Apothecary Melchior and the Ghost of Rataskaevu Street Read Free

the early evening, the wind dropped and the fog set in. Into that fog the Tower-Master had stepped; he came out of the door on the second floor of the tower on to the wooden walkway above the arched alcoves. He remembered no more, for at that very moment he fell. And now he lay on the ground where he had landed, between the nunnery and the town wall. Most likely no bone or joint remained intact. His body was racked with pain, and through the mist he saw the ghost approaching him, shrouded in a white cloak. He smelled the stench of rotting putrefaction and mould. The ghost approached, and suddenly a hot light flared up all around.
    He saw the face of the ghost leaning closer to him in the light, and he wanted to scream because what he saw was …
    It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. This was madness.
    He refused to believe it, and yet he knew that what was looking at him was his own death. The ghost had let him know who or what it was, and death now seemed even more unjust to him, even more senseless.
    In the last moment of his life he thought of his own sons and begged God that their deaths be more merciful.

2
MELCHIOR’S PHARMACY,
RATASKAEVU STREET,
3 AUGUST, MORNING
    F OR THE T ALLINN apothecary, Melchior Wakenstede, this day began and ended with death. That was too many deaths for one beautiful fresh sunny August day. People die every day, regardless of the weather, but still this was too many for one day, especially when you have known two of the three deceased very well and you are very sorry for their demise.
    That day began with Melchior standing on the threshold of his pharmacy in the morning, greeting the passers-by cheerily and inviting them inside the shop to sweeten their mouths or taste a sip of a medicinal potion. Thus he spent most of his days, and thus he would – God willing – spend the rest. He was forty years old, and he believed that he was as necessary to Tallinn as Tallinn was to him. At that age a man tends to look back on his life and decide whether he has done anything with his days that will be pleasing to God, and Melchior believed he had. Since his father had died – when Melchior was scarcely out of his apprenticeship – he had kept the apothecary’s shop on Rataskaevu Street in Tallinn, carefully and devotedly following his father’s teachings and the orders of the Council and the town physician. He had been mixing remedies for decades and curing the townspeople’s ills, and had been preparing confections and selling several kinds of intoxicating drinks, being especially proud of his strong, sweet ‘apothecary’s dram’, which he sometimes referred to as his elixir. As far as he could, Melchior also dealt in all sorts of other things, from ink toa bitter essence made of marinated wolf’s intestines and mummified human remains. And although he might sometimes think himself that such miraculous cures didn’t always ease people’s illnesses, the trade in these helped to maintain his reputation as a scholarly apothecary and ensure the respect of the town. As an educated man, the apothecary was part trader, part scholar; people often came to ask his advice – and not only about their painful organs.
    Melchior had heard it said about himself that he was a perspicacious man, a clever man, a shrewd man. He had his eye on people; he could see what others didn’t see. The background to such stories was evidently down to the fact that that several times he had accused someone in front of the Magistrates’ Court of killing someone else, and later the court had indeed found that man or woman guilty. Melchior did not think of himself as an informer, but he probably saw more of the people in Tallinn than any other living person. And for the town to flourish, for everyone to have a good life here, sores could not be allowed to fester. People who had assumed the right to kill others secretly and by stealth and then pretend to be