The Master's Apprentice, page 53
part #1 of Faust Series
Johann didn’t reply. He was still staring at Greta. She was just on the brink between girlhood and womanhood. Her stature was tall and athletic, and tiny breasts were showing beneath the dress, but her face was still childlike. Johann remembered the summer days in Knittlingen, playing in the hay, hide-and-seek in the woods. It could only be coincidence—there was no other possibility. Still, the resemblance was astonishing. Now he understood what Valentin had meant.
There’s something about her . . . something familiar . . .
Greta appeared to have lost interest in Johann again.
“Did you bring me something?” she asked Valentin excitedly.
“What do you think?” Valentin held out the pouch with his crippled, pincer-like hand. “See for yourself.”
Greta immediately started to rummage through the pouch. With a cry of delight she pulled out a chunk of cheese, half a loaf of bread, and a few shriveled apples. She stuffed her mouth with bread and pushed in the cheese after.
“Don’t eat so fast, child,” said Valentin. “You’ll only make yourself sick.”
The two men watched in silence as the girl ate. She was frightfully skinny, and her face and arms were dirty and covered in fleabites and scabs, but Johann couldn’t see any serious injuries. Evidently the hangman hadn’t started the torture yet. Johann was amazed at how well the girl looked, given the circumstances. It must be awful for her, alone in the cell at night, listening to the screams of other inmates and having not one person to talk to, apart from the hunchbacked keeper and a few surly guards. It would seem Greta possessed an inner strength that many adults lacked.
When Greta was finished eating, Valentin cleared his throat. “I brought you something else, too. I thought you could use it when you feel lonely. I know you’re probably too old now, but still . . .”
From under his coat he pulled a tattered doll with matted, woolen hair and button eyes, one of which was dangling by a thin thread. Greta cried out with joy and squeezed the doll to her chest.
“My little Barbara,” she whispered. “Did you miss me? I know, I didn’t take good care of you in the last few years. I’m sorry.” She stroked the doll, and suddenly she seemed much younger than her fourteen years.
“My friend is a physician,” said Valentin. “He would like to examine you so we know how you are doing. His name is Johann.”
“Hello, Greta.” Johann thought his voice sounded as if it weren’t his own. He tried to smile encouragingly. “May I . . . may I take a closer look at you?”
Greta pressed her lips together and gave him a frightened look. “That’s what the keeper said, too,” she whispered. “I don’t like it.”
Johann raised his hands. “I won’t hurt you. I promise. I’m a physician. And I can do magic,” he added mysteriously.
Greta looked at him with surprise. “Magic?”
Johann nodded. “Give me the doll. I’ll show you.”
Greta hesitated and looked at Valentin, who gave her a nod. Then she handed the doll to Johann. “But don’t hurt her.”
The idea had come spontaneously to Johann. He remembered well how much he’d loved magicians and jugglers as a little boy. Now he sat Barbara on his lap and held her little hands.
“Good day, little Barbara,” he said.
“Good day, Johann,” said the doll.
“I hear Greta hasn’t been playing with you lately. What have you been up to, all alone?”
“Oh, I sneaked into the kitchen at the command and stole a pot of honey,” the doll replied in a high-pitched voice. “And then I painted the commander’s beard with it while he was sleeping. Such fun!”
The doll clapped her hands and Greta’s jaw dropped with amazement. She looked up at Johann and then back at Barbara on his lap. Johann stifled a smile. He had taught himself ventriloquy all those years ago so that the archangel could speak to Margarethe—for purely selfish reasons, as he’d realized later. Now he used the trick to cheer up a girl in a prison cell.
“I would like to sing a song for Greta,” said the doll. “Maybe she can join in.” Johann hummed a tune in the high-pitched voice, slowly at first, then steadier and louder until the words came back to him.
“Growing in our garden are parsley and thyme.” Barbara the doll clapped her small, tattered hands to the beat. “Our Gretchen is the bride, she’s looking so—” Johann broke off. Without really thinking about it, he had chosen the song Margarethe always used to sing. The same song she’d hummed when the guards had arrested her inside the cave at Heiligenberg Mountain.
