First Chapter below

ORPHANS OF BELIEF

Hamburg
May, 1847

Far below the sanctuary of the Hamburg Cathedral, small chambers had been dug at great expense to house the remains of the privileged. The idea they had been sold was that one might, for a meaningful financial consideration, find a place of rest in the house of God in order to be closer, everlastingly, to the Almighty.

Sadly, there could not have been a place more devoid of anything of a divine persuasion. This was a stone gallery where the dust of fools craved the warmth of earth, and meticulously carved names longed to be read aloud by visitors who never came.

The dour face of an old priest flickered in the void from a torch that wept light onto the rough stone floor in front of him. He limped along on a badly deformed leg repeating obscure Latin phrases until an elaborate sarcophagus that jutted out into the passageway caught his eye.

“Put him down and remove the lid.”

The priest placed the torch into a rusting iron sconce while three rough-looking men behind him lowered a body to the floor and began pushing on the heavy stone. With a slow grind, the massive weight scraped across the lip of the coffin before hitting the wall.

“That will do. Put him in and close it,” the priest barked.

One of the men looked at him in horror. “But … but Father Luke … he … he breathes!”

“You will do as you are told or face eternal damnation! This one deals with the Devil himself. If he awakens in our world, we are all damned!”

“Forgive me, Father.” The man cowered in the presence of such religious certainty and signalled the others to comply. They stuffed the body into an opening barely wide enough for the task, then grunted the lid back into place. The fragile promise of light fluttered away one step at a time as the burial party retreated up a stone spiral staircase and darkness flooded back in.

***

It was about an hour later that Brother Peter Verhoevan stirred. It felt good to feel the blood coursing through his veins again, though the view left something to be desired. He opened his eyes and stared into the blackest of black. An attempt to sit up ended abruptly with his forehead slamming hard into cold, rough stone.

“Dummkopf,” he moaned in exasperation as he fell back. Blood trickled down the bridge of his nose as a familiar musty odour invaded his nostrils. He had the misfortune of knowing that fragrance, having come across the stench of decaying human flesh before. There had been a few occasions when, as a young priest, Peter had been ordered to reclaim bejewelled family heirlooms from the fingers and necks of the dead. He’d been told it was for the families involved but he knew better, as new chalices and crosses impregnated with very familiar-looking gems appeared at the altar soon thereafter.

Something hard dug into the back of his head. He reached over his shoulder for what he knew would be there—strands of decayed hair, and farther down, remnants of a nose … and farther still … teeth. “Mein Gott,” he huffed as he squeezed himself over and came face to face with the carcass of an aristocrat of some importance. Importance—the word seemed silly given the journeys of the last few months, an earthly term meaning only the best fabrics and coffins in which to rot. The very idea of the word had on many occasions caused Verhoevan to shake his head in wonder at the stupidity of his own kind.

Everything in the material world had been turned upside down. A belief that had once defined the universe for Peter Verhoevan had been revealed as a frivolous comfort that now embarrassed him greatly for having once been its purveyor. Where no answers were forthcoming, well, that was where belief came in. It didn’t have to be true, just appealing on some level … a drop sheet, nicely painted in floral pastels to hide the abyss of infinite possibilities on the other side. Men soon recognized the power of belief as a useful tool in the denial of reality. And so, Verhoevan concluded, belief had been repackaged under the more encompassing banner of “faith.”

For most honest men there was honest doubt, or at least a temptation to wonder, to search beyond the boundaries of belief as new information became available. Faith, on the other hand, could be sold as an absolute, requiring the cessation of question, which effectively gave those in charge power over the faithful. How dare anyone argue with God! That any church would declare itself the voice and earthly manifestation of God was an assault to Verhoevan’s common sense. It was simply preposterous for any man of conscience to presume to speak for the Almighty.

The fraternal twins of fear and ignorance were at the root of most human suffering, and he had no doubt they were behind his current predicament. He thought it odd how such fragile things could exact so much pain from humankind. Still, as a man of good heart, he felt a measure of sympathy for those who merely sought shelter in mindless surety. And it appeared that such surety might breathe easier now, with the likes of him dead.

Bracing himself on his elbows and knees, Verhoevan attempted to slide the lid of the sarcophagus with his back. He feared it would be a fruitless exercise, but anger at the cruelty of those who would put a living body in such a place drove him to an exhausting first effort. He caught his breath and heaved a second time … again with no reward. After a few more moments of rest he gave it one last try, with every ounce of strength left in his body. A searing pain ripped across his chest and his arms buckled, dropping Verhoevan hard onto the carcass beneath him.

