned. However, if you ask me whether he deserved such a death, then I would answer yes, without question he did.'

Gerdrud let slip a muffled exclamation. ‘But, my dear husband, how can you say such things in front of a place of worship?'

‘Truth is truth in all places, whether in front of a place of worship or in a tavern,' Tweffell snapped. ‘Go home, woman, if you do not wish to hear the truth.'

‘So it was for that reason that you went to speak to the Knight yesterday, to tell him all this?' Melchior asked.

‘Yes and no. Last spring one of my ships did not return from Gotland because the local commander – Clingenstain – had picked it clean from bow to stern. The reason given was that its cargo had been bought from Erengisel, the Vogt of Vyborg, who was apparently in debt to Gotland. In debt he may have been, but from the very moment that I bought those wares from that fox-faced Erengisel they were
my
wares, and I owed Gotland not a single penny. Gotland may war directly with Vyborg for its debt – or with the King of Sweden himself, for all I care – yet not with the Order's loyal subjects, with Tallinn's merchants. I had stated all of this in my
tenth
letter to Clingenstain, and he was aware of the matter already. What I went to tell him was that the Great Guild would not allow itself to be ridiculed and worked over like some ignorant peasant girl and that we have a great many friends in Lübeck. If Clingenstain did not pay off his debt then the Great Guild would write to Lübeck and to the Grand Master in Marienburg.'

‘And what did Clingenstain make of all this?'

‘Ha!' Tweffell barked. ‘He made of it what he had since last springtime: absolutely nothing. He was already so drunk that he could not tell up from down, boasting about that golden collar – which he had bought from Casendorpe with
my gold
– and thrust towards me a tankard of beer brought to him as a gift from the Council. He did not wish to hear anything about a stolen ship. And I'll tell you one more thing, Magistrate. The town of Tallinn might be home to a number of merchants that the Commander of Gotland has robbed, and such men might be found in all towns lining the shores of the sea, but, as sure as I am the Alderman of the Great Guild, this I tell you, Magistrate Dorn, if you search for your murderer amongst merchants then you are looking in the wrong place.'

‘I certainly do not believe that any merchant committed such an act. Absolutely not,' Dorn rushed to avow.

‘That I would certainly hope,' Tweffell growled. ‘Tallinn's merchants are not the sort of men who would slink off to remove heads like a thieves in the night, no. Tallinn's merchants behave like baptized Christians, with justice and good counsel. They allow neither the Order nor the town to overstep their boundaries. They write to Lübeck's Town Council and, when necessary, to the Grand Master of the Order himself. They demand fair trial be held over all thieves. It is time that the Order also came to understand that merchants are now a force. With each passing day they demand evermore justice in the name of the Lord, as well as the status, the treatment and the respect of which they are worthy. But I digress. I wish you fine health, good Magistrate, Sire Apothecary – and my gratitude for your salve. Wife, Ludke, let us depart.'

The Alderman and his entourage began to move off towards the centre of town along Munga Street, Gerdrud subtly supporting her master and the loyal Ludke trailing after them.

B
ROTHER
H
INRICUS GREETED
Melchior and Dorn before the main portal, left them waiting for a short time and then reappeared to announce that, yes, the Prior would receive them. Hinricus stated that the Prior did not feel too well, but he was in a better state than he had been that morning and would take their company. The Prior was in the dormitory, and Hinricus would show them the way.

Melchior was aware that Hinricus was the
cellarius
of the preaching brothers. The monk was still a young man and apparently of Estonian descent: tall in stature, gaunt and gangly, somewhat bow-legged, yet with sinewy-strong forearms. His face was rather crudely formed, as if etched in stone or densely compressed, and his eyes were too close to the bridge of his nose. He is probably not regarded as a handsome man, Melchior mused. Hinricus was, however, a devout Dominican and had been promoted to the rank of
cellarius
only recently, no doubt as a result of his upstanding religious work.