“Don’t stop!” pleaded Greta. “Keep singing!”
“Do you know what, little Barbara?” said Johann to the doll, placing her on the bed beside Greta. “I think I might show you what I can do with apples.”
He took the apples from the bag and started to juggle. Both Greta and Valentin watched him with amazement.
“You see five apples,” said Johann, using the mysterious and seductive voice of jugglers and tricksters. “Hocus, pocus, locus—now there are just four!” One of the apples had suddenly vanished. “Hocus, pocus, three black cats—now there are just three!” Then three apples became two, and eventually Johann was only holding one last apple in his hand.
“You see,” he told Greta. “You can juggle apples, you can make apples disappear, and . . . you can eat them.” With the last words, he took a bite from the apple.
“Hey, that’s my apple!” called out Greta and laughed.
Johann startled. Greta was laughing! The sound was as out of place inside this prison cell as the singing of angels.
And the laughter was so familiar.
“You can keep the apple if you let me examine you,” replied Johann hesitantly.
Greta agreed, and Johann came closer. He examined her limbs for broken bones, cleaned the fleabites, and treated her frostbite with an ointment. Eventually he tore his overcoat to shreds and wrapped them around her feet. His hands trembled, and it wasn’t because of the cold. Greta’s laughter had removed any remaining doubts.
It was a laughter he hadn’t heard for many years.
“Will you come back?” asked Greta with her mouth full. She was devouring her third apple since Johann had made the fruit reappear. “You must come back and do magic for me. Please!”
“I . . . I’m going to try,” said Johann haltingly. He looked away when he felt his eyes well up. “And I’ll bring you shoes next time.”
“You can examine my little Barbara, too,” said Greta. “I think one of her eyes is sick.”
Johann nodded. “I will. I—”
Someone knocked on the door, and the gruff voice of the prison keeper rang out. “Half an hour is up! Come out now or you’ll have to stay for good.”
“I’ll be back, I promise,” said Johann again. He stood up, and he and Valentin walked out of the cell. He turned to catch one last glimpse of Greta waving at him, her eyes full of silent grief and hope at once.
“Come back,” she said quietly.
Then the door slammed shut.
They didn’t say a word as they walked the long way back out of the prison. When they stepped out into the morning sunshine in front of the city hall, Johann turned to Valentin.
“You . . . ,” he said in a shaking voice. “You—”
“Let’s go sit down at a tavern,” said Valentin quickly. “And I’ll explain.”
They hurried across the square, where several grocers had set up their stalls in the meantime. There was salted meat for sale, as well as venison, eggs, poultry, and geese gaggling away in their cages. But Johann registered none of it. His whole life had been turned upside down by what had just happened in the prison cell.
They entered one of the cheaper taverns in an alley leading away from the main square and chose a quiet table in an alcove. Once a buxom serving maid had brought them two mugs of mulled wine, Valentin finally started to talk.
“Yes,” he said in a low voice. “Margarethe’s daughter. Your daughter. Did you see her eyes? They are your eyes, Johann Faustus. There can’t be any doubt.”
Johann sat as if he had turned to stone; all the noise around him, the loud conversations of the other people, the chinking of crockery—it all sounded like it came from behind a thick wall.
My daughter.
But how was that possible? Margarethe had hanged herself at the jail in Heidelberg—Valentin had said so himself. Even if she had been pregnant, there could have been no child, because she died.
Johann looked at Valentin, who was clutching the hot mug with his crippled hands, which were red from the cold. He kept his head low, avoiding Johann’s eyes.
“Margarethe never hanged herself,” whispered Johann. “You . . . you lied to me.”
