Apothecary Melchior and the Mystery of St Olaf's Church (30 page)

Hinricus had drawn a couple steps back from the Prior, but Eckell rose up and then almost immediately collapsed. Melchior initially thought that it was hysteria that had knocked him off his feet, although he realized in the next second that it must be something else. Everything happened very quickly and yet in slow motion. Eckell had shrieked these words, leaped up then lurched and collapsed over the long guild table a split second later. He was unable to breathe and tore his tunic open at the front with a flailing motion. He tore something from around his neck that flashed like silver, yanking it with such force that the leather cord snapped. The Prior threw it somewhere, at someone, towards the table. Melchior could not make sense of what was going on. The object fell between the benches.

Hinricus jumped up to support the Prior, but Eckell pulled himself out of his grasp, extended his hand towards the table and croaked, ‘You knew. You …'

But there the man's words stopped as his breath reached its end. He fell to the floor, and, as he did so, grabbed at Commander Spanheim, who stood nearest to him. He seized the Commander's black scapular and tore at it like a madman. Everyone jumped to their feet and saw how the old monk – his eyes red with rage, fear, insanity or something else entirely and his face distorted into an anguished grimace – lashed his arms wildly around himself and brandished the Commander's scapular like a cross to drive out an evil spirit. Eckell pulled the cloth down over his head then slumped to the ground.

Melchior bolted to his side and held back the crowding men. He watched as the Prior thrashed and twitched convulsively, gurgling and inhuman groans of pain emerging from his throat as he then doubled over, vomiting and heaving. All his intestines burst forth in an instant, and the life in Eckell's eyes faded. If his eyes had indeed focused on a particular person during his moment of death, Melchior could not determine who.

‘Father, Father,' Hinricus cried. Someone roared that the town doctor must be called. Another shouted, ‘Poison? What poison?' ‘Lord have mercy, he is dying,' someone cried, then suddenly – as if the Archangel Gabriel himself had commanded all to be silent for an instant so that the dying soul could spend its last earthly second in peace – everyone fell silent. They stood and stared at the old man twitching before them, the spark of life already extinguished in his eyes. Eckell's body lived for just
one more inhalation of breath, and then out from between his vomitcovered lips slipped a final sigh. Prior Baltazar Eckell could no longer hear this himself, though. The Dominican Prior Baltazar Eckell was dead.

‘He is dead. St Catherine and Mother of God, he is dead. Our beloved prior is dead,' Hinricus whispered, falling to his knees beside the body. He wept.

Everyone now grasped this fact.

The men backed away from the corpse haltingly, and only Hinricus remained at the old man's side, praying. Tears streamed down his young face from beneath his closed eyelids. Prior Eckell's dead body lay curled up in a puddle of his own purged innards, his frozen expression containing pain and … anger.

Anger? thought Melchior. Oh, it was anger all right. The Prior had grasped the truth in the final moment of his life, but he had taken it with him to the land of the dead.

‘Poisoned,' someone whispered.

Poison? Absolutely. There could be no doubt of that. Melchior heard disquieted, frightened voices whispering around him, ‘What did he say about poison?' ‘Who poisoned him?' ‘What did he actually say?' ‘Has he been poisoned?' Everyone drew away from the body. The breath of poison could still be there.

‘The Prior said someone poisoned him,' Hinricus said abruptly and loudly. His eyes remained shut and his face was wet with tears. He spoke to everyone at once and to no one at all. ‘St Catherine, this truly
cannot be possible
. Then he, he … grabbed the Commander …'

‘What now?' Spanheim sputtered. ‘He fell on to me, he was in his death throes.'

‘Yes, but he said that someone had poisoned him.'

‘Send for the doctor,' someone shouted again.

But Freisinger's voice then sounded, ‘There is nothing more the doctor can do here. Someone should send rather for the Dominicans, who might properly care for the Prior's body.'

The Blackhead pushed his way through the horrified guests and approached the corpse. He kneeled down next to Hinricus.

‘Oh, heavenly grace, he believed he had been poisoned. He believed he had been poisoned at the Brotherhood of Blackheads.'