“Dummkopf,” he muttered again, in what would be his final spoken word. The corpse’s teeth sank into his cheek from the pressure of his own dead weight. The pain began to dissipate quickly, more distant … more distant. He knew that when the pain was completely gone, he would be elsewhere … again.

Hamburg

One day later

The doors of Frau Hoffman’s brothel on Lieber Strasse were not known for spewing sunny, fresh faces into the morning dew, and this day would be no exception. A shipment of Weisse beer had arrived from Munchen with the entourage of King Ludwig I the previous day, and somehow a “misplaced” barrel had found its way to Hoffman’s seedy establishment.

There were few who could afford good beer in Hamburg, or for that matter in any of the Germanic states. Famine was reaching epidemic levels due to the potato disease and the failure of grain harvests. Typhus swooped down like a buzzard to pluck the last pathetic remnants of a painful life from the starved flesh of thousands. Peasants, demanding release from feudal obligations, were ransacking houses in the surrounding countryside.

The growing pains of moving into the Industrial Revolution to meet the challenge of British, French, and Belgian imports had planted the seeds of federalism. Growing ranks of people displaced by machines were the downside of industrial capitalism. Industrialization for many was nothing but feudalism in a mechanized disguise. In Prussia, there were already a couple of thousand mechanical looms, but well over one hundred thousand handlooms remained. Progress would not be easy.

The output from the looms of Dopp Textiles greatly exceeded that of the rest of the producers in the area. This was as much due to Herr Gert Dopp’s keen sense of business as it was to the advantage of machine over man. His contacts in America had kept a steady stream of cheap cotton and other raw materials flowing his way to add to all the local wool he was buying. There was a sense of promise in Dopp Textiles, and the former weavers Herr Dopp employed to oversee the large looms were his best advertising. He paid them well, and so he was viewed by many as something of a saviour in an otherwise bleak economic landscape. Few realized his generosity was simply a well-calculated form of self-preservation.

The previous evening, Herr Dopp’s son Matthias had decided to walk off the ringing in his ears – a side effect of hours immersed in the roar of his father’s newfangled machines. To that end, his carriage had been sent on to the safety of the livery while he waited for the few remaining employees to leave. Once the head count was complete, Matthias reached into his trouser pocket and pulled out the large keys for the padlock and the cast-iron locking mechanism of the massive front door. After securing and double-checking, he spun around, free at last.

“Guten abend, Hans,” he said to the night watchman, a man with tree-trunk limbs and but a few brown teeth left to lose to an unmanageable temper.

“Guten abend, Herr Dopp,” the surly man snorted as he took up his position on a crude wooden bench thrown in front of the door.

Matthias, tall and full of his eighteen years, walked down the cobblestone street with a confident swagger fed by youthful good looks that caused more than a few women to smile in his direction. It was an unusually warm evening, and what began as a nice stroll quickly turned foul as he got farther away from the cool harbour breeze. Humidity and sweat soaked through his shirt and well into the lining of his jacket, like glue on gauze. He took a handkerchief and wiped the perspiration-soaked blond hair at the base of his neck. When he passed Frau Hoffman’s establishment, the sight of the Weisse beer being offloaded from an oxcart was too much for a now desperate thirst. His eyes followed the barrel as it was hoisted onto the shoulder of a burly deliveryman, who stumbled over the uneven cobblestones under the weight. It was indeed a fair weight for any man to carry, but not enough of a burden to stop the brute from finding the necessary air for a lusty grunt at the fair-haired girl standing, quite fetchingly, in the doorway.

Matthias’s focus was torn from the keg of beer by the intense gravitational pull of the young girl’s green eyes, focused inquisitively in his direction. She had to be new, he thought … no more than sixteen. God, she was beautiful, and out of place at an establishment known for old cows that beckoned with burgeoning cleavage, rotten teeth, and far too much experience for even the most remote notion of romantic fantasy. It was terribly hot, he rationalized to himself … perhaps just one tall glass of cool beer. He moved towards the young girl in the long cotton dress—she was nearly his height—and, uncharacteristically, he found himself stammering, dumbfounded in her rose-scented presence.

“Uh, guten tag, fraulein. I see you have, uh … taken possession of a new shipment of Weisse beer.”

She nodded a provocative affirmative and led him in by the hand, sensing that he might be coaxed into more than the beer.

