L. L. FRIEDMAN - THE JESTER'S CHRONICLE

L. L. Friedman once went on a blind date with a marble statue in Vienna. It lives in New England. More of its work can be found at www.crookedbutinteresting.wordpress.com.

The Jester’s Chronicle
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“This date has to be off,” I said, taking a sip of coffee.
            “Why do you think so?” asked Rivka. Her voice cut through the rush of wind and small-town traffic. We were sitting outside our favorite café, the one that sold blueberry croissants and had a pot of succulents on every table. I was struggling to keep warm in the sudden October cold, bundled up in flannel and trying to make the hot coffee last.
            “Because in the chronicle it says that she’d already been burnt at the stake by Easter of that year.”
            “Maybe the chronicler’s fooling with us.” Rivka raised one dark eyebrow, her expression of ironic mischief making her look like a gargoyle carved into a cathedral roof.
            “Well… I don’t know, that article in Witchcraft Studies Quarterly was pretty convincing that the chronicle probably shouldn’t be taken as a satire. And the author wasn’t likely to have accidentally fudged the chronology.”
            “Oh, I’m not implying it’s a satire.”
“Then what?”
“I’m saying it’s a downright hoax.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“No, you come on, Dmitri. Look, all this stuff just doesn’t add up. First it says she was burnt at the stake a week before Easter, then it has her turn up on All Hallows’ Eve cursing the bishop and telling prophecies or something. It just makes no sense –”
In her scholarly passion, Rivka nearly knocked over my cup of coffee. I scrambled to move our laptops and papers to the other side of the cramped café table. A gust of wind, cold as a knife, threatened to scatter our notes all over the sidewalk.
“I feel like we’ve already argued about this,” I said, annoyed.
“Admit it. It’s weird.”
“I’m not saying it isn’t weird. But the thing with these old books is that you’re supposed to read between the lines, interrogate the text or whatever. Isn’t that what they taught us in that historiography seminar last year?”
“Yeah, well, I’ve interrogated this text so much, I feel like the FBI should hire me. And what I’m getting is that it’s a fake,” she said, tucking a flyaway strand of hair back into her flowery purple tichel. “Meanwhile you’re still holding onto your pet theory that the bishop’s court jester wrote it.”
“You’re the one with the pet theory, Rivka. I didn’t even come up with that. It literally says so right here.”
I pulled up the tab of the digitized version of the book. The ornate gothic typeface on the title page proclaimed, in German, that this book was called The Jester’s Chronicle and that it contained “an Account of the Life of the late notorious Witch, MAGDALENA BRANDT, called the WITCH OF THE BLACK FOREST; her wayward Childhood, wicked Youth, forc’d Marriage (the Misery of which did kindle in her a Desire to make a Pact with the DEVIL and thus engender’d her unholy Deeds), and finally her Trial and ignominious Death; faithfully told by the sometime Acquaintance of said Witch, the Court Jester of His Grace the Prince-Bishop of ZWICKDORF; publish’d in STUTTGART, Anno Domini 1640.” Facing the title page, the frontispiece showed a somewhat inept engraving of the witch, looking like a perfectly average and respectable housewife of the period with her white cap, lace collar, and plain dress. The engraver had seemingly tried to give a dangerous expression to her face, but instead only ended up making her look strangely haughty and self-aware, as if she were simultaneously reveling in her notoriety and questioning it.
Rivka scoffed. “It’s a joke title, Dima! I don’t believe a word of it, and neither should you. Like, hello? Jesters weren’t all that common in European courts by the seventeenth century. Even the Spanish Habsburgs had replaced theirs with dwarves by then.” She shook her head dismissively. “Obviously whoever the author was adopted the weird jester persona to highlight the fact that the whole thing’s just a literary prank. Whether his readers got the hint or not is, of course, another story. But look, he doesn’t even say his name, and we haven’t been able to find any record of a jester at the bishop’s court whatsoever.”
She turned her laptop to face me and pulled up a file – it was a photocopied tax record from 1632 that we’d both pored over countless times already. “And while we know there was a woman named Magdalena Brandt because she shows up on the tax rolls along with her husband, there’s no record that she was ever put to death for witchcraft, only that she was accused of it! And even that might be hearsay.”
“Weren’t most of the diocese’s records destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War, though?” I pointed out. “It’s nearly impossible to find any information about the bishop himself, but there’s no doubt he existed and did all the stuff he did. There are just a lot of holes in the record, is all.”
Rivka paused. “Okay, true. But I still think it’s unlikely. The holes are in awfully convenient places. Remember all the vague wording in the preface? The author doesn’t say anything about himself, doesn’t explain how he met Magdalena. And then later on, he doesn’t say who accused her, or even found out about her supposed witchcraft in the first place. Nothing.” She closed her laptop like a private detective snapping shut a briefcase. “It’s a damn hoax from beginning to end. Like that spaghetti tree prank the BBC pulled in the 1950s.”
I sighed. “Okay, let’s step back a bit,” I said, pushing my glasses further up my nose – a nervous habit. “Let’s see what we can rule out for sure. We can definitely rule out the possibility that Magdalena didn’t exist.”
“Yeah, we established that. But that’s stating the obvious – we know she existed, we know she lived in Zwickdorf in Baden, we know she was married, we know who the bishop was, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
“And we know that she was accused of witchcraft.”
“No, we don’t. No record of that, outside of this chronicle and a single letter by a traveling cartographer who happened to hear the rumor when he was passing through Zwickdorf on his way to the Frankfurt book fair.”
“But the Witchcraft Studies article says –”
Rivka rolled her sloe-black eyes. “It’s conjecture, I tell you! The church records just mention a woman from a town in Baden being accused and tried for witchcraft in that year, which is really not enough to go on. It could be anyone!”
I took a long, angry sip of my coffee. It had turned cold and tasted unpleasantly sweet. “Okay, look,” I said deliberately. “Cartographer or no cartographer, accusation or no accusation, we’re pretty sure that Magdalena Brandt got embroiled in some fishy business around 1638. And we know that someone cared enough about this whole thing – about whatever it was that she did, whatever it was that happened to her – to write a whole book about it. Maybe they embellished some of it, but they didn’t make it up. It’s not a picaresque novel.”
“It sure reads like one,” Rivka muttered. Then she sighed and rubbed her eyes, suddenly seeming very tired. “I gotta go. The evening service starts in half an hour.”
I hadn’t even noticed how much time had passed. “Shabbat shalom,” I said.
She grinned in that impish way of hers, and then she was gone.
Long shadows seemed to drape themselves all over the street. The shops were going to close soon, but the cafés and libraries stayed open late in this town, swarming as it was with students. A dry leaf, almost the exact color of the setting sun, flew by on a breath of wind and landed straight into my cold, half-finished coffee.
 