This fact now struck everyone. Poison was a dreadful, stealthy weapon. All knew of it, but people were only poisoned in foreign lands
far away and never here in Tallinn. Poison had no place within the safety of the town walls. Poison had even less of a right to trespass into the rooms of the Blackheads' guildhall, on to the sacred
Smeckeldach
table, on to the trays filled with tankards of beer and plates groaning with meat. Every townsman present – merchants and masters alike – now stared with open mouths and frightened expressions at the plates and cups from which they had just eaten and drunk.

‘He said that someone had poisoned him,' Freisinger echoed gravely. ‘Sires, Commander, that is not possible.'

‘I must run, I must … I must take word to the brothers. I must inform them of this awful news, I must …' Hinricus muttered, rising to his feet.

‘Of course. Go, run, monk,' the Commander barked.

Hinricus now began to move quickly. He was suddenly overwhelmed by many thoughts and many words. ‘Yes, I must go. To the monastery … Yes, I must tell the almsdealer that the Prior is dead and that he must now give out alms to the townspeople. Yes, I must leave at once …' He drew further away and at a faster pace with every step until he reached the door, by which time he was already running. No one watched him leave. It was Dorn, who, surrounded by the great disorder, finally proposed that someone should also inform the authorities.

‘We don't know what message we should take,' Melchior reasoned.

‘What do you mean, what message? He's dead, poisoned, just as he himself said,' the Magistrate huffed in bewilderment.

‘Yes, but what did he say
precisely
?' The Apothecary's voice was loud enough that the other men fell quiet and pricked up their ears. ‘He certainly wanted to speak – he wanted to say many things – but he was unable to get the words out.'

‘I heard precisely,' Freisinger said. ‘He said, “You poisoned.”'

‘Yet who did the Prior have in mind? Did he accuse anyone?' Melchior asked. No one replied. Melchior noticed that a few men cast glances towards the Commander, although Spanheim did not see this himself. The Apothecary then cleared a path through the crowd and bent down close to the Prior. His death had not been pretty; it had not been the death of a clergyman. Eckell had departed in fits of torment, and a lump even rose in Melchior's throat when taking in the disfigured body. He leaned over the corpse and inspected it carefully, lightly squeezing the dead man's joints, raising his limp hand, peering at his fingers and fingernails, parting the Prior's hair away from his temples and touching
his face, sniffing at his mouth. As the minutes passed, a look of incredulity crept over the Apothecary's expression. Melchior stared at a clump of Eckell's grey hair in his palm, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. Others gathered around him, but no one dared step any closer to the body.

‘The Prior believed he had been poisoned, but how could he know this?' Melchior murmured. ‘He suffered pains, yet he was an old, sick man and had been no stranger to pain for quite some time. I fear that the monastery infirmarer is not the best bloodletter.'

‘You are right, Melchior. How did the Prior work out that he had been poisoned?' Freisinger said suddenly. ‘I can swear in the names of all the saints that he cannot have been poisoned. It is simply not possible. I can swear, I can swear that no one in our kitchen has mixed poison into –'

‘That would be madness,' shouted one of the servants. ‘I bought all of the meat and other foods personally.'

A shocking thought had surfaced in the Blackhead's mind. He walked over to the table at which the Prior had been seated and seized the dead man's beer tankard.

‘We all ate the same food and drank the same beer,' he declared. ‘It simply cannot be that only the Prior swallowed poison. You see, here is his plate on to which food was served from the same tray as ours. Here is his cup, and the beer is from the same cask.' Freisinger grabbed a bone from the Prior's plate from which the old man had gnawed the softer meat.

‘Sire Blackhead, under no circumstance should you try …' Melchior shouted, but Freisinger had already made up his mind.

‘The good name and honour of the Brotherhood of Blackheads are as important to me as the Scriptures. In the name of truth and justice, you are all witnesses.' And with these words Freisinger bit from the shank of meat, drank every last drop of beer from Eckell's tankard to wash it down and stuffed a piece of gravy-soaked bread into his mouth.

Someone shouted out in fear.

‘Do not dice with death, Freisinger,' came Tweffell's voice.

Nevertheless, Freisinger stood up and placed the empty tankard upside down on the table.

‘You are all witness to the fact that no one is fed poison by the Brotherhood of Blackheads,' he declared. ‘You see that the Prior's food was not poisoned, that his beer was not poisoned. I live and breathe, and, if the Lord wills it, I will still breathe tomorrow morning.'