Once in the dimly lit libido trap, Matthias became even drier in the throat as the young lass held his hand somewhat gingerly to her powdered cleavage. The power of forbidden fruit had caught him off guard and excited him to the core. In for a penny, in for a pound, as he had heard many a British sailor say. He assumed a manly stance beyond his years and slapped a handful of coins on the table, where Frau Hoffman sat drinking a cheap homebrew with some of her scantily clad employees.

“I should like the best room in the house, this fair young fraulein, and a large pitcher of Weisse beer, and don’t try to pass off your own homebrew on me!” Matthias puffed, with a slight tremor in his youthful voice.

The proprietor’s mouth curled up in one corner as she sized up the young buck in full swagger. She recognized the good-looking young man immediately, and saw an equally good opportunity.

“Nothing but the best for the son of Gertie Dopp,” she rasped with a knowing smirk.

“Frau Hoffman, you would be better to show a little more decorum and respect for my father, Herr Dopp.”

“I beg your pardon, Herr Dopp, I meant no disrespect. We all love your father here.”

She had no sooner uttered the patronizing words than a barmaid chatting up the deliveryman popped her head over his shoulder and cackled, “And we all have loved your father here.”

Laughter overtook the room, and a couple of snickers escaped from behind a curtain pulled haphazardly across the doorway to the back room. The space between the bottom of the curtain and the floor revealed the rolled-down trousers of a standing patron who apparently was in a bit of a hurry. It sounded as if he were blessing the woman kneeling at his feet as she hummed in what could have been mistaken for a well-rehearsed religious rapture.

Sensing that Matthias might be losing his purpose, and bringing her grin under control, Frau Hoffman swung into action. She was, after all, a businesswoman, and there was some business to be had from the son of a wealthy man.

“Follow me, Herr Dopp. And if you would be so kind as to join us, Anna.”

Before Matthias could change his mind he found himself gazing into the dim light of a seedy third-floor room. He surveyed the cracked plaster, ratty furniture, and dirty-looking bed linens, wondering what he was doing in such a hellhole, until he completed his 180-degree sweep and found himself staring once more at the one called Anna. Her apparent nervousness held an innocence that Matthias found captivating.

“This is Anna’s first week with us, Herr Dopp, and now that you know where she is we hope to see you again. I’ll leave you two to discuss whatever comes up,” Frau Hoffman quipped as she spun around and cackled at her bad joke all the way down the stairs.

The young girl closed the door quietly and her trembling hands began unbuttoning the embroidered cotton blouse, to the undivided attention of her captive audience of one. There was something about this girl that was far more interesting than the well-to-do daughters his father’s friends were always forcing on him. They all exuded such uselessness that Matthias dreaded the day he might have to marry one and be responsible for her until his dying breath. There had been a couple of sexual dalliances, but those episodes felt like arranged traps to force a marital course. This was a moment of random passion with no such consequence, or so he tried to convince himself. He knew he was inventing ridiculous excuses for every inch of the slope he was sliding down, but he just couldn’t stop.

What he didn’t know was how hard Anna was working to hide her nervousness. In the last couple of days, she thought, she had seen and done it all. All the customers thus far had been filthy labourers and lonely old men, but this Matthias was young and handsome. She had observed him walking by two days earlier and was undeniably attracted to him. There were still a few girlish fantasies that she hung on to as a way of mental escape, but she had never expected one of those fantasies to walk so willingly into her hell.

The beer arrived moments later with a knock on the door, which opened just enough for two arms to slide a frothy pitcher and two beer steins onto the floor. With the click of the latch, the room fell silent once more to expectation. Any awkwardness was slowly discarded, along with their garments, as the young couple drifted away into what would be a longer night than Matthias had anticipated. He was indeed infatuated with the lovely young woman, but unbeknownst to him the beer had been laced with a substance used on special occasions by the canny proprietor to blur any lines of common sense. To Frau Hoffman, the appearance of anyone of substantial purse constituted such a special occasion.

The night disappeared into an unusual drowsiness that finally took Matthias under and delivered him like a castaway to the wreckage of the morning after. A monumental headache awoke him in such a disoriented state that it took him a disconcerting amount of time to realize where he was. His hand blindly floundered among the clothes on the threadbare upholstered chair at the side of the bed until it found the slit in his waistcoat. His index finger went on alone until the small, silk-lined pocket reluctantly spat out his grandfather’s gold watch. An unwilling, pillow-free, blurry eye squinted into the burning light until the bad news, in Roman numerals, slowly came into focus … 8:25 a.m.

