VERONICA

BAMBERG, FRANCONIA, 1628

Christoff was none improved by the time Rudi made snuffling noises at the door. I let him in quickly and frowned as he left melted snow paw prints across the floor to the hearth where he dropped with a satisfied snort. He smelled of dank wet fur and dirt. I pressed some more tea toward Christoff’s lips and sang to him, the same soft lullabies that my mutti had sung to Hans and me. I felt the tears come and thought of my mother, so beautiful, so regal, so gone. She was tall and blonde and had fine features. At night she often played a lute and sang and her voice was like the tinkle of wind chimes. She had exchanged words with the neighbour after a carpet that was drying on a fence went missing. In the following round up of witches, the third or fourth for the year, the neighbour’s wife was taken away and within days of her torture she had named my mother as an accomplice. My mother went to her death without revealing any names or accusing any other soul. They tortured the life out of her and I heard it said that she was more dead than alive when they had taken her to the gallows.

My voice filled the cottage and I looked up to see that Hans had woken and was sitting on the top stair listening, his own grief rolling over his ruddy cheeks. I motioned for him to join me.

‘I am going to Ebrach to find someone who I believe Christoff needs,’ I told him. ‘I will wait until just before sun up and make the journey alone. If I make haste I can bring the girl back by sundown. Frau Berchta says it is an easy half-day walk.’

Hans looked frightened. ‘You will go into the woods in the dark?’ he said, drawing his little brows together to form a furrow between his eyes.

‘It will only be the last fading gloom of night,’ I told him. ‘I believe his heart needs this tonic. A girl called Susanna. I must find her. Ebrach is not a big village and I will ask around after Christoff Kilian’s kin. His poor mother should come also.’

‘Is he going to die?’ Hans asked in a small voice.

‘Not if I can help it.’ I smiled. ‘You stay and talk to him, even when he doesn’t seem to know your voice, and give him plenty of this brew. Hold it to his lips and tell Frau Berchta when she rises that I have gone to find Christoff the one thing that might save him.’

I went to the cold larder and brought back a pot of milk, which I told Hans to drink when the sun had come up. Then I went to look in the wooden chest upstairs to find the sturdy boots that had belonged to the child living in the attic before us. I took a heavy woollen hooded cloak, a deep burgundy colour, and dressed myself well, adding fur-lined gloves.

As soon as I could see the black night drift higher into a shallow grey, I kissed my brother and held him tight.

‘You take good care of him. I will come back to you soon, Hans. I promise.’

‘With faith there is love, with love there is peace, with peace there is blessing, with blessing there is God, with God there is no need,’ Han’s replied.

I felt my heart roll over with grief. My brother had remembered the blessing my father always gave anyone who went on a journey. He was a devout man and it broke me that he had gone from this world so shamefully. His letter to me, penned through such pain and with the knowledge that he was soon to be set on fire, had been so desperate to let me know that he was innocent of the charges.

‘Mutti and Papa will watch over me.’ I smiled and held him tightly, kissing his head and patting his back. ‘Do not let the fire go out.’

I left the cottage when Rudi stretched his legs and lifted his haunches, shaking and padding to the door for release. Outside a mottled-brown squirrel was bravely chiselling his two little teeth into a mouldy ear of corn and stopped still, watching as Rudi padded past, without any obvious fear. He went back to his early morning meal, ignoring me. I pulled the door behind me and looked out at the pale snow that lay like a shroud over the meadow.

I gave a little shudder, thinking of the other creatures that were still roaming and foraging through the thick woods and forest that carpeted the hills and valleys all the way to Ebrach.

I knew the way because Christoff had shown me the path and taken me a little ways down it once to show me where the last of the strawberries grew. He had cleared the path from town himself, with his father, when just a boy. He had told me that Frau Berchta had been renowned for her healing skills and the path had been well-trodden for years until the witch-hunts began in earnest and then people had become afraid that the wise woman would be targeted and they did not want to be burned by association. But all protected her and no one would ever reveal a word of her or her whereabouts.

As I stood there, watching the sun rise from a faintly rosy sky, I noted that the moon was chasing a streak of clouds up to the north. It would be a bright day of sunshine that would melt the snow to sludge in a day or two. In the new light the snow blazed a rich orange.

I set off. I wandered carefully into the crush of trees and trod the path which felt narrower because the ice and snow had caused the tree limbs to droop under their weight. The light was a patchy black-green with shards of gold filtering through the canopy.

I had brought some bread and cheese for the journey and would stop for water when I found a stream, or drink melted snow from leaves if I had to. I would arrive in town at around midday.

I heard a nearby honk of ducks and stuck to the path, making good strong steps toward my destination.

The hours were long but there was much to enjoy in the woods. I spied a mole nibbling on frozen seeds and rabbits leaping about in the snow, leaving pits jabbed down by their little paws. By a small brook bubbling with beads of ice I came across a pair of herons gobbling up cold tadpoles and watched the snow-laced water tumble over the sturdy backs of tortoises braving the cold.

I knew I was nearing town when my feet ached and the wildlife began to thin to the occasional wren or woodchuck. I smelled Ebrach before I saw it. I had been sheltered by the woods for so long that I had forgotten that a town could be so pungent, rich with the aroma, scent and stench of people and their refuse.