*
 
The weekend went by without much progress, except for a weird meme about witches that Rivka sent me at two in the morning on Sunday. (I saved it to my project folder, where it was as incongruous as a jester among bishops alongside all the deadly serious files of notes, articles, and transcriptions of primary sources.) But when Monday rolled around and classes began again for the week, wild speculations about Magdalena Brandt and her mysterious fate crowded into my mind again, like Pandora’s box in reverse. It was all I could think about. I didn’t want to believe in Rivka’s conspiracy theory; I wanted to hold out the hope that there were just a few missing pieces of the whole baroque puzzle waiting to be discovered, waiting to give us the crucial clues about the witch of the Black Forest and the bishop’s court jester. Maybe it was all folly, hubris, and vaunting ambition on my part, but I wanted to get the satisfaction of unraveling a centuries-old mystery, of digging deep beneath the earth to find a rare glittering gem instead of an ancient jack-in-the-box.
            That evening I went to the transgender support group on campus. I didn’t attend every meeting, but this week I felt I needed to get out of my head and do something other than wading knee-deep through German library databases, trying to parse some long-dead scholar’s bad Latin. But even there, a reminder was waiting for me: because Halloween was coming up, somebody had brought the whole group freshly baked cookies shaped like witches on broomsticks.
            After the meeting, I walked back to my dorm alone. While Rivka lived in an ivy-covered apartment with a coterie of hippie women and a bunch of cats, I still lived on campus. The dorms, all of them old brick buildings from the nineteenth century, stood on a small hill not far away. The cracked pavement shone from a recent rainfall, and the air smelled faintly of wilting flowers and oncoming frost. I rounded a corner and turned onto a path lined with maple trees; some of them were still in full blood-red splendor, but others had already lost most of their leaves and were nothing but gnarled, blackish branches.
            It was odd to think that Rivka and I were doing a joint senior project together after only having known each other for a year. We were an unlikely pair. Pale as a vampire, dressed in flowing patterned fabrics and jangly jewelry as if she were on her way to a frum version of Woodstock, Rivka was the kind of person who would probably end up in the news someday for throwing an encyclopedia at a corrupt politician. I, on the other hand, was more like an argyle-sweatered and bespectacled Rapunzel  – complete with long blond hair, which I kept in a messy ponytail – destined to live out my days in an ivory tower of obscure knowledge.
Even the story of how we met was a bit ridiculous: both hurrying to a lecture on Early Modern literature, we’d crashed into each other on a staircase. Books and papers cascaded everywhere, and we both instinctively swore in our native language. That was how I met the only other Russophone in the history department. We started hanging out and bonded over all the peculiarities of the immigrant family experience, such as Americans thinking you’re a spy and Russians thinking you’re American (which, by the way, is worse).
When we found out we both had research interests in Early Modern history – hers was in women’s studies, while mine was in religion and occultism – we decided to work on our senior projects together. But what had begun as an innocent foray into “the influences of sectarian conflict on literary representations of women accused of witchcraft in the seventeenth century,” to quote our abstract, was metamorphosing into something way beyond our original scope. We’d become obsessed with Magdalena Brandt – at least, it felt that way to me.
I had to get to the bottom of this story. I needed to find out what happened to Magdalena, who the jester was, what he had to do with her, and what the deal was with that absurd chronicle. Who doesn’t dream of solving a centuries-old mystery while still only an undergrad? Besides, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t an element of personal rivalry at play here, too: I knew Rivka was brilliant, which was why I had to prove her wrong.
 
