The Death Cart

By Joanne Schoenwald

The Death Cart is a compelling historical fiction piece set in the middle of the 14th century at the time of the Black Death. The story is infused with the odors, sounds and descriptions of a
small German town that is disintegrating from the effects of the plague, which strikes its citizens without warning and defies explanation.
Greeta, a pretty and talented 15-year-old servant-girl, is the main character. She and her boyfriend, Timothy, have
discovered a cache of old manuscripts in an abandoned castle in the forest. As the sickness overtakes her loved ones, she
finds she must enlist the help of the local priest and a spiritually conflicted monk in order to translate the ancient writings of the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Procopius, looking for clues to fight the plague.
The novel is filled with interesting characters: Greeta’s master and mistress and their twin daughters, a disgraced knight, a young prostitute with bi-colored eyes, a charismatic animal doctor, and a mysterious priest inquisitor.
Events unfold rapidly, including a near fatal fight in a tavern, Greeta’s arrest and imprisonment and a trial that leads to the chilling climax.

The presence of the death cart is recurrent throughout the novel as a reminder of the tenuous thread that binds the living to the dead.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Joanne Schoenwald
• Release date: Jul 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450783033

Joanne Schoenwald

Joanne is a wife, mother of two, and grandmother of four girls. She practiced pharmacy for 44 years in Indiana, Arizona, California, Washington, Texas, and Iowa. As a member of a Great Books group since 2002, she has read and discussed classical literature and philosophy from the ancients to the moderns. Her writing background comes from the many years of courses she attended at the 'Iowa Summer Writing Festival' in Iowa City. She is retired and enjoying a second career as an author of historical fiction, and being 'mom' to a cute Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Annie. Joanne lives in Surprise, Arizona with her husband, Ron, a Professor Emeritus from the University of Iowa.

Book preview

Thanks to Ginny Schierscher for her early critique of the book and Susan Wells Bennett for her critique and recommendations.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgment

PROLOGUE: The Deadly Hitchhiker

CHAPTER 1: The Girl in the Window

CHAPTER 2: The Twins

CHAPTER 3: The Woolen Merchant

CHAPTER 4: Plagues and Rumors of Plagues

CHAPTER 5: The Chosen One

CHAPTER 6: Behind the Walls

CHAPTER 7: Bitta’s Castle

CHAPTER 8: Clues from the Past

CHAPTER 9: The Priest from St. Stephen’s

CHAPTER 10: The House on Belcher

CHAPTER 11: Dark Night of the Soul

CHAPTER 12: Changing of the Guard

CHAPTER 13: The King’s Men

CHAPTER 14: The Reluctant Monk

CHAPTER 15: Latin and Greek

CHAPTER 16: Law and Order

CHAPTER 17: The Missing Manuscript

CHAPTER 18: Freda’s Trove

CHAPTER 19: Armed and Ready

CHAPTER 20: Knight of the Night

CHAPTER 21: Procopius’ Plague

CHAPTER 22: The Healing Salve

CHAPTER 23: Lancing Buboes

CHAPTER 24: Treachery, Deceit, Betrayal

CHAPTER 25: Violence in the Night

CHAPTER 26: The Prison

CHAPTER 27: The Trial

CHAPTER 28: Day of Judgment

CHAPTER 29: Blessed Arno’s Niche

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ring a Ring o' Rosies

A Pocket full of Posies

'A-tishoo! A-tishoo!'

We all fall Down.

– UNKNOWN

PROLOGUE

THE DEADLY HITCHHIKER

The year was 1347.

Off the coast of Italy, a small merchant ship was making its way from the shores of the Black Sea to off-load its cargo of Russian tea and fur hides in one of the bustling Italian ports. The captain, a weathered man in his early forties, had plied these waters for half his life and was seasoned enough to realize that he had a problem on board that he had never seen in all his years at sea.

He tried to reason that the answer lay in the rawness of several of his recruits. It was not uncommon for deck hands to be rudely kidnapped in the wild port villages and pressed into service. He had been known, himself, to turn a blind eye. Perhaps they were of inferior stock, the two lads who had succumbed so quickly to some virulent disease.