I hit a wide road and tramped down a steep hill into the valley that harboured the town. The ground underfoot was soft and spongy and not as hard and ice-solid as on the path. I walked beside the road, my sack over my shoulder, lighter after I had eaten my cheese and bread. The first time I heard a human sound I shivered with terror. I had become so much like a hermit out in the clearing in the woods and the idea of strangers and noise and marketplaces now frightened me. A mule and cart passed down the centre of the stony road and the driver took a pipe from his mouth and raised his hand at me with a wide, hollow smile.

As I neared the town filled with buildings and a haze of wood-fire smoke hanging like a cloud, I passed another man in a uniform leaning against a dark cart and a thick-legged horse chewing grass by the side of the road. The man had a hat over his forehead and a long moustache that hung from either side of his mouth like waxed ribbons.

He looked me over, up and down, and flicked a dandelion from his hand where he had been twirling it.

‘Where have you come from, Fräulein?’

He caught me by surprise. My mind, so tranquil from the woods, went empty and I said the first thing that leapt into my head.

‘Bamberg.’ I gave an awkward smile.

He nodded thoughtfully.

‘All by yourself, ja?’ he said in a slippery voice.

‘I was accompanied by kin for most of the way but they have gone on to Würzburg. I am meeting my husband in Ebrach.’ My face flushed with the lie. I watched him turning my words over, examining them.

‘What is your husband’s name, pray tell?’

‘Christoff Kilian.’

‘And your given name, Frau Kilian?’ he asked.

‘Rosa,’ I lied again, giving my mother’s name and it hurt deeply to say it aloud.

‘Well, guten tag to you and get some rest when you return to your home, pretty lady.’ He smiled and I walked on stiffly, glad to be rid of him.

Ebrach was bustling with activity and the colours jarred my eyes. Replacing the golden, green and sky-blue hues of my quiet existence were purples and crimsons and limes and sapphire blues. People shouted and cried out, laughter sounded gaudy and children squealed, screeching over my nerves. Carts rattled along filled to overflowing with produce.

The marketplace was a chromatic symphony with so much vibrant colour that I was almost overwhelmed and felt giddy from it. I hurried as I knew that Christoff’s life swayed in a balance. Most early winter markets have a sense of frenzy about them, with buyers ferreting about like desperate squirrels collecting the last nuts for the big freeze. This market was no different and it seemed every citizen was there, shouting and waving coins, haggling, and shoving out the competition. Birds perched on eaves, watching for scraps that might fall to the stones so they could swoop down for a piece of sausage or a dropped head of turnip.

Christoff had told me that his mother’s house sat near the main marketplace so I knew I was close. I approached a woman selling woven baskets and asked her about the Kilian family house. She appeared to be foreign and did not understand me, speaking back to me in a language I had not heard before. I tried another woman and then another.

‘Ja,’ the last one nodded enthusiastically. ‘You will see the tall, narrow white house criss-crossed with wooden beams, topped by a red roof and a tall brick chimney. It is down that street, there, maybe four or five along.

I thanked her with a smile. But the smile sank from my face as I caught sight, between shuffling bodies, of the uniformed man I had come upon on the open road just outside the town. I saw that he was leering at me. I turned away, wondering if he had followed me. I shrugged off the thought as the marketplace was the throbbing centre of town and every person seemed to be there.

The house was easy to find and I rapped on the door, nervous, guilt-ridden for bearing such disturbing news of Christoff. I looked up at the rooster weathervane spinning on the roof.

The door was opened by a tall, broad-shouldered woman standing in the dim entrance hall. She offered a blank expression. I guessed the woman to be about forty, pale and ample. Something about her reminded me of our nurse, Kristina. Her face, the square jaw and the softer, expressive eyes, made me like her instantly. That made it harder for me to introduce myself and deliver my message.

‘Frau Kilian?’ I asked and she nodded, frowning and putting her head to one side. ‘I have come from Frau Berchta’s cottage in the woods …’

Her face broke into a broad smile.

‘You must be Veronica,’ she said, tugging at my sleeve, encouraging me inside. ‘Come in. Christoff has told me so much about you.’

The smell of cooking sat heavily in the air as she led me through to the second room spread with pine-planked floors. We passed an oval mirror and I was tempted to look at my reflection as I had not seen a looking glass since I left Bamberg. My face was rounder and pinker and I looked more like a young woman than a child. My face surprised me being just that little bit less familiar than when I’d last looked at it.

‘I have not come for a social visit,’ I said and watched as the woman turned to me, stopping, freezing up in that moment with a glimmer of fear racing across her brow. ‘Christoff took a gash to the leg and he is laid down with a bitter fever. I have come in haste to ask you to come to him to give him hope and strength.’

The woman put her hands to her mouth and blew on them, her eyes blinking fast, fighting back tears as she nodded at me.

‘I will get my coat and come with you,’ she said, her voice sounding panicked. ‘But Christoff is a strong boy and God could not take him from me. Not my Christoff.’