*
 
The reading room of the library was almost deserted, so it hadn’t been hard to find a carrel with a window. Outside, rain fell like a thick shimmering veil, nearly blotting out the muddy leaf-strewn lawn; if I squinted, I could just barely see an oak tree and a rosebush shaking in the downpour. I’d come to the library after classes to work on the project by myself. Rivka and I usually met once or twice a week to go over our research, and it was already the middle of the week. I needed to find something – anything – to make her rethink her theory and to quiet my own thoughts.
            The campus library was small and looked like it hadn’t been redecorated since the Gilded Age. Sepia portraits of bearded classicists, critics, and historians, their names now obscure, hung on the walls; Art Nouveau flower motifs snaked around the windows and doorways; the floorboards were scuffed and creaky where they weren’t covered by a faded pseudo-Persian carpet. And, of course, there were shelves upon shelves, all filled with books. It was my favorite place on campus.
            I flipped through my messy handwritten notes and looked at the chronicle again on my computer. I reread the part where Magdalena shows up out of nowhere at the bishop’s palace, trying to make sense of it:
            “The Troubles of my lord the Prince-Bishop were not yet over. No, this Witch grew ever prouder and her Boldness did increase daily, even as divers Tongues wagg’d against her and her Trial drew ever nearer. On All Hallows’ Eve Anno Domini 1639 the Witch of the Black Forest did surprise the Bishop while he was keeping pious Vigil in his palace Chapel; like an horrid Fury from the heathen Myths, she hurl’d savage Curses at him. ‘Thou bloated Bastion of Greed,’ said she, ‘thinkest thou that, because thou keepest the Lioness on a Chain, thou shalt ‘scape mauling? Thou Arch-Conjurer! Here, get a Foretaste of eternal Hellfire!’ And thereupon she did throw a Candle at him, setting Fire to his priestly Robe, which had been bought with so many silver Thalers donated by the Faithful – Thalers that would have been well spent, I ween, if they had gone toward saving Souls, or feeding the Hungry, or clothing the Poor, but what knoweth a lowly Jester about the proper Spending of Church Funds? True it may be that the Poor want Clothes to stave off the dead Cold of Winter, but likewise doth a Bishop want splendid Robes to wear in Processions and Ceremonies. And so His Grace was marvellously afear’d that he should burn to Ashes like an Heretic at the Stake – an End good and meet for Frau Brandt, but unfitting for a Bishop; therefore he grabb’d a Bowl of holy Water and splash’d it upon his smoldering Garment, and the Fire did subside with much Smoke and Hissing. But before His Grace could call his palace Guards to seize upon the Witch, the cunning Woman invok’d the Aid of Satan, and disappear’d through an open Window.”
            I just didn’t understand. Why would the chronicler say that Magdalena was executed a week before Easter, and then contradict himself so blatantly by saying her trial hadn’t even taken place by All Hallows’ Eve? A slip of this magnitude couldn’t have resulted from simple forgetfulness, especially not if the jester claimed to have been in the eye of the storm throughout the entire scandal. No, it couldn’t be that. It was as if he wanted to check how well the reader was paying attention, to keep the labyrinth turning.
            Sighing, I looked at the tax roll file again. Because it had been behind a paywall on the official database, Rivka had snagged it off some rather shady file-sharing website (don’t ask me what was so tantalizing about the tax records of a small ecclesiastical city in southern Germany that it warranted such a high paywall, but that’s academia for you). The document, dated 1632, listed the amount paid by a cloth merchant named Herr Ambrosius Brandt and his wife Frau Magdalena. One corner of the paper bore the prince-bishop’s seal – a winged bear holding a cross and wearing a miter.
            In fact, it was Ambrosius who had been the catalyst for Magdalena’s descent into darkness in the first place. According to the chronicle, he “took a violent Fancy to the young Magdalena, and thus did so harp upon his great Wealth (which he had acquir’d through the Trade and Sale of many goodly Fabrics, from Lands as distant and exotic as the Indies, east and west, and as unremarkable to the Christian Traveler as France and England) that the Parents of young Magdalena, oppress’d as they were by cruel Poverty and Want, in a Trice gave the unhappy Girl’s Hand in Marriage to him. Her mean Dowry consisted of nothing more than a pearl Necklace which she had stolen from the Market, and a Broomstick with which her Mother had so oft beaten her for Waywardness. Herr and Frau Holzmann were no little happy to be rid of their Daughter, for she was one less Mouth to feed; and she in turn, though wondrous wary of Herr Brandt’s strict Countenance, could at the Time think of nothing so blissful as to leave the dark House of her Mother and Father, who had brought her into this sinful World unthinkingly, and had, through their hard Dispositions, never given her Reason to love them. But judge of the poor Wretch’s Dismay when she learn’d her Husband’s true Character; though he never beat her, yet he found Fault in all that she did and said – never a Prayer, never a Greeting, never a Word was said by Magdalena, but Herr Brandt rebuk’d her for it; and, what she deem’d most villainous of all, he forbid her to read any Books or write anything, saying it was not meet for a Woman to know Letters. Thus did their Marriage turn most miserable, with Husband and Wife ever suspicious each of the other, and never a Smile exchang’d between them for as long as they liv’d together.”
            The chronicle went on to tell of how Magdalena went looking for mushrooms in the Black Forest, “encounter’d the Devil in the Form of a He-Goat, standing on two Legs and clad in a starch’d Collar of white Linen,” and, figuring she had nothing to lose, decided to make a pact with him. “Thus, having promis’d her immortal Soul to him, she became a Witch, and was imbu’d with certain unholy Powers of Destruction, Manipulation, and sundry other unnatural Abilities” – and the first thing she did with her newfound powers was kill her husband without a second thought. I couldn’t say I didn’t sympathize with her.
Absentmindedly, I tapped my pen on the desk in the library carrel. The noise resounded eerily through the reading room, like someone knocking on the door of a tomb. The desk bore the marks of decades of bored students’ pencil scratches, with countless initials and doodles carved into the dark wood. It was getting dark, the rain outside showed no sign of abating, and my eyes were beginning to glaze over as I scrolled through another academic database.
Then I found something that gave me a jolt.
It was a testimony from the trial of Magdalena Brandt. Maddeningly and beyond all belief, there was no date. I clicked on the thumbnail to enlarge the scanned image – the document was written in shorthand in the rather convoluted Latin of the ecclesiastical courts. Luckily, I remembered enough of what I’d learned during the paleography course I’d taken two years ago to get a good sense of what it said.
            As I read, my heart skipped a beat, then sank like a stone. The witness making the testimony – who seemed to have been speaking in German and had his speech translated into Latin on the spot by the court scribe – was none other than Ambrosius Brandt.
 
