Dancing in the Palm of His Hand (15 page)

“
Nein
. My son never breathed.”

“Are you sure?” said Hampelmann.

“
Ja
. I felt no movement during the final month. Frau Lamm told me, before he was born, that the baby was dead.”

Chancellor Brandt's nose twitched like a rodent's. “The midwife told you the child was dead? Even before it was born?”

Father Streng smoothed the brown quill. “Tell us, Fraulein Spatz, did the midwife show a special interest in the infant's body?”

“
Nein
.” She sniffed, her face angry. “Frau Lamm wanted nothing to do with it. She made me bury it myself.”

“Why were the birth and the burial so secret?” said Father Streng. “You were discovered all alone, in the middle of the night, trying to bury the infant near Saint Stephan's Cathedral.”

The girl's head hung low. “I hid my...my condition, cause I didn't want anyone to know.” She looked up at the priest. “But I wanted my son to be buried in consecrated ground.”

Judge Steinbach wagged a bony finger at her. “An unbaptized baby in consecrated ground? The Church does not allow it. Moreover, Fraulein Spatz, you violated the lantern ordinance. You were out that night without a lighted lantern.”

Father Streng's eye twitched, making the mole above his eyebrow jump. Lindner's oafish face contorted in puzzlement. Hampelmann rubbed his temples. Leave it to Judge Steinbach to worry about the lantern ordinance when they were investigating charges of witchcraft and infanticide.

“Show her the first instrument of torture,” said Chancellor Brandt.

Freude held out the thumbscrews. The girl turned to Lutz, her eyes round and dark in a face completely drained of colour. “Sir?”

“The truth,” Lutz said. “Just tell them the truth.”

“Do you still insist you were forced?” said Chancellor Brandt.

“
Ja
.”

“Do you still insist that the bastard son resulting from this illicit union was born dead?” said Hampelmann.

“I-I think so.”

“So now you're not sure? said Chancellor Brandt. “Did the midwife have any opportunity to kill the baby without your knowing?”

Freude held the thumbscrews only inches from the girl's nose. Tears trickled down her cheeks. “Sh-she might have.”

“Have you changed your mind about anything else?” The chancellor's words were clipped and harsh. “How did you know Frau Basser, Fraulein Stolzberger, and Frau Imhof?”

“I didn't. I swear I didn't.”

Chancellor Brandt persisted. “When and where did you attend the sabbath?”

“I've never been to a sabbath.”

“When did you receive your mark?” said Lindner.

She shook her head, her eyes locked on the thumbscrews.

“You must answer, Fraulein Spatz,” said Father Streng.

“I got no mark,” she wailed.

“Take her back to her cell,” Chancellor Brandt said with disgust. “Very often meditation and the misery of imprisonment dispose the accused to discover the truth.” He pointed at the judge's gold watch.

Judge Steinbach tapped the gavel. “We'll adjourn for dinner and reconvene in two hours.”

Chancellor Brandt glowered at Lutz. “
Bitte
, do not be late.”

I laugh and the shadows dance. The men cross themselves then touch the balls of wax at their throats. They believe I always attend the interrogations of my followers. Of course I am here. Their fear has brought me here. Yet they refuse to hear me, or to see me. I can shout as loud as I please, and still, they pretend not to hear.

The men are waiting for the one who has not yet come, and while they wait, they drum their fingers on the table, pick the wax from their ears, smooth the lace on their collars and cuffs, cross and uncross their legs. And pretend they are not thinking of me. Nearly all are wishing they were at home, lounging in a sunlit courtyard, sipping wine with a friend, or reading, contemplating God, or embracing a wife - or lover.

The boyish priest beholds their flagging zeal. His iron eyes narrow behind the glass disks. He jumps up, startling the old man, who blinks and cowers. Infusing his words with fiery passion, the priest reminds the men of the great importance of their work, reminds them that the end-time is near and God will punish them all if they do not seek out and punish witches.