“Just like you lied to me for weeks and months.” Valentin sighed. “I was so full of hatred for you, Johann. I wanted to hurt you where it hurt the most. And so I told you Margarethe was dead, when in reality she had been taken away shortly before me. I saw her again in Worms; she was in the cell next to mine. Twice a day when they dragged me to the torture chamber I saw her briefly, and her beauty helped me bear the pain.” He blew on his mulled wine and took a sip. “During the nights, we had long whispered conversations. I learned much about you, Faustus. About little Johann in Knittlingen and his dreams and juggling tricks. I see you still know them.” Valentin smiled. “You must have been a nice boy once.”
“But Margarethe . . .” Johann’s voice failed him. “Why . . . ?”
“Why she was spared? During her very first interrogation in Worms they found out that she was with child.” Valentin gave a sad laugh. “She had known for a while, and she knew whose child it was. There could be no one else, of course—she was a nun, and you were the only man she saw.” His finger traced an invisible line on the tabletop as if he was drawing her face. The sun stood above the rooftops by now and shone through the tavern windows.
“They spared her until the child was born,” continued Valentin. “That’s the law. Even torture has its rules, and they are recorded in the Bamberg book on the punishment of capital crimes. Shortly before I was released, Margarethe made me promise that I would care for the child when she was no more.”
“And?”
“As soon as the child was born, Margarethe confessed to being in league with the devil. But the hangman took pity on her and throttled her with the garrote before the flames consumed her. She didn’t suffer much.”
Valentin gazed into the distance again. Men laughed, mugs clanked. The atmosphere was so peaceful that Johann felt like screaming out loud. He wanted to wail and cry, but no tears came. The last time he cried was a long time ago. It had been in Heidelberg when he’d learned of Margarethe’s death.
Now she had actually died.
And been reborn at the same time.
“Margarethe seemed like she wasn’t really in this world anymore during the last few weeks of her life,” said Valentin. “She was convinced to the last that the devil would return to earth. She always spoke about the boogeyman she’d seen in the woods. And about Archangel Michael, who had abandoned her and all of us.”
Johann closed his eyes.
The boogeyman . . . Archangel Michael.
Would this horror never end? No matter where he went, evil always got there first and waited for him.
Because you carry it within you . . .
“Greta isn’t from the gutter,” explained Valentin with a sigh. “I found her in an orphanage in Worms. It wasn’t hard to get her out of there. No one likes to raise the child of a witch. I never told her who her mother was, and she knows nothing about her father. She thinks that her mother died while giving birth and that I’m a distant relative.” He smiled, and for a moment Valentin looked like the zealous young student from their Heidelberg days. “She calls me Uncle Valentin. Isn’t that beautiful? We had wonderful times together, even though she’s been a little rascal at times since we took up residence at the command. She’s stubborn and has an inclination for tricks and fibs. In that regard she takes after you.”
Johann sat on the bench at the tavern and tried hard to remain calm. So many unexpected things had happened in the last hour. If Valentin was right, his daughter was in danger of suffering the same fate as her mother. He had to focus and find a solution. All his intelligence and all his knowledge were for nothing if he couldn’t protect his daughter now.
The child he didn’t even know.
26
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, Johann desperately tried to figure out a way to get Greta out of Loch Prison. He felt like he was trying to square a circle—the legendary problem even the great Archimedes failed to solve.
He would often sit with Valentin and Karl at the command in the evenings. They met in the order’s library, a bare room inside the church, rarely used by the knights. Valentin spent most of his time here. The only furniture was a wobbly table and a few shabby stools, but there were so many books and scrolls on the shelves along the walls that some had fallen off. More books were piled on the table. Wax from the candles of a candelabra dripped onto the tabletop, forming mounds of tallow. Little Satan lay curled up at Johann’s feet.
Johann and Valentin had agreed that they wouldn’t tell Karl the whole truth—not yet. As far as Karl was concerned, Valentin was Greta’s uncle and an old friend in need. They didn’t tell him that Greta was in fact Johann’s daughter or about what had happened between the two men back in Heidelberg. Johann wanted to wait for the right moment to confess the sins from his past to his assistant. Thankfully, Karl was preoccupied with all the wonderful paintings, sculptures, and art treasures inside the churches of Nuremberg. Johann was under the impression that Karl was almost a little jealous of the effort his master put into trying to save a girl he didn’t even know.