Being at the helm, he could only rely on second-hand versions of their tortured deaths, and could easily dismiss these accounts as the exaggerations that usually accompanied tales at sea. But he had seen the blackened skin, and bulb-like swellings just before the bodies were slid overboard, anchored firmly to wooden planks…and something was nagging at the back of his mind.

As the vessel pulled into port, the worried captain and his crew were not the only ones to disembark. With them, scampering underfoot, were the ubiquitous rats that hitched rides from port to port. This time, the fleas, which usually fed off the sweet sticky blood of the rodents, had been introduced to a much tastier and more accessible host…man. The busy port was the perfect target for the insects carrying the deadly bacteria of Bubonic Plague.

It was air born. What had once required intimate contact with infected rats, could now be spread by the almost imperceptible bite of a flea. These insects rapidly bred with port fleas, pasture fleas, village fleas, town fleas. They knew no boundaries.

The medieval mind was incapable of understanding the transmission of disease. The thought of vermin, that they lived with on an intimate basis, harboring such a deadly pathogen, was as alien to them as the notion of human hands being full of dangerous microbes and bacteria.

Most would look for answers in folklore and superstition or the solace of their faith. Some would revert to bestial and bizarre behavior. But a few would search for clues in an age-old human quest for understanding.

By 1351 some 30 to 50 million people in Europe were dead.

CHAPTER 1

THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

The plaintive cry echoed through the streets, penetrating the old house where the young girl stood transfixed, pressing her fingers against the window to steady herself as she choked back waves of nausea.

As she peered out the window, she saw Herr Heller on his front stoop, wearing only a dirty linen nightshirt. He was dragging something loosely wrapped in a filthy sheet. He paused for a moment to push back the unruly shanks of hair that fell in his face. As he wiped his sweaty forehead on his sleeve, the winding fell open and the young girl saw that the burden was Herr Heller’s beloved wife Meary, whose nearly naked body was covered with blackened buboes, blistered and still oozing.

Mustering all his strength, his neck muscles bulging, the red-faced man flung his wife’s body onto the death cart, with no more emotion than if he were tossing a load of hay onto a wagon. He had repeated this act four times in the past week; his eldest son, two daughters, and his baby boy, and each time, it took a little more of his humanity. Finally, nothing was left for the woman who was once the light of his life.

The girl could feel the warmth of the sun beginning its slow arc toward the western forest. Chickadees and sparrows twittered in the heights of an ancient oak, the massive tree struggling to support twisted branches, its leaves crisping in the cool breeze. A hawk circled just above the tree line, a silent raptor in a cloudless sky.

It should have been a perfect autumn day…a day when the odor of fresh-baked bread and new mown hay was drifting through the town square, a day when neighbors were greeting each other on their front stoops, relating the latest gossip, exchanging recipes for leek pottage and mutton stew, a day when children were playing hoops or testing their skills with leather-covered balls…instead, the death cart was making its way down Belcher, a mud-caked road on the outskirts of a small German town, in the middle of the fourteenth century…and the air was filled with the stench of rotting corpses.

Greeta!

The fifteen-year-old servant girl turned away from the sight of Frau Heller’s body staring at her from dulled, blue eyes glazed over in death. Away from the horribly twisted smile that framed her open mouth in a frozen scream, as her blackened arms flapped from the back of the death cart with each forward motion.

Yes, mum.

Her mistress, Frau Steiner, was a tall, strong-willed woman, plain-faced with wide cheekbones and deep-set blue eyes. She stood with her hands on her hips a few paces across the room near the doorway of the only bedroom in the 13th century house.

Greeta let the strips of tarpaulin fall back against the window with a gentle slapping sound, and continued sweeping the front room. A dung beetle was trapped in the tufts of switch grass bound together with rope at the end of her hickory-pole broom. She was whisking it toward the doorway. feeling loath to add even this insignificant bit of vermin to the rising death toll.

Well? Who? Don’t make me ask, girl.

It was Frau Heller, mum.

Greeta took a deep breath from the clove-laced towel draped over her shoulder, bracing herself for the outpouring she knew would come. Frau Steiner and her neighbor had been more than just friends. They canned fruits and vegetables together when the town market was ripe with rich produce. There were juicy apples, grapes, cherries, and pears in handmade baskets, purchased from the vender’s kiosks. Succulent tomatoes, squashes, and legumes were dried and stored in their dirt-packed cellars to provide sustenance for the difficult winter months. Children were…Greeta did not want to think about the intertwining of these two lives.

No! No! Not Meary! Frau Steiner cried, nearly collapsing against the doorframe. She was so dear to me. …all her children gone…now her. She must have died of a broken heart. I know I will if… Her thin body shook with emotion as she turned away from her servant to hide the depth of her feelings.

Greeta struggled hard to keep from reaching out to the stricken woman. It was not her place to intrude into the inner life of her mistress. She was the house servant. It was her job to serve…not to share.

***

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! The old butcher’s wagon, used for hauling dressed out carcasses of meat, resumed its slow progress carrying the latest victims of the plague that was spreading like a wildfire throughout Europe. The chilling herald was Waldric. He was a stout, leather-faced man in his early twenties whose mushroom ears stuck out from under his slouched, woolen cap. The children called him ‘dunce man’, dancing around him just out of reach of his huge hands, while he batted this way and that as if he were swatting flies.

Like a nightmare playing over and over, he guided the ox-drawn cart around the ruts and potholes, his massive head jutting forth like a ship’s mascot, bobbing up and down as he made his grisly rounds.

How did she look? Frau Steiner whispered hoarsely, pulling herself up to her full height, which was almost a half foot-length above her servant.

She looked peaceful, mum, like she fell asleep, Greeta began. She was wearing her pink gown, the one with the lace sleeves that she made last spring. I don’t think she suffered at all.

For the last few weeks the two women had been playing a macabre charade. On her mistress’ orders, Greeta would wait at the window for Waldric’s appearance, and tell her what she had seen. But the sensitive young girl could not bear to relay the harsh realities, so she rearranged the images, painting them with a different brush, transforming the horrors of the naked bloated bodies with their blackened scabs and hideous grins, into the normal deaths of village life. Frau Steiner would pretend not to notice Greeta’s quavering voice.

But today it was different. When Greeta began to describe the flower blossoms that were plaited into Frau Heller’s hair, and the wooden rosary beads laced through her fingers, her mistress cried out; Enough! That’s…that’s enough. The tall gray-blond woman leaned her head back against the wall. She had never been attractive even in her prime, but now, her eyes were rimmed with great puffy circles that gave her an owlish appearance. The simple linen tunic that she wore barely covered her knees, and could hardly be distinguished from the dress of her servant.

Greeta ached to console her mistress, but the strict discipline she had endured for the past five years as a servant in the Steiner house, restrained her from heeding this basic instinc. She swallowed her tears, and murmured some pious words about ‘God’s will' and ‘resting in peace’.

Greeta, whose golden hair framed her pale, pretty face, had spent her entire childhood until the age of ten, in an old warehouse on Danker Row near the center of the small town. It was no ordinary warehouse. The rectangular, wooden building had been fitted with bed stalls lining the walls on both sides of its long interior. Greeta lived there under the control and tutelage of Mother Alice, a robust woman in her late thirties, who ran the most prominent brothel within a hundred miles of the town. It had not been an easy life.

All kinds of women found their way there.

Some were women on their way up…young, pretty, and ambitious…looking to escape the toils and hardships of the servants and peasant women. Men from all stations in life, including nobles and clergy, would sneak into Mother Alice’s place after dark, in order to spend a few hours with one of the more attractive prostitutes. These women often confided in her about their dreams of the perfect man who would rescue them, like a princess in a storybook. But Greeta saw the emptiness and the brutality that would leave a beautiful young face scared for life.