He reminds them of their most terrifying fears.

To bolster the men's fervour, and their courage, he quotes the labyrinthine arguments of Dominicans and Jesuits, arguments that circle and double back like deer paths through a thicket of willow and alder. He speaks with such a potent and slippery tongue that his words straighten the sharpest switchback, make clear the faintest trail. Only now and again does he talk himself into a dead end. His eye twitches then, and I chuckle at the little priest's conundrum.

He paces before them, waving his small black book as if his wrist were attached to strings pulled from above. I listen with interest to his strident logic. He lectures about what the Dominicans have written in their manual, what the Pope has declared to be true. They claim I have three types of followers: those who can injure but cannot cure, those who can both injure and cure, and those who can cure but cannot injure. I raise my hand, making the torches gutter, and shout out my question. The boy stands alert, peering from side to side. If he would just allow himself to hear me, I am quite certain he could explain why women who cure but do not injure should still be burned
.

The priest points the book at the men. The most powerful witches, he says, are found among those who can injure. They can perform every sort of spell. The list is long and impressive. To invigorate the men's fear, he names each crime: witches can raise hailstorms, hurtful tempests and lightning, make the generative desires ineffective and even destroy the power of copulation. They can kill infants in the mother's womb by a touch to the belly. They devour unbaptized children.

And all of them practice carnal copulation with me. I sigh morosely. Would that it were so.

The priest has not yet come to the end of his list. Not by any means. I must admit to some pride that the Dominicans and Jesuits believe my followers and me to be so powerful. The Dominicans have written that witches can make horses go mad under their riders; they can transport themselves from place to place through the air; they can affect judges and commissioners so that they cannot hurt them. That is why witches must walk backwards when they enter the chamber. The men have been told - and they always believe what the Church tells them - that witches cannot lay a curse upon them if they see the witches before the witches see them.

My followers can cause themselves and others to keep silent under torture, he says, and can bring about a great trembling to the hands
and horrors to the minds of those who arrest them. They can show to others future events, can see absent things as if they were present and turn the minds of men to inordinate love, or hatred. They can bewitch men and animals with a mere look, without touching them, and cause their deaths
.

They dedicate their own children to me. I am perplexed. Why would the Dominicans and Jesuits imagine I have any interest in the weak and helpless? I scratch my head in puzzlement, the sound like the scrape of a boot on stone.

The young priest begins to speak quietly, in a whisper, as if he were telling a secret. Or a lie. This last crime is my favourite.

The Dominicans, he says, report that witches sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty together. They put them in a bird's nest or shut them up in a box, where they move like living members and eat oats and wheat. There is a story of a certain man who lost his member. The young priest blushes, and I laugh out loud at his unease. The man approached a known witch, he says, to ask her to restore his member to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, told him he could take whichever one he liked out of a nest in which there were several. But when he tried to take a big one, the witch said, You must not take that one...it belongs to the parish priest.

Only the stout man with the shaggy white hair dares to smile. When he sees that no one else is amused, he hides his grin behind his hand. Then his face takes on furrows of bewilderment as he struggles to follow the tangled twists and turns of the priest's logic. He will learn. Or he will learn to keep silent.

The chancellor arrives, and the men are ready now. The priest has restored their zeal. They bring in the midwife and search her naked body for the mark they believe I have made upon her. Her limbs are sturdy, her breasts large and pendulous. The members the men are so afraid of losing stiffen within their loose breeches.

The Dominicans say I can enter only the heart that is bereft of all holiness. In this, as in most things, they are quite mistaken. I can enter only the heart that contemplates God
.

We dwell in the same heart, God and I.

The midwife stood, chin thrust forward, shoulders back, arms at her sides. Unashamed of her bald nakedness. A hot flush rose from Lutz's neck to his cheeks, and he found himself unable to meet Frau Lamm's bold gaze. He'd never even looked at Maria's body that closely. An unsettling mix of shame, fear, and carnal prurience made his heart – and his member – throb.