“Loch is probably the most heavily secured prison in the entire empire,” said Valentin glumly. Lying on the table was a layout plan of the city hall that Valentin had secretly copied. “I visit the city hall regularly on administrative business. That building alone is heavily guarded, not to mention the jail below! All those doors . . .”
“Where do they keep the keys?” asked Johann.
“I’ve asked myself the same question.” Valentin sighed deeply. “The prison keeper always carries one set on his belt, and there’s another in the guards’ chamber.”
“Which is heavily guarded,” said Johann. He fell silent again and thought hard, but try as he might, he couldn’t work out a solution.
“What about bribes?” asked Karl.
“We might be able to bribe the keeper and one or two guards, but not all of them,” said Valentin. “There are too many.”
“Maybe we just have to accept that we can’t save the child,” said Karl with a shrug.
“If I’d said the same thing back in Warnheim, you wouldn’t be here now,” retorted Johann angrily. “I don’t need to mention in which circle of Dante’s Inferno you would be roasting right now.”
Karl said nothing.
“There must be a solution,” muttered Johann after a while as he rubbed his temples. “There simply has to be!”
By now he was convinced that it was no coincidence that Valentin had called him to Nuremberg. He had been watching the stars from the top of Saint Jakob’s Church every night. The comet couldn’t be far off now. It would be the third time Larua would enter Johann’s life. The first time had been at his birth, the second time he’d nearly joined an occult group of devil worshippers, and now God was giving him one last chance. Because of his selfishness and arrogance, Margarethe—the love of his life—had been tortured and executed.
But now his daughter had entered his life, as unexpectedly as an angel. As if Margarethe were reaching out to him in forgiveness.
God had given him a key to turn back the wheel of time.
Now or never.
“We keep thinking,” he said, staring at the map. “Worst case, we have to wait until they convict Greta. There might be a chance to free her on her way to the gallows.”
But he knew that he couldn’t wait that long. Every day down in that cell was one day too many for the child. It was strange that the Nuremberg authorities were holding Greta for so long without commencing torture.
Wolfgang von Eisenhofen inquired nearly every day whether Johann had found a lead regarding the devilish murders. Johann strung him along and garbled something about constellations he needed to observe more closely. He didn’t really care who was behind the murders—he only wanted to free his daughter and get out of Nuremberg as fast as he could.
With the help of the commander’s connections and some silver coins, Johann and Valentin managed to visit Greta most days. A few times Johann even went alone. He brought playing cards, coins, and colorful leather balls to show her all the juggling tricks he used to perform for her mother. He hoped it would distract Greta from the horror she was going through. The girl always loved it when he made her doll speak or coins appear from her ears.
But what she loved the most was Little Satan.
For a pile of hush money, the prison keeper allowed Johann to bring in the dog. Little Satan sniffed at the privy bucket, jumped onto the small bed, and licked Greta’s face until she laughed. When he’d calmed down, he let her pat him while he sat quietly on her lap.
“I’ve always wanted a dog,” she said. “But Uncle Valentin says the commander wouldn’t allow it.”
“He’s probably afraid the dog will make a mess in the great hall.” Johann smiled. “If you teach him properly, you might be allowed to keep one someday.”
Suddenly Greta looked very serious. “The guards say that I’m a witch. And that I’m going to burn at the stake. I’m scared, Johann! Does it hurt to burn?”
“You . . . you’re not going to burn.” Johann swallowed hard. “Because you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“But they say that I’m a witch.” Greta started to cry, and Johann’s heart broke. “And I didn’t even do anything! I was just by the river, by the bridge near the Hospital of the Holy Ghost, and then there was that dead little boy, and there was blood everywhere.” She sobbed. “It was horrible! And I didn’t even want to go to the river. But the man told me to go.”