*
 
Three sharp raps sounded on the door.
            “Just a second!” I called, hands shaking slightly as I finished up my weekly testosterone shot. Once I’d put everything away and pressed a bandaid onto my thigh, I opened the door and found Rivka standing there. She looked tired and even a bit sad for some reason, with a vague expression in her eyes and dark rings underneath them, but she smiled when she saw me.
“Where have you been all week?” she asked.
“I might ask you the same thing,” I replied. “I haven’t heard from you for so long, I’d started thinking you’d been eaten by your cats.”
“They’re not mine, Dima, they’re my housemates’. If I could have my way and the landlord weren’t such a schmuck, we’d have pet tarantulas instead.”
I made us some tea and we sat down at the kitchen counter. I shared a suite on campus, which had a kitchen and a bathroom, with a few other students; it was convenient, and I was really glad not to have to use communal showers, where I tended to get stared at and asked creepy questions. All the dorm buildings stood on a little hill at the far end of campus, so the suite had a view of the rolling hills that surrounded the college on all sides. At this time of year, the hills were a riot of russet, yellow, and red. Airy clumps of gray fog clung to the faraway tops of the trees. The sound of bicycle wheels crunching through the dead leaves on the campus paths drifted through the open kitchen window.
Rivka tugged at her dark blue shawl. “So. This witch thing.”
I sighed heavily, my shoulders sagging. There was nothing else to do – I had to admit defeat. “Listen, I…” I shrugged and shook my head. “Yeah. You were right. It’s all a fake.”
Her eyes widened as if I’d just told her I didn’t believe in the moon landing. “Wait, what? Dima, what are you talking about?” She laughed in disbelief. “I can’t believe you decide to start agreeing with me right when I come over to tell you I had it all wrong.”
“Huh?”
“My theory. It was all wrong! Magdalena really was put on trial for witchcraft. The traveling cartographer was right. The chronicler was right. You were right.” She took out some papers from a folder. “I found this and printed it out because I just had to show it to you. It’s an article in the Strasbourg gazette from 1641 that mentions Magdalena Brandt as having been tried for witchcraft in Baden a few years before – so that church record really was about her. And the cartographer wasn’t just repeating hearsay.”
I flipped numbly through the pages, which were illustrated with crude woodcuts of a woman dancing with a goat, stirring a cauldron, and holding a bloody dagger.
“The problem is, though,” she continued, “and I swear, this is just my luck – the article doesn’t mention exactly when she was put on trial. I suppose it must’ve been in 1639, but we still don’t know whether it happened in the spring or in the fall. It could’ve been in early 1640, but then that doesn’t leave a lot of time for the chronicle to be written and published.” She took a sip of her tea, playing with the tag on the teabag. “And we still have no idea if she was executed for it, or when. And, of course, this still doesn’t prove anything about a court jester being the author. I’m not quite willing to believe that yet. But it’s something.”
I looked up from the paper. “Rivka, I –”
“I swear, Dmitri, I’ve been losing sleep over this,” she interrupted. “No offense, but I really didn’t want you to be right. It’s all just so improbable, and exactly like the kind of thing you’d find in a bad gothic novel, that it honestly would’ve been better if the chronicle was just a hoax or a prank. I still think it’s pretty ridiculous, but the witchcraft part isn’t made up, at least. I guess she probably really did kill her husband. Not with magic, obviously – she probably slipped him a poisonous herb or something – but of course the townspeople thought so. I bet the next thing that’ll turn up is his death record saying that he died mysteriously or something.” She waved her hands with an air of mock spookiness, then sighed exasperatedly. “Anyway. What were you going to say? Will it cheer me up?”
I fiddled with my glasses and looked down. “It depends.”
“That’s a no, then.”
“No, really, it depends. How would you feel if your original theory were proved partly wrong but mostly right?”
Rivka frowned and folded her arms. “Really weirded out, for one thing. For another, kind of suspicious and frustrated.”
“Yeah, that’s how I feel, too. You’re not the only one who found something.” I got my laptop and pulled up the court testimony I’d found the previous evening. “Magdalena was put on trial, all right, but that’s pretty much the only thing the chronicle isn’t lying about. Look, this is Ambrosius’s testimony against her.”
Rivka stared, still frowning.
“She never killed her husband, probably never cursed the bishop, or anything like that. All she was accused of was killing a neighbor’s cow,” I said. “I don’t know if she was burnt at the stake for it, but I doubt it. All the other stuff about her childhood is probably fake, too.”
“But… I don’t understand.”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? Someone, maybe even Ambrosius himself, had some kind of vendetta against her and got her accused of witchcraft; there was a short trial, after which the Brandts probably both ended up as laughingstocks and laid so low they were never heard from again. Then some jokester decided to spin this case into a whole supernatural morality play so that he could make some money off a sensational story and criticize the bishop without being censored. So really, you were right the first time: it is an elaborate hoax.”
Rivka shook her head slowly. “What? No… That’s crazy…” She looked out the window, lost in thought. “It’s just so… disappointing.”
“Why? I thought you were hoping it would be fake.”
“Well, yes, but… I wanted it to be a sophisticated literary joke, an exercise in playing with reader expectations – you know, all that postmodernist stuff. I wanted it to be ahead of its time. But this? This is just… pamphleteering. And I hate the fact that whoever wrote it took an innocent woman’s public humiliation and turned it into a crazy melodrama where she’s simultaneously a degraded victim and a monstrous, villainous harpy.”
“Case closed, then?”
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Should we even leave this in our project?”
“I don’t know. I guess we can get some good textual analysis out of it. But honestly, we spent so much time and effort on this stupid chronicle that I just want to move on to something else for now,” said Rivka.
“What about that book of sermons from 1624?” I suggested. “We’ve had that one on the back burner for a while.”
“The one by the preacher from Yorkshire who was so obsessed with hunting for witches that he fell off a bridge while chasing after some random midwife?”
“Exactly.”
“Yeah, let’s work on that for a while. I could use a laugh.”
 