Freude jabbed the woman with the birch rod and turned her around so that her back was to the commissioners. He pointed to a wine-coloured stain, a small
fleur-de-lis
blooming on her shoulder. “There, gentlemen, is the
stigma diaboli
.”

Father Streng's quill scratched across the paper.

“Shouldn't you test it?” said Judge Steinbach.

“No need. The evidence is clear.” Freude handed the linen shift to Frau Lamm, who slipped it over her shaved head and tugged it down to cover her sturdy body. Tying her wrists, Freude gave the hemp rope an extra twist. The midwife bared her teeth at him, teeth that were straight and strong, and looked sharp enough to bite into a man's throat and hang on like a wolfhound.

Lutz shuddered, and felt himself shrink. Of all the accused, Frau Lamm was the one he most suspected of being a witch. She'd been a widow for twenty-three years, a midwife for thirtytwo, since she was nineteen. She was as old as Maria, but that was where the similarity to his wife ended. Frau Lamm was brash and outspoken, her face hard and angular, especially without her bushy silver hair. She was not a large woman, but her arms and legs were heavily muscled. When he visited her cell, she'd treated
him with derision, and told Father Herzeim that he'd do better to confess his own sins than to ask to hear hers. When Lutz tried to question the midwife, her unflinching stare and dark laughter had stopped his breath in his throat, making him choke and stammer. He'd have fled the cell if the priest hadn't been there with him.

“When and where did you first have dealings with the Devil?” said Chancellor Brandt.

“I know nothing of the Devil.”

Father Streng pointed the quill. “Your mark says otherwise.”

“I've had that mark since the day I was born. It's why my mother named me Lilie.”

“Which is even more damning,” said Freude, pointing at her shoulder with the birch rod. “A child marked in the womb, who carries the name of her mark, as if her mother were proud.”

“It is the sign of peace,” said Frau Lamm, “the symbol of Saint Katharina.”

Freude struck her across the face with the rod. “You'll not foul the names of the saints with your filthy mouth.”

“If you've had no dealings with the Devil,” said Hampelmann, “how do you explain the evidence?”

“What evidence?” The midwife licked the blood from her split lip.

Hampelmann flipped through his ledger, then ran a finger down the page. “The Prince-Bishop's bailiff found more than two score plants and roots,” he said, squinting at the page, “as well as pots of ointments. And there were bags filled with powders of various colours.” He looked up. “If these are not potions for poisoning and hexing, what are they?”

“Medicines for healing.”

“Those who use herbs for cures do so only through a pact with the Devil,” said Lindner, “either explicit or implicit.” The physician's oily face glowed in the torchlight.

“I have no pact with the Devil,” she said firmly.

Hampelmann stabbed a finger at the page. “What about the ointment the bailiff found, the one with the colour and odour of human flesh?”

The woman's face crinkled in puzzlement, then cleared. “Oh, that's just a salve made from lard and goat's milk. It smells like goats, not men.” She smiled grimly. “Well, I suppose some men smell like that.”

Chancellor Brandt was clearly not amused. “What about the stone shaped like a heart?” he said. “The stone that hung above your doorway?”

“I found that stone when I was a girl, while I was walking by the river. My mother had just been taken away by the Prince-Bishop's bailiff.”

“The charges against her?” said Father Streng.

“Witchcraft.”

The commissioners nodded knowingly to each other. Lutz rubbed his thumb over a smudge on his ledger. He'd warned Frau Lamm not to speak of that, told her that being the daughter of a suspected witch was damning evidence. She'd grinned into his face, bubbles of spit at the corners of her mouth, and said she was as good as dead anyway.

“I found that stone while I was praying,” she continued, “and my mother was released a few days later. So you see, the stone was a gift from the Holy Mother. It hangs above the door so that no evil can enter my household.”

“And what about the evil that comes from your household?” said Judge Steinbach, rubbing the swollen knuckles on his right hand.