“Burckhardt’s call to arms must have pleased her. She wouldn’t have shed any tears if he had been killed in battle. Then the matter of the shrine came up, and that was a real bonus. I can see Konstanze drooling over those jewels and cursing the old count for giving them to the church.

“At first, everything seemed to be working out for the lovers. Burckhardt practically handed the shrine over to them by sending it to Rothenburg in Nicolas’ charge. Nicolas murdered or bribed the guards and brought the shrine to the Schloss alone. He and Konstanze hid it in the tomb of the old count. Then Konstanze wrote that letter to her husband saying that the expedition had never arrived.”

“He kept her letters,” Tony muttered. “Carried them around with him, brought them here….”

“He was a stupid sentimentalist,” said Blankenhagen, looking contemptuously at Tony. “Stupid not to suspect such a story…”

“We didn’t suspect it,” I said wryly. “And he was deeply in love with her; love has a very dulling effect on the brain. There was no reason why anyone should have been suspicious. Even when we found Nicolas’ body, and the wing that had been broken off the shrine, there was no evidence to show that Konstanze knew anything about it.

“After that night, when Nicolas appeared as the Black Man, he went into hiding. He couldn’t be seen hanging about; Konstanze meant to kill her husband, if he wasn’t killed in battle, but until he was dead she couldn’t let him get suspicious. And he wasn’t the only one who had to be deceived. The bishop was after the shrine and he was giving Konstanze a hard time. I’ll bet her reputation was already shaky. The mere fact that she read authors like Albertus Magnus and Trithemius would be enough to start nasty gossip.

“So Burckhardt came home from the wars, hale and hearty, and delighted to see his loving wife. She didn’t waste any time. He was taken ill the day after his return.

“On the crucial night, the night of the steward’s murder, the conspirators decided to move the shrine. We’ll never know why; Burckhardt was dying, so maybe they thought it was safe to proceed with their plans. At any rate, there they were, down in the crypt; I can see Konstanze holding the lamp and Nicolas working on the tombstone. He raised it. The shrine was lifted out, losing a wing in the process. And then…

“Then they looked up and saw, in the lamp-light, the face of the man they had robbed and cheated and tried to murder. God knows what aroused him, or how he got the strength to come looking for them. But he was there. He must have been there. He saw the lovers, with the shrine between them, and he knew the truth. You can’t blame him for turning berserk. The theft of the shrine was bad enough, but the knowledge that his servant and his beloved wife had cuckolded him…he went mad. By the time he finished Nicolas, who must have put up a fight, Konstanze was gone—with the shrine. I suppose she had someone with her, a servant maybe, who had helped with the heavy work. She could quietly bump him off at any time with her handy store of arsenic. Nobody asked questions in those days about the death of a serf.