“On no!” He jumped off the lumpy feather mattress onto the rough planks of the floor and frantically grabbed at the rest of the crumpled clothing that lay strewn around the room. Anna didn’t stir. He looked at her for a moment, mesmerized by her delicate, soft features, even though he had sufficient memory of his attempts to cure the fascination. Still, there was something different about this girl.

Such sweet thoughts were shattered when a quick inspection of his trouser pockets revealed that there was nothing clanking against his keys … the rest of his money was gone! There was no time to sit through what he anticipated would be well-rehearsed indignant huffs of innocence from the husky-voiced proprietor. He would just have to be grateful that Frau Hoffman had seen fit to leave him his grandfather’s watch and his keys.

This was the day a new pipe organ would be dedicated at the Hamburg Cathedral in loving memory of Matthias’s mother, Maria Dopp. She had died the year before in a fierce outbreak of cholera that had begun in the neighbourhoods worst hit by typhus, then spread like ground fire. His grieving father, seeking some kind of immortality for her memory, had taken over the financial responsibility of the new organ. The bass pipes were thirty-two-footers. The three manual sixty-note keyboards and two banks of ivory stops would be a testimony to state-of-the-art technology. It was to be one of the biggest pipe organs in Germany … nothing but the best for the wife of Gert Dopp, God rest her soul.

His best friends had begged Herr Dopp to hold fast financially for a few months, but there was something deep seated that stopped him from listening. He demonstrated a heart-wrenching remorse in the loss of Maria that he fruitlessly tried to sedate by throwing money at it. One year later, however, the only remorse he felt was in being considerably lighter of pocket.

The Church, on the other hand, was ever so grateful for Herr Dopp’s generosity. In exchange for a good chunk of the Dopp fortune, a small brass plaque would be fixed to the polished oak cabinetry in memory of Maria Dopp and dedicated to the glory of God. Herr Dopp, at the time of the final and painfully large fund transfers, had remarked snidely to his son that apparently the God everyone worshipped was “only in it for the glory … according to that damned plaque!” The service of dedication was to take place on the day and time of his beloved Maria’s death, 8:00 a.m. …twenty-five minutes ago!

How could Matthias have been such a libidinous fool? Well, the answer to that, he had shockingly learned the night before, was that apparently it ran in the family! He couldn’t think of his father as a sexual being; it disgusted him. Had his father been frequenting Frau Hoffman’s establishment even before the death of his mother? Was that the source of his remorse in her death? While engaged in condescending judgments, flashes of everything he had done the night before spat his own lust squarely back into his face.

Boots hastily laced, Matthias leaned over and gently swept a wisp of fine, fair hair from Anna’s delicate face, then kissed her tenderly on the cheek. Even though he had satisfied his every fantasy, a part of him still didn’t want to leave her.

He shook his head at the impossibility of it all, then spun around and flew down the stairs onto the busy street.

Anna hadn’t stirred, even though she was wide awake. Unrealistic thoughts of life with her dashing young man crashed onto the filthy, cracked-plaster wall of the seedy brothel. She knew she wouldn’t last long in Hoffman’s business with such a frivolous vulnerability. Such feelings as she had for Matthias had to go … maybe even the ability to feel them. She had money to make, a father, mother, and siblings to feed with her meagre earnings. Matthias was for some other life, some other world, some place she might find in a tall tale from the imaginations of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm of Frankfurt.

Carts and wagons of every shape and size had been bringing goods up from the harbour for a good few hours, feeding the street vendors and shops, who were well into their day’s meagre take. Anna jumped out of bed to watch her gallant young man, three floors below, as he pushed his way through the crowded street towards the twin towers of Hamburg Cathedral.

His movements were like an intricate dance step, expertly avoiding the daily obstacle course of horse and ox droppings. An exceptional coordination of sight and reflex was a prerequisite for the well-dressed city dweller. One could hardly impress a soul smelling like horseshit, or, even worse, dragging the same onto the parlour carpet of some unfortunate host. As he began to run, Matthias became aware that his clothes held an aroma of dried sweat from the previous day. The odour, combined with a crushed and dishevelled appearance, would most certainly merit more than the usual words of disapproval from a fussy father who prided himself on his appearance.

There would be a gathering of local dignitaries at the ceremony, including the Lord Mayor of Hamburg and, rumour had it, the possibility of an ardent organ enthusiast in the person of none other than Ludwig I, who was visiting from Bavaria. Marcus Fricke, a musician of national note, had been rehearsing a short program of Bach that would showcase the power of this majestic musical instrument, and there would also be an original piece written for the occasion by Peter Verhoevan, a priest of the Franciscan brotherhood. Verhoevan was a brilliant composer whose music was the toast of local gossip for its powerful ability to move even the most monumental cynic to tears.

Matthias ran up the steps towards the giant, arched, weathered doors of the cathedral, quite expecting to hear the powerful new bass pipes rattling the foundations with their thunder … but the church was eerily silent. He must have arrived in a moment of prayer, he thought, as he reached for the large iron ring and hauled gently. The smaller inset oak door groaned, despite his efforts to open it ever so slightly that he might slide through unnoticed. The bright morning sun had blinded him to the dark and musty house of God. His feet slowly followed the stone squares of the centre aisle, worn from centuries of repentance and the salt of tears. A shaft of morning light now just high enough to engage the lower stained-glass windows fell in the direction of the altar.

Matthias gazed up at the high ceiling that attempted to contain Heaven, sensing something was definitely wrong … the great sanctuary was silent, deathly silent, with the exception of the gritty sound of his boot leather on stone. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark, a heap of purple satin on the altar steps came into focus. On closer inspection he could see that the clump of purple was in fact the Bishop of Hamburg in full regalia, flat on his back, motionless, face staring upward, frozen in a glaze of blank piety.

Matthias’s head snapped back and forth to the pews on either side of the aisle. The occupants were slumped over as though sleeping, or were they … dead? He ran towards the front pew and recognized his father’s expensive Italian leather boots sticking out from under the fine cloth of his tailored trousers.

“Oh, Mary Mother of God.” He was unable to make any sense of the images that assaulted his eyes. He grabbed the pew with one hand and leaned down to turn his father over. He was dead … no, wait … he was breathing, eyes open, expression fixed, just like the Bishop’s.

“Father … Father, can you hear me?” There was no response.

Matthias looked at the next pew, and the next, for signs of life. No one was moving, and yet he could now hear and see that most were breathing. What insanity was this? Was it the fever? There were nearly fifty people in the cathedral, all apparently in the same state. It had to be a new plague of some sort. And then Matthias realized that he had touched his father. Did he now have whatever it was? He fell to his knees and wept. Judgment Day must surely have arrived, and, like his father, he was to pay for his sins.

It was the Lord Mayor’s coachman who sounded the alarm when he stumbled on the scene a few minutes later. The Lord Mayor was late for an appointment that would now most certainly be missed. Within the hour, police had cordoned off the building from a gathering crowd of the curious. An ornate carriage rumbled up to the front of the cathedral, barely missing a few irate onlookers. The driver jumped from his seat and ran to open the shiny, crested, black door after placing a small red-carpeted step onto the cobblestones. Two very dignified-looking men emerged and were briskly escorted by police through a sea of inquisitive faces to the great doors, where they were immediately granted entrance by the constable on duty.

Herr Reuter, physician to King Ludwig I, entered cautiously. He was a rotund individual of a good age and height with a meticulously coiffed beard. Reuter was attended by his ambitious and somewhat skinny young protégé, Rudy Bier, a studious-looking sort some twenty years his junior from the Vienna school of medicine. They both walked slowly down the centre aisle in a studied procession of scientific observation. Careful not to touch anything, they went directly to the Bishop, lying on his back surrounded by an abundance of purple satin, like a victim of a gaudy ballooning accident. Dr. Reuter held a small vial of smelling salts to the nose of the holy man, whose face gazed towards the ornate painting of his Maker on the ceiling above. They waited a moment and observed … nothing.

The two men turned to Matthias, who by this time was reduced to a mumbling madman, reciting over and over a mantra that begged forgiveness as he rocked gently with his father’s head in his lap.

“I am told you are the son of Gert Dopp?” Reuters inquired sharply, bringing Matthias to a tentative attention.

“Matthias,” the young Dopp mumbled.

“Yes, Matthias. What’s happened here?” Reuters shot back.

Matthias looked up through his red eyes and shrugged his shoulders. “I was late, all is as I found it. Can you do anything for my father?”

Reuters tried the smelling salts, with no discernable response.

“Perhaps when we know what this affliction is, my boy, but for now I am afraid we shall have to close the cathedral for observation, and you will have to stay here with the afflicted. No one can come or go without my permission. We cannot allow whatever this is to spread. I am sure you understand, Herr Dopp?”

Matthias shrugged with indifference and returned to his grief.

“Rudy, ask the constable on the door to find some food and drink for young Herr Dopp, and then we must insure that all are instructed in appropriate precautions.” His colleague reluctantly obeyed, huffing audibly, annoyed at his reduction to servant status.

“Appropriate precautions” was a vague term that was subjectively determined by the man with the most power. In such matters as human health and disease, there was no one more powerful in Hamburg at that moment than the physician to King Ludwig I. Fortunately for Ludwig, he had made rather merry the night before and refused to get out of his bed that morning. However, when he was alerted to the state of those in the cathedral, he’d felt it prudent to send his physician.

After inspecting forty-seven bodies, the royal physician noted that all were breathing, except for one individual whose neck had been compromised when she apparently fell awkwardly onto the wooden kneeler in front of her pew. The cathedral would be sealed from the public and the breathing bodies would be observed, not touched. Some ale, bread, and spiced meat were left on the pew beside Matthias, and additional guards were placed at all doors, where entrance was verboten. By late afternoon, Herr Dr. Reuters had advised Matthias that if there was any change in the status of the afflicted he should inform one of the guards posted outside any of the doors and the doctor would come immediately. Otherwise, he would return again at dawn.

Matthias watched the doctors’ cloaks take flight as they marched, in unison, down the aisle with the officious strides of authority. The door thudded shut with a hint of finality that echoed into the most minuscule reaches of the stone temple. As the echoes slowly died, silence moved in like a cold draft, sending a shudder that rippled up the spine of Matthias. He felt like an Egyptian servant buried alive with his master, entombed with the damned. After grieving the remnants of the day away, he finally crawled onto a hard oak pew and gave in to fatigue.

The sound of a crowd gathering in alarming numbers outside became a distant hum as he drifted towards thoughts of Anna and the sweet rose fragrance that cascaded from her soft white skin. A rustling of cloth suddenly pulled him back from his sweet escape … there was someone else in the great sanctuary, sounds in the foreground other than the eerie breathing of the living dead. He slowly lifted his head and observed a short, sturdy man in what looked like a robe of the Franciscan order. The priest was holding a leather-bound book and intoning Latin phrases over the bodies of the afflicted. Matthias felt a measure of comfort that the spiritual needs of his father were being met, and then he lowered his head to sleep. As he fell deeper and deeper into Anna’s arms, he felt a loving hand on his forehead and a gentle voice in the distance.

“Worry not for thy father. He will return if he so wishes. God be with you, my boy.”

“And with you, Father,” Matthias whispered in automatic response as he fell back into the warm memory of Anna.

All night long he slipped in and out of consciousness, not wanting to believe where he was. Every so often he thought he heard the painful sound of a man weeping. It seemed to emanate from the sad, chiselled faces of the Apostles who looked down at him from every corner of the cathedral.

***

The next morning, when the royal physician returned, the carriage driver was forced to whip his reluctant black gelding through the throng of people who now flooded the streets outside the cathedral. Anxious fears of typhus and cholera fluttered through the air, amplified by frightened calls to burn the bodies of those inside before a new plague spread. Most of the city’s available constabulary were posted on site and quickly created a pathway to the great doors, while the driver, now on foot, jostled by irate onlookers, struggled to accomplish his duties.

Carriage door ajar, Herr Dr. Reuters leaned forward and looked with disdain into the crowd. He finally got up and stood on the carpeted step, instructing an armed constable to fire his pistol into the air. The crowd was startled into a moment of silence that Reuters quickly claimed for his own purpose.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please go to your homes. There is nothing you can accomplish here! If this is, as some of you think, a new plague, then surely your safety lies in distance, not gathering here in proximity to the source!”

“It is a new plague!” a voice from the crowd shouted.

“A pox!” another voice threatened.

“They should be burned!” came yet another bloodthirsty cry, barely audible above an escalating cacophony of hysteria.

Reuters knew his moment was gone, and he quickly put leather to cobblestone moving down the path cleared by the police, protégé in tow.

“Perhaps they are right,” Bier said sheepishly as they were escorted into the Cathedral by a police captain. “Burning might be the prudent thing to do, for the safety of the public at large.”

“Perhaps, Rudy, but I will decide when it is time for such action.”

Rudy’s face was red, but not with embarrassment. He turned away to conceal his anger at what he felt was another condescending dismissal. He was, by his own estimation, better educated in the latest science than the old man and deserving of far greater respect.

Matthias stood inside the door with a look on his face that was now fully conscious and anxious with fear.

“Is my father to be burned? What about the rest of the people here? Surely you would not burn the Bishop of Hamburg or the Lord Mayor?”

“Please, Herr Dopp, control yourself. No one is going to be burned.” Reuters strode down the aisle towards the stricken. “Has there been any change overnight in anyone?”

“No sir. Only ...” Matthias wasn’t quite sure what to say. Herr Dr. Reuters and Rudy Bier stopped abruptly and faced him.

“Only what, Herr Dopp?” the royal physician inquired.

“Well, it might be nothing …”

“Let us be the judge of that, boy. Spit it out!”

“There was someone else here, a priest who was ministering to the afflicted … and there was weeping, loud, painful weeping.”

“And where is the priest now?”

“I … I don’t know, sir.”

“Captain?” Herr Reuters stared at the tough-looking policeman who had heard every word.

“I assure you, no one has entered or left this building since you were here yesterday, sir,” the policeman replied officiously.

“Then someone is still here. Please conduct a thorough search, including the chambers below!”

Reuters and Bier proceeded to inspect the bodies again, and all was as before … only one dead, while the remainder curiously breathed as though all was as it should be. There was no fever, no discoloration of the skin, no rashes, no indication of ill health other than a complete lack of consciousness. The unruly crowd now worried Herr Dr. Reuters more than the afflicted people in the cathedral. There would be no answer to this medical riddle if the fearful mob had its way and burned the poor souls.

A good hour later, the police search had found no sign of the curious monk that Matthias had described. Matthias offered the explanation that perhaps he had been dreaming, which seemed to appease all but Herr Dr. Reuters, who called the police captain over to discuss a plan to move the bodies to a more secure location for observation. If they were not allowed to get to the bottom of this it could occur again, and perhaps place even more lives in jeopardy.

Two large wagons were commandeered and sat a block from the rear of the cathedral, where they would wait until dark. Dr. Reuters needed time and room to manoeuvre, and to that end, he sent Rudy out into the crowd to spread words of reassurance that all were recovering nicely and the crisis was over. Stretchers and crude wooden planks to move the bodies were smuggled in. It was arranged that the bodies would be taken to an empty barn on the outskirts of town for further observation. If worst came to worst, the entire site could be burned and the contagion, whatever it was, contained with no public threat.

By dusk the crowd outside of the cathedral was even larger and more unruly. Reuters thought this odd, given that he had sent word that the afflicted were recovering. Even more curious was the fact that Rudy had not returned. The warm evening had encouraged above average levels of alcohol consumption, leaving good numbers of the inebriated spoiling for some kind of altercation.

Interesting phenomenon, inebriation, Herr Reuters thought as he listened to the crowd. It reduced some to sentimental fools and others to belligerent monsters; some achieved an annoying state of giddiness, while yet others lost all sense of morality. He had seen fear manifest itself in equally strange ways. The thought that he was facing a double-edged sword—a crowd of people both inebriated and fearful for their own lives—gave him no sense of security in his current authority. And what of young Matthias, who had pawed his father for hours in grief? Was he to be burned with the others? Would he succumb to the same illness? And where was Rudy? What could have happened to him? Reuters’s mind stirred through horrid possibilities, among which a sad wish emerged that Matthias might also lose consciousness before all options had been exhausted and orders were given to light the fires of purification in the public interest.

The front door slammed, startling all within. A harried-looking constable began rattling all the locking bolts into their cast-iron yokes. The captain ran to him for a brief exchange, then back to Dr. Reuters.

“It is time, we must act immediately.”

No sooner had the captain spoken than the sound of thumping on the main doors began. The crowd, determined to have its way, was becoming increasingly bold.

“Bring the wagons to the rear entrance,” Reuters barked.

Stretchers and wooden planks were hoisted one by one, transporting their catatonic cargo to the back of the cathedral. Reuters looked sadly at the faces of the afflicted: some he knew, from various social functions over the years, and all were of a privileged class, as demonstrated by their expensive clothing and jewellery. One middle-aged baroness he knew very well as a former patient and family acquaintance of many years, and then there was the Lord Mayor of Hamburg. The back of the cathedral was unusually quiet as the wagons arrived—too quiet, Reuters thought. All but four of the bodies had been loaded when Reuters called for the police captain.

“Is my assistant, Herr Bier, outside with your men?”