They stepped through the sharply arched portal, which was adorned with painted symbols of the Dominican Order: a dog, a lily, a rosette, a vine and an oak-leaf garland. Melchior's father had once explained the meanings of these symbols to him, which he had learned through his education at a Dominican monastery school: the dog symbolized a monk; the lily the Virgin Mary and St Dominic; the rosette St Catherine; the winding grapevine Jesus Christ, our saviour; and the oak-leaf garland the Virgin Mother. Also painted on the arch were lions, snakes and dragons. There had been snakes and lions painted on the doorway of the monastery in Lübeck, too, a detail Melchior remembered. He had been four years old when he had visited the monastery with his father for the
first time. Melchior the Elder had sought the monks' help to cure his son's sickness. Or
was
it a sickness? His father had been unsure. Was it a wrathful spirit, a demon? The Wakenstede line had suffered this curse for several hundred years … The old half-blind infirmarer's wrinkled hands had groped their way across Melchior's entire body, and the only medication he recommended was to say ten Our Fathers. Melchior's father, though, was already perfectly aware that this would be of no help.

Melchior drove those terrible memories from his mind. The Wakenstedes' curse had not beset him for a whole year. Perhaps his guardian saints had helped.

Melchior always sensed a kind of transition when he entered the monastery. He breathed a different sort of air – it was not the air of a church, it was more … sacred? The thick walls of the monastery instilled a feeling of having stepped closer to God, that one was now in a place where fifty men served Him from morning to night, praying for the salvation and happiness of all who lived in the town. Every monastery had its walls, and once inside you were in a separate world.

Hinricus led them through the gates and up to the newly erected St Catherine's Church. The church had been completed only a few years ago, but the building work never seemed to draw to a close in the realm of the Dominicans. Immediately in front of the men stood the dormitory that had been constructed from the monastery's old church; wooden scaffolding and unfinished walls were already rising next to it. A new, larger refectory was being built on the north side of the complex, and a second dormitory was taking shape behind that. At the south wing, alongside the new church, the passageway into which Hinricus now led them was being fashioned from the older, smaller church. The men walked in absolute silence behind the
cellarius
and breathed in the monastery air, which, in truth, smelled rather earthy – more specifically, of baked fish; the brothers had taken a small meal following vespers. Melchior gazed through the windows of the passageway out on to the courtyard, which was dotted with a few quaint plant beds, and there was a small well next to which an older lay brother garbed in a white robe was washing a pile of laundry. Masons had apparently just demolished the old church's last remaining face, the north, and were now putting up the wall of the western passageway. A poor monastery does not build, Melchior said to himself, and a poor monastery is of no use to anyone.

Hinricus warned the guests about the piles of stones that were
scattered around. The new passageway was only half completed, and there were building materials everywhere. The floor in some places was still simply packed soil, and large holes yawned along those stretches. Hinricus directed them towards the lay brothers' dormitory. It was a long structure that squatted between the northern nave of the new church and the unfinished dormitory that was still under construction bordering the western wall of the passageway. Half of its wall was still unfinished. Melchior glimpsed hay-stuffed sacks used as mattresses that were lined up side by side, a modest table and a jug for water alongside each. The lay brothers lived a truly humble life, but then they had entered the monastery penniless, looking to work. They were not schooled in the Scriptures nor could they ever be ordained as full brothers; they were simple souls who found in the monastery that which had eluded them in the world outside.

Hinricus guided them through the lay brothers' dormitory and finally came to a stop in front of the door to a small chamber.

‘The Prior is currently with Brother Wunbaldus,' Hinricus said softly. ‘He felt unwell, and Wunbaldus mixed him a therapeutic drink.'

He then bowed, opened the door and disappeared without a sound.

Melchior and Dorn entered the small chamber and crossed themselves devoutly. The room had no windows, but a soft evening light spilled in through a gap in the unfinished passageway wall. The chamber contained a sleeping-mat, a chair and a low table with a shelf bearing four small silver relics. Brother Wunbaldus sat behind the table and was apparently busying himself with cleaning the relics using a small brush and vinegar, causing a pungent, sour odour to permeate the room. Prior Eckell sat on the mat, holding a cup. Between the two Dominicans was a bench, on top of which was a chessboard lined with black and white squares. They were evidently in the middle of a game, as the chess-pieces were spread across the board. True, many of the figures were no longer in play, and the majority of pieces had already been cast on to the floor. Only a few lone combatants were left in position. Prior Eckell rose immediately to greet the Magistrate and the Apothecary. The two men kneeled before the holy Dominican Father.