Perhaps the apothecary was hard of hearing. Jack began to wander about in a loud, obvious, banging way. He entered a big room filled with things he knew it would be a bad idea to touch: glowing tabletop furnaces, murky fluids bubbling in retorts above the flames of spirit-burners, flames as blue as Eliza’s eyes. He tried another door and found the apothecary’s office-jumping a little when he caught sight of a dangling skeleton. He looked up at the ceiling and found more heavy plaster-works, all of female goddesses: the goddess of dawn, the spring-goddess riding a flowery chariot up out of Hell, the one Europe was named after, the goddess of Love preening in a hand-mirror, and in the center, helmeted Minerva (he knew some names at least) with a cold and steady look about her, one arm holding her shield, decorated with the head of a monster whose snaky hair descended almost into the middle of the room.

A big dead fish, all sucked into itself and desiccated, was suspended from a string. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets dense with professional clutter: diverse tongs, in disturbingly specific shapes; a large collection of mortars and pestles with words on them; various animal skulls; capped cylinders made of glass or stone, again with words on them; a huge Gothickal clock out of whose doors grotesque creatures sallied when Jack least expected it, then retreated before he could turn and really see them; green glass retorts in beautifully rounded shapes that reminded him of female body parts; scales with vast arrays of weights, from cannonballs down to scraps of foil that could be propelled into the next country by a sigh; gleaming silver rods, which on closer inspection turned out to be glass tubes filled, for some reason, with mercury; some kind of tall, heavy, columnar object, shrouded in heavy fabric and producing internal warmth, and expanding and contracting slowly like a bellows-

“ Guten Tag,or should I say, good afternoon,” it said.

Jack fell back on his ass and looked up at a man, wrapped in a sort of traveling-cloak or monk’s robe, standing next to the skeleton. Jack was too surprised to cry out-not least because the man had spoken English.

“How’d you know…?” was all Jack could get out. The man in the robe had a silver robe and a look of restrained amusement nestled in his red beard, which suggested that Jack should wait a minute before leaping up, drawing his sword, and running him through.

“… that you were an Englishman?”

“Yes.”

“You may not know this, but you have a way of talking to yourself as you go about-telling yourself a story about what’s happening, or what you suppose is happening-for this reason I already know you are Jack. I’m Enoch. Also, there is something peculiarly English in the way you go about investigating, and amusing yourself with, things that a German or Frenchman would know to be none of his business.”

“There’s much to think about in that speech,” Jack said, “but I don’t suppose it’s too offensive.”

“It’s not meant to be offensive at all,” Enoch said. “How may I help you?”

“I am here on behalf of a Lady who has gone pale and unsteady from too much feminine, er…”

“Menstruation?”

“Yes. Is there anything here for that?”

Enoch gazed out a window at a dim gray sky. “Well-never mind what the apothecary would tell you-”

“You are not the apothecary?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“Down at the town square, where all decent folk should be.”

“Well, what does that make you and me then, brother?”

Enoch shrugged. “A man who wants to help his woman, and a man who knows how.”

“How, then?”

“She wants iron.”

“Iron?”

“It would help if she ate a lot of red meat.”

“But you said iron. Why not have her eat a horseshoe?”

“They are so unpalatable. Red meat contains iron.”

“Thank you… did you say the apothecary was in the town square?”

“Just that way, a short distance,” Enoch said. “There’s a butcher there, too, if you want to get her some red meat…”

“ Auf wiedersehen,Enoch.”

“Until we meet again, Jack.”

And thus did Jack extricate himself from the conversation with the madman (who, as he reflected while walking down the street, had a thing or two in common with the Doctor) and go off in search of someone sane. He could see many people in the square-how would he know which one was the apothecary? Should’ve asked old Enoch for a description.

Bockboden had convened in a large open ring around a vertical post fixed in the ground and half buried in a pile of faggots. Jack did not recognize the apparatus at first because he was used to England, where the gallows was customary. By the time he’d figured out what was going on, he had pushed his way into the middle of the crowd, and he could hardly turn around and leave without giving everyone the impression that he was soft on witches. Most of them, he knew, had only showed up for the sake of maintaining their reputations, but those sorts would be the most likely to accuse a stranger of witchcraