The Diary of Caspar Kruse III, Executioner: Goslar, 4 October 1637 — Anna Ilsabe Flörke

 

It was a moonless night when they came for her. The bells of Saint Stephen’s had not yet finished the ninth toll before the watchman stood at my door. He whispered her name as if it were contagious: Anna Ilsabe Flörke, daughter of the widow Flörke of Nonnenstraße. That evening she had been seen in the tavern Zur goldenen Kanne, drinking beer with the leather-boys from the yarn-weaving shop. They said she laughed. They said she sang. They said she had no shame and an eye for girls.

But weightier still was this: her mother was said, as a young girl, to have danced on the Brocken with black bucks and naked women on Walpurgis Night. There was no evidence, of course. There is seldom evidence. There are words. Rumors. Whispers between mothers at the well. A child wakes sleepless, a cow dies, milk sours — and always there is a woman nearby who knows too much of herbs or moon-times.

She was brought to the Ulrich Chapel. My sons carried her half-alive across the threshold: not by force, but by fear. She had not resisted. Her eyes were large, dark as damp earth, and looked not at us but at a place far beyond the wall. She smelled of sweat, wet wool and the sour air of sleep. Her dress was askew. One boot was missing.

I asked her name. She gave it. She did not ask why she was here. She already knew.
I bound her to the bench with leather straps. Her wrists were slender, pale-blue veins trembling under my thumb. She shivered, but she did not scream. No word, no protest, no plea. That made it harder. It is easier when one cries, prays, curses. Then there is distance.

I gave the sign. The men turned the wheel of the bench slowly. Her body tensed. Knees cracked softly. The first beads of sweat broke out on her brow. She shut her eyes; her lips trembled. After five minutes her left arm began to shake. Ten minutes later the skin at her shoulder began to tear. And still she said nothing.

“Anna,” I said, “name names, and the Lord will be merciful.”
Then she opened her eyes and spoke.
“I dreamed of fire, and when I woke, I knew it: it lives in all of us.”

I asked her what she meant. She would not say it again.
After an hour I let her rest. We held water to her lips. She spat it out. When the second hour began I applied the thumbscrews. Her left thumb broke on the first turn. Blood ran between the cuticles. I remember how her hair stuck to sweat, how her shirt lay wet against her ribs like parchment. She still did not scream.

Only in the fourth hour did something give.
She whispered six names.
The first three were women from her neighborhood, not strangers. The fourth was the miller’s wife near the Zwinger — she had long been under suspicion. The fifth was her mistress in the linen trade. And the sixth …
… was her neighbor girl. Eleven years old.

I set down my pen. The oil-lamp flame flickered. The ink crept slowly across the parchment, as if blood making its own way.
I looked at her. Her face was still, her eyes closed. Yet her mouth moved, voiceless words. Her jaw trembled like a child who has just stopped crying. In that moment I knew: pain had taken over.

And yet I wrote the names down.
I have learned to obey the hand, not the heart. The Council wants lists. The people want certainty. The preacher wants devils.
I want silence.

That night I ate little. Anna was returned to the cell, her shoulders dislocated, her left hand like a crumpled leaf. She did not look up. I heard later that she sang that night. Softly. A cradle-song.
I have not written the sentence yet. I wait. I do not know why.
Perhaps I hope someone else will condemn her first. Perhaps I hope for rain to rot the papers.
But I know better.
No one will come for her.




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