‘If that was arsenic, and I believe that it
was
arsenic, then the pains should begin after a few seconds. Arsenic does not take effect in a heartbeat but still with extreme swiftness,' Melchior spoke seriously.

‘Arsenic? Arsenic, you say?' came Spanheim's voice.

‘Yes, I said arsenic,' Melchior replied. ‘I am familiar enough with apothecaries' wisdom to believe that it was arsenic by which Brother Wunbaldus perished and that arsenic also put an end to Prior Eckell's days.'

‘Arsenic? That dreadful poison?' Kilian exclaimed.

‘Yes. I believe this based on what Magister de Ardoyn wrote in his
Book of Poisons
. The knowledge contained in that book was passed down from the Berbers and the Romans. Every apothecary must recognize poisons, and there is likely no other poison in the world as fearful as arsenic. It has no colour, no scent, no taste. It is not bitter, not sweet, not sour, yet when it has made its way into your veins it causes hellish pain and kills quickly. There are few attributes by which an apothecary can say that a person has swallowed arsenic, and the majority of them – as Magister de Ardoyn writes – are similar to the signs of ordinary food poisoning or cholera. However, when I now look upon the unfortunate Prior's corpse, then –'

‘Arsenic or not, here I stand alive and well because there could not have been a speck of arsenic in Prior Eckell's food or drink,' Freisinger interrupted. ‘And whoever says that the Prior was poisoned at the Brotherhood of Blackheads' is a liar.'

‘You are a bold man, Freisinger,' grunted the Goldsmith. ‘But are you not too bold, perhaps?'

‘What in heavens do you see, Melchior?' Dorn asked, ending the exchange.

Melchior slowly raised his head. ‘When I observe this body and recall what De Ardoyn wrote about arsenic then I would say with all certainty that this man died of arsenic poisoning. Look here, you can pull his hair out easily; and see, white lines have appeared on his fingernails. These are sure signs that the poison was arsenic, although …'

‘Although what, Melchior?' Dorn pressed.

‘Yes, it was arsenic, but there is something odd about it. I do not understand it … Hair that comes out in clumps, lines there on his fingernails, and then there is everything I know about Prior Eckell's last days. He complained of pains, he had difficulty digesting food, he
breathed heavily and was short of breath, he had aching cramps. Sometimes he carried on strange conversations, as if all was not right in his head. These are all the effect of arsenic, but they are symptoms of
long-term
poisoning.'

No one understood what Melchior meant at first. They demanded that he explain, which he did. ‘The hair does not start to fall out immediately, not after half an hour. White lines do not appear on a man's fingernails in minutes. De Ardoyn writes that all of these symptoms, along with weakness and pain, show that arsenic has worked its way into the body in small doses over a long period of time, as if he had swallowed a minuscule quantity each day. Arsenic poisons slowly and unnoticeably at first if it is fed to a person regularly, bit by bit over time. It is said that a compressed ball the size of a pea will kill a man quickly, but … no, that is ridiculous. The light scent of garlic can be detected on the Prior's mouth, which is another characteristic of arsenic, yet …'

‘Has he been poisoned or not, Melchior?' ‘What are you trying to say?' the men demanded.

‘Oh yes, oh yes – it was arsenic.' Melchior nodded fervently. ‘However, the Prior ingested it over some time. He certainly did not drink poison here, today, at the Blackheads' guildhall.'

‘And that is as definite as an “amen” in a church,' exclaimed Freisinger. ‘You see for yourselves. I am alive.'

‘That is true. Just as the bold Sire Blackhead demonstrated to us, his food cannot have been poisoned,' Melchior concurred yet continued to look baffled.

‘But how could the Prior have been poisoned then?' Kilian asked.

‘It must have happened earlier, perhaps at the monastery?' Dorn suggested.

It was Pastor Rode who now spoke up. ‘Wunbaldus. It must have been Wunbaldus who killed the Prior. That murderer …'

‘That is certainly possible, but why then did Wunbaldus only admit to killing two people during confession?' Melchior queried. ‘Shouldn't poisoning the Prior have inflicted the greatest torture on his soul if he had elected to take his own life contrary to the Scriptures and to Christian duty? I do not understand it. Furthermore, how could arsenic have been there in the monastery? The Prior assured me that they kept none; the Magistrate heard this also. It is a mystery.'