The Cold Widow, Historical Novel (ePub)

It was in the Summer. We wrote the year 1587. The respectable citizen and landlord David Andres was standing in front of his new house in the Lange Gasse1 and watched how his friend Jeremias Neuner the riflesmith was fixing a very ornately made sign high up in the stonework at the corner of the house.

At a long arm there was some dainty climber to see from grape and hop like it befits for the sign of an inn, and also the plate had a frame of the same kind. This plate was particularly beautiful. Wendel Dieterlin himself had painted it, the great master, who had begun since a while, to decorate the houses of the city with signs of a new kind, like they were tradition in the country of Italia; he painted them with colors on the wet whitewash, so they might resist to every weather, and surrounded them with signs, pillars and other ornaments in pure excessive wealth of decoration.

What the master had depicted on this very plate, was the following: One saw a stage, that was erected among graves. And on it was much wood and other material piled up, that burns very easily and was able to nourish the flames, and the flames raised up. At the top, many heads and faces were looking out of the flames, whom one could easily recognised as Jews, due to their beards and costumes. Also women were among them and tender little children. A post on a stack of wood was towered up in the middle, to which a young woman was tied, who was superhumanly beautiful and lovely to look at. Her long open hair surrounded her face like a frame and felt on the bare breast; however the tender face showed such a strict seriousness in her features, as if it were the one of an offended queen.

Also the pile of wood at the woman had been set on fire, but look! the flames did not touch her, they felt back on every side, and so she stood there like one of the martyrs, about whom the Holy Scriptures tell us, that the force of the fire could nothing against them, or even like the three young men in the oven...