*
 
That evening I went to the library again to study the next part of our project. Bad weather seemed to be brewing again – dark clouds hung heavily in the sky like a funeral pall. The aquamarine Tiffany lamp that stood on the library carrel desk gave off a gentle glow.
I pulled up a website called Early Modern Letters Online and did a keyword search. Rivka had found a connection between the Yorkshire preacher and a printer from Stuttgart who specialized in books about supernatural occurrences, and I wanted to see if I could find any of their letters. The preacher had been a Protestant and the printer a Catholic, so we wanted to analyze how the two of them talked and thought about women and witchcraft, and how their religious differences informed that.
Scrolling through the database, I found some letters written by and sent to the printer. Most of them concerned business matters; some were personal.
Then I stopped, my cursor hovering over one item in particular.
?? January [?] 1640: Brandt, Magdalena (author), fl. 1640 to Pfaff, Johann (printer), 1600-1676.
I hesitated. There was no way this was the same Magdalena. Besides, Rivka and I had already decided to put this mystery to rest.
I clicked on the link.
The letter, written in a looping and curving hand that seemed almost playful in its flamboyance, rang out in flowery, polished German:
            “Frau Magdalena Brandt to Herr Johann Pfaff sendeth Greeting. My good Sir, I have heard much of your Business in Books on Matters occult and supernatural; indeed, I have heard it said that you are the most illustrious Printer in that Category of Literature, for your Creations are unsurpass’d in the Quality of the Type, the Speed of Publication, and the Sagacity of the subject Matter. Therefore I do humbly beseech ye to peruse the Manuscript that I have attach’d to this Epistle for your Consideration and Judgment. It relateth sundry Matters fit to entertain and edify the reading Public; moreover, the Story told therein is partly drawn from Life. I, though a Woman and certainly no Scholar, am no Stranger to Truth, and…”
            At that point the letter broke off. The database only contained a preview, but the rest was available by request from a small German archive that kept the original letter. I noticed, with some surprise, that my heart was pounding. I looked for the archive’s contact information and began to dash off an email to the address on their website, trying to keep the wording from coming off as too desperate.
I hit send and slumped back in my chair. My thoughts raced.
Had Magdalena Brandt written The Jester’s Chronicle herself?
It barely seemed credible, and yet there it was, all spelled out in the letter. She had been accused of and tried for witchcraft, only to survive it and go on to write an outrageous fictionalized biography of herself under the guise of a court jester, viciously mocking the prince-bishop and all of Zwickdorf’s inhabitants from behind her mask of motley.
I wanted to text Rivka and tell her about this immediately, but I knew it would be better to hold off until I got a response from the archive. Besides, Shabbat had already begun and she wouldn’t reply until Saturday evening. I would just have to sit with my unbearable curiosity and confusion by myself for the time being.
A clock ticked away somewhere in the library. Thunder rumbled outside; wind started to blow; a bare tree branch struck against the window pane. I decided to head back to my dorm before the storm began in earnest, so I packed up my laptop and notes, and left. Pausing on the front steps of the library, I looked up at the sky. A spidery flash of lightning illuminated the black clouds.
 
The End
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