I knew from speaking with Christoff that his mother was a widow and the two of them lived alone without a maid. Frau Kilian took her heavy coat from a hook near the door and a key from another. She went to the fire in the larger room and looked at it.

‘It will cool down and die,’ she murmured to herself.

‘In his night sweats he has called for Susanna,’ I told her, and she turned to me from the hearth, her eyes wide with something that I could not read.

‘Susanna?’ she whispered as if the word was holy.

I nodded. Frau Kilian stared out over my head, past me into the foyer. Then slowly, she walked in there, plucked a gilt-framed painting from the wall and held it toward me. It was a portrait of a child, a ginger-headed little girl with mischievous eyes and a rosebud smile.

‘This is Susanna,’ she said with a sad smile. ‘Christoff’s little sister. She drowned three years ago, in the river, with her father. They were out fishing when the boat sank.’

I shut my eyes and said a silent prayer for them. ‘He was calling for her,’ I said.

‘Let us hurry to him and give him some love from this world and not hear more of him pressing to join Susanna,’ his mother said and went to hang the painting back up.

‘If we leave now,’ I told her, ‘we should reach the cottage before nightfall.’

‘Oh, I know the way,’ the woman said as she buttoned her cloak. ‘I haven’t been there for years but I used to know Frau Berchta very well. She came to town and sang at Susanna’s funeral.’

We hurried outside and walked briskly down the cobbled street back toward the market, an urgent clatter of boots against stone.

As we pushed through the throng I felt a hand grab at me.

‘Hello, Liebchen,’ came a voice in my ear. I recoiled, recognising it as belonging to the uniformed man.

I stopped and turned and looked him in the eye. One of his eyes sagged a little over his cheek.

‘Let me be!’ I demanded.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he hissed at me. ‘See, I done some asking about and seems you are a stranger in these parts, looking for the Kilian house, not of the Kilian house yourself. You’re a vagrant and a pretty one at that.’

Frau Kilian had been pushed ahead and a crush of sweaty bodies pressed between us. I caught her eye as she looked back, bewildered and confused.

‘Now, I get a bag of coin for every vagrant I pick up for my overlord.’ He grinned. ‘And I know he likes pretty ones. Woman, alone, wandering the roads, travelling light with no man to speak for her. That says someone else is looking out for her and maybe that’s the devil.’

‘That is foolish talk,’ I said, trying to pull my arm from his grip. ‘My mother-in-law will vouch for me. I have been afield visiting kin but I am no vagrant and no witch.’

‘Ah, but you’ve bewitched me, see?’ He laughed. ‘I laid eyes on you and can’t get you out of my head now. You’re in there like a weevil in flour and I can’t pick you out. You bewitched me, you did.’

I could see Frau Kilian pushing back toward me but when she saw the man with me something crossed over her face like a dark cloud, a veil of pure terror. She began backing away, crushing herself into the crowd, leaving me behind.

‘You’ll come with me,’ the man ordered roughly and began dragging me the other way out of the marketplace.

People made room for him and looked away. It seemed his uniform spoke loudly, inciting an aura of fear. I looked at the man’s lapel where a pin poked out and I saw that it was a seal, the likeness of a crest that bore the image of two foxes. My blood turned to ice. The Hexenbischoff! The man was a guard in the evil Bishop’s private army who had declared war on the good people of Bamberg and the surrounds, churning people accused of witchcraft through the new prison building that had broken my parents.

I was dragged down a narrow lane and began to scream when I saw the caged cart with a dozen or more poor souls trapped within, tugging at the iron bars and wailing and begging for release to anyone walking by. Mostly women, but there were a few men and some children not as high as my hip. I struggled to get away so that I might run, but the man drew a cutlass and held it at my neck.

‘I could slit your throat right here and let your blood flood the street but that would be no fun,’ he seethed. ‘We’ll want you to give us some names and confess your wickedness before you’ll get any freedom, and when you’re nothing but ash and smoke you’ll be free as a bird!’

I was jammed into the locked cage on the cart and fell, hurting my knee. One woman helped me up and wiped a tear from my cheek with her handkerchief.

‘Hush now, young one,’ she murmured. ‘Be strong.’

My thoughts thundered through my head. Hans. Christoff. Frau Berchta. The woods.

As we rumbled, jolting and bumping over the open road back to Bamberg, I sat on the rough wooden slats and prayed. I prayed for Christoff’s life and my own. Frau Kilian would arrive at the cottage with the bitter news and I hoped that Hans would be strong and brave, but he was more than an orphan now. He had no family to speak of. No one left the Hexenhaus except to go to the death square. Hans, that beautiful boy, my brother, had lost me for good.

The kind woman beside me was talking to me but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It was as if I were underwater. The sun kept flickering overhead and I could see the woman’s hand holding mine; it was thin and bony like a skeleton. I was finding it hard to breathe knowing that I was being ferried to my death like a fish on a bank, flinging itself back and forth, gasping for water in its gills, knowing that it was destined for the frying pan. Although I was warm beneath my coat and with the odorous press of other bodies around me, my blood was howling chill in my veins like a blizzard. I looked up at the sky and tried to find a bird, believing it might be a symbol of hope for freedom. But the sky was bare and blue and cold.