Others were women on their way down…older, but not wiser. They were the ones who had known a more genteel life. A life that had slipped away as subtly as a dream fading in the morning light; a husband’s death, an affair gone awry, or just the bad luck that accompanies life on the edge of poverty. Bitter and broken, they lashed out at any perceived offense, but mostly their anger was directed inward. Greeta saw suicides and self-mutilation that would leave her numb.

Most, however, were like Greeta’s mother…women with no other options, selling their bodies in exchange for food, clothing, and a roof over their heads. They lived in a cruel world of hope and despair, where most of their dreams were shattered by the harsh realities of life.

Finally, there were children like Greeta, the issue of unwanted pregnancies, whose fathers would never be known. If they survived the diseases and infections that were rampant in such a crowded environment, they were like an extra bonus for Mother Alice. If they were pretty, their virginity could bring a high price, if not, they were just another body to add to her stable.

***

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead! The cart lurched and groaned under its odious load.

May God have mercy on their souls, she whispered, as she wiped a smear from one of the panels of glass with a clean linen towel, smelling of clove and camphor. The window, which seemed out of place in the thirteenth century home, was made of four squares of glass, a foot-length on all sides. The expensive import from Flanders, was held together with narrow strips of hardened oak and set into the front façade of the old house.

This window framed her narrow world. Whenever she cleaned the front room of the tiny house she imagined herself to be one of the colorful wrens and jays that flitted from the oak tree to the shiny twisting leaves of the birches and aspens. Oh, for the freedom they had. If she could fly, she would head straight into the forest, and look for her dear friend, Bitta. That’s what she would do.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the squeaky hinges of the door directly across the road. It opened wide, but the only bodies that emerged were clothed and well fed.

I’d trade all of them for Frau Heller, she said. God forgive me for thinking so. She crossed herself hastily to diminish her remark.

The same wart-faced woman that she had seen for the past few days, came prancing out on the stoop in her new-found outfit, a yellow linen frock trimmed with brown wool. Then the shirtless lad with buckteeth and a crooked smile, urinated on the evergreen by the side of the house, like one of the village dogs. The lower branches were turning brown. Today, there was a tall, greasy-haired man with a patchey beard, wearing Frau Balmer’s green, silk dress. He sat on the stone stoop with the garment pulled up around his knees, showing the dirty, loose-fitted leggings of a peasant.

When she closed her eyes, Greeta could still see the Balmer girls churning butter on the front stoop while their mother visited with Frau Steiner and their father tended the oak saplings he had nursed from tiny sprouts. But the Balmers were gone…some of the first victims of the plague. They all fell ill and died within days of each other.

Now, the abandoned dwelling was inhabited by a group of squatters, drinking the stores of ale and eating the meats and vegetables that Frau Balmer and her daughters had been preparing and storing for the winter months. What would have supplied the whole family for half a year, was being guzzled and gorged by these ghouls, who would move on to other empty houses as soon as the supplies were gone.

The Balmer house had been one of the largest structures in the original part of the town, more than a hundred years earlier, when it was just a river stop in the transportation of goods to nearby towns. However, over time, recurring droughts redirected the flow of water to the northeast where new houses and businesses were built.

Belcher was a wide road in comparison to the narrow streets and alleys that made up the newer part of town. Along its neglected old street, the remnants of the bases of kiosks and baking hearths poked up here and there among the bushes and trees…relics of bygone days. There were still a dozen houses on both sides of Belcher. Most of the families had inherited these places, and even though some of the residents belonged to the merchant class, for one reason or another, they could not afford to move to the newer more stylish section near the bustling marketplace.

***

Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!

Waldric guided his ox-drawn cart past the window. Looking up, a faint curl of amusement flickered over his face. He marveled, perhaps, at the way the rays of sunlight exploded back at him from the Flemish glass. He continued on, jostling his load over the deepest ruts to settle the bodies, making room for the last few victims before heading for the open burial pits at the western edge of the town, just beyond Belcher.

CHAPTER 2

THE TWINS

Bring more water, Greeta, Frau Steiner said, wiping her face with her sleeve.

Yes, mum, she murmured, with her head down, concentrating on the beetle that had managed to free itself, and was making a run for the hearth against the kitchen wall.

Greeta looked past her mistress into the bedroom, separated from the front room by a flimsy wall and a wooden frame for the door. She stared mutely at the long woolen curtains surrounding the single bed. Only the corners of the white linen sheets were visible in the faint glow from the candles, perched on the wooden chest at the foot of the bed. Please God, she prayed, don’t let this come to pass or I, too, might die from a broken heart.

Don’t be lookin’ at them with that dog-sad face of yours. They’re not sick. They’re always coming down with something. Why just last summer… Frau Steiner’s voice trailed off.

Greeta put the broom next to the long, stone hearth in the kitchen area. The sturdy oven was fitted with a cast-iron plate that covered the fire pit below. She filled a basin with water from the blackened kettle that was always simmering and spitting little bubbles into the soot-filled air inside the dwelling.

With her stained cotton apron wrapped securely around her tunic, she tried to tuck her chestnut hair back into her kitchen cap, where the unruly curls were framing her pale, round face. Her wide brown eyes reflected a determination not to give in to the despair that continued to tear at the edges of her mind. She would be as firm and steady as her mistress.

***

Since the plague had begun to ravage the small town, the lives of the two women had been turned upside down. In normal times, one of the village lads would pick up dirty clothing and linens from the residents in town, who could afford to have their laundry done and then bring back the cleaned items a few days later. But Counselor Willi, the chief magistrate of the town, had forbidden the laundresses to wash their clothes in the river. He was trying to prevent pollution to the water supply. Each family was forced to clean its own garments and bedclothes.

The boys who delivered firewood and water to the residents, to heat their hearths and fill their cisterns, had either died of the sickness, or run off to the forest. Greeta or Frau Steiner had to make several trips to the woods and the river, to carry fresh water for drinking and branches and twigs for cooking and heating.

Even before the tragedy struck, Frau Steiner’s social status had been eroding. As the wife of one of the village merchants, she tried to keep up with the other women, but they regarded her as an ‘old town’ resident…not a social equal. She begged her husband to move, but he refused to even consider the matter. Since the house had only three small areas; front room, bedroom and kitchen, Greeta heard the bitter arguments between her employers. Money was always the problem…the lack of it.

Frau Steiner accused her husband of hiding the profits from the business, and he berated her for spending too much on unnecessary things, like stylish ankle length dresses to distinguished her outfits from the short drab tunics worn by servants and women of low breeding.

Greeta bore the full brunt of her mistress’ frustration. Greeta, there are stains on the bed linens, see to it they are bright as new…Greeta, the fire is not properly banked, and clean up those ashes…Greeta, the porridge is too thick…Greeta, the stew is too thin…Greeta, the shoes are not oiled…Greeta… It never ended.

But now, so much had changed in so short a time. Frau Steiner was still trying to maintain her usual detachment from her servant, but she was wearing simple clothes that were easy to clean and maintain.

***

It was with a heavy heart that she stepped across the threshold into the bedroom, carrying the warm water, and some clean linen towels, tucked under her arm.

Two small heads, with identical curly brown hair, were all Greeta could see of Katia and Lena, the four-year-old Steiner twins, as she pulled back the heavy curtains. They lay side by side under the linen sheets…Katia on the left and Lena on the right. She could always tell them apart by their dimples, even though they were old enough to love playing little games with her, pretending she had mixed them up. I’m Katia, Lena would say in a gruff, disguised voice. No she’s not. I’m Katia, her twin would reply, in an even throatier tone. And then they would switch places with each other, claiming a different name, until they were so mixed up, themselves, that they were sure Greeta could not tell them apart. Lately, it was their favorite fun.

But now, their tiny faces were painfully still, their cheeks pallid like the sheets that covered them. They made little whimpering sounds, and clung to each other as they always