The Diary of Caspar Kruse III, Executioner: Goslar, June 27, 1634 – Trial of a Soldier’s Wife

 

The air hung heavy over the city today. Not from storm or rain — but from something else. A tension that drifted through the streets, rolled across the marketplace, clung in people’s eyes like dust.

Margarete Lichten stood trial.
She was the widow of a mercenary, dead in the emperor’s service, somewhere between Halberstadt and Magdeburg. No one knew for sure. She was left with a ragged skirt, three children, and the name of a man who had slain more faces than he had kissed.

She was accused of stealing offerings from the church — candles, bread, coins from the alms chest.
But it did not stop there.
The pastor, a young man with fiery eyes and an unbending back, called her a witch.
He said: “She touched the holy with unclean hands.”
And: “God’s curse rests upon him who disturbs the grave.”

For during her interrogation, under the first torture, she confessed that she and her dead husband had desecrated graves —
that she had gathered blood, mixed it with wine, and sold it as medicine.
Her voice cracked when she said it.
She looked at no one.
Her eyes were like extinguished coals.

I sat there, as my office requires.
I watched.
I listened.
But in her words I heard no truth.
I heard no sincerity.
What I heard were memories of sermons, of warnings, of nightmares forced upon her.
She told what she thought we wanted to hear.
What people always think we want to hear.

After three days she had given a list of names of women she claimed to have seen at the Brocken feast.
Women who had never looked at her in the street.
Women who brewed a herb broth against colic or tended lavender in their gardens.
She wanted it to stop.
And I — I wrote it down.

The council was satisfied.
The pastor thanked God.
And the sentence was clear: death by fire on the Brandplatz at the Hochgericht.

Today she was led to the square.
The people stood in rows.
Some had brought their children.
She wore a simple linen gown, her hair loose, her feet bare.
She stumbled once, but rose again without help.

I walked before her, sword on my back, face set.
Before the fire was lit, she asked if she might speak a word.
The pastor refused.
She remained silent.
I nodded to my servants.
The wood was damp with dew, but dry enough for flame.
She burned without a scream.
Only her body spoke.
A twisting. A jerk of the head.
And then silence.

When the fire died and the crowd departed, it was a child who picked up a stone from the ground.
He threw it — at her, at me, I do not know.
I caught it.
A smooth stone, warm from the sun.
I looked at the boy.
He had reddish hair, eyes full of questions.
His mother pulled him away without a word.
I let the stone fall.

I thought of my own children.
Of Anna, who only yesterday said Hans Christoph had nightmares again.
Of my mother, who once stole candles from the church to cook soup when father was too long away with the sword.

That evening I sat alone by the fire.
My hands and hair still smell of smoke.
I whispered a prayer, but I do not know to whom.
To God?
To Margarete?
To the child who threw the stone?
Perhaps to myself.

And I wondered —
whether we do not all sometimes hold a stone.
Not to throw,
but because otherwise we do not know what to do with our hands.

I climbed onto the roof by the wooden ladder we seldom use — the rungs cold, damp, slippery from the night. Above, the wind still howled, sharper now, as if it gathered at my back. My fingers grasped the ridge; the slates were wet, slick as an eel. When I pushed one of the tiles back into place, my hand caught — frozen to the cold metal of the nail that stuck out. The cold bit.

My knees ached from crouching. The wind whipped my cloak open like a flag. But I worked silently, determined. One tile, then another. Align, hammer, seal with tar remnants from winters past.

When I stood below again, my hands were blue from cold, my coat soaked with mist. Anna set a pot of warm milk on the fire, added honey. She said nothing as she handed it to me. Only her gaze was warm.

I drank slowly. My fingers tingled as they thawed.
In silence I thought: A carpenter would have come to a baker, to a mason, to a judge. But not to me. Not to the man who builds gallows and keeps silent when blood flows.
And so I climb myself.
And so the house stands.