“No, I have not seen him for some time.”

“Have one of your constables look down in the vaults below. Perhaps an idle curiosity has caught his imagination.”

Reuters headed towards the back entrance to oversee the loading of the last few bodies. As he stepped outside into the warm evening, an odd sound assaulted his ears, one that he soon recognized as the clatter of hundreds of feet heading his way. He turned to face a wall of angry-looking people being led down the street by … Rudy Bier!

“There they are!” Rudy screamed.

The crowd roared and broke into a faster pace, swarming the rear entrance and the wagons. The constables were overwhelmed and cast to one side as the crowd converged, staring curiously at the human cargo, until a large man yelled, “Burn them! Burn them, or we all will die!”

Voices in the horde repeated the call—“Burn them! Burn them! Burn them!” — until the words bled into a loud cacophony of insanity. After the horses were unhitched, thatch and lumber appeared from nowhere and were instantly stoked underneath the old beer wagons. Dr. Reuters screamed in vain, his words consumed by the roar of the large organic mass that no longer held any semblance of reason. He was pushed back inside the rear entrance and his exit blocked by two surly men who threatened to put him on the wagons with the damned if he didn’t co-operate.

The fires were lit and the crowd cheered as the flames quickly took root, caressing the floorboards of the wagons that had once held barrels of beer. More and more wood was thrown onto the blaze, until the tops of the flames moved heavenward, like the spires of some hideous cathedral of death.

An elegantly dressed woman whose body had lain lifeless moments before in the front wagon suddenly stood up and began to scream. Reuters looked with horror at his former patient, the Baroness, her eyes terrified in a newly regained consciousness as she tried to climb over the side rail, only to be harshly pushed back by pitchforks and poles. Her eyes cut deeply into Dr. Reuters’s with a look of panic wrapped in a pitiful plea for some kind of explanation. She began to cough, overwhelmed by smoke. Flames ate into her petticoats, and then, with an explosive whoomph, she was transformed into a screaming human fireball that twisted and turned, writhing in agony, before falling onto the other bodies in the wagon.

As the crowd cheered with ugly delight, Reuters looked back into the shadows of the rear entrance of the cathedral. Tears streamed down Matthias’s face as he held the end of his father’s stretcher, watching as, one by one, the bodies caught fire to the roars of the crowd.

A familiar voice began once again to dominate, slowly drawing the attention of the crowd. Dr. Reuters recognized it as the excited voice of Rudy Bier, his dark task not yet accomplished.

“There are more inside. And don’t forget the young Dopp boy, who is most surely infected!”

Angry citizens pushed through the narrow Gothic archway into the once dark vestibule, now well lit by the wall of heat and dancing light of the fire.

Matthias had dropped the stretcher to defend himself when he was suddenly pulled off of his feet sideways by a sturdy arm in a rough woollen sleeve. Reuters saw him disappear and attempted to follow, but when he finally made it to the corner where Matthias had disappeared, he saw only an empty alcove with a statue of the Holy Virgin.

One by one, the remaining bodies were thrown on the fire. Gert Dopp was thrown into the air and onto the flames, stretcher and all, like a pile of refuse. The oily, sickening stench of burning human flesh began to permeate the air as Reuters made his way back to his carriage, defeated, and betrayed by one whose professional kinship he had severely overestimated.

Bier had no desire to follow in the footsteps of Herr Dr. Reuters; in fact, he loathed the wealth and unearned respect of the aristocracy. He had seen doctors die from caring for the sick and had made a pact with himself that he would never engage in such heroic stupidity. In fear of his own life, he had calculated that the only way to avoid the wrath of the crowd was to join them—or, even better for his own egomaniacal self-importance, lead them.

“Get us out of here,” Reuters said to his driver in a barely audible rasp. The footman closed the door behind him, a door that Reuters wished could shut out the sound and stench. As his carriage pulled away, he sat, stunned, until his usually stoic front cracked into a steady stream of tears. They were tears of failure, of plundered responsibility … of the deepest sadness he had ever felt. And what of young Matthias? Had he been thrown onto the flames, or had he somehow survived? Would he ever have an answer to the illness that affected those in the cathedral? The Baroness had actually recovered from the mysterious affliction; would the rest have done the same, if they had been allowed the time? The images and mysteries of that night would frequent his fitful sleep for the rest of his life. The cries of an old acquaintance burning alive would call to him relentlessly, until he achieved the welcome silence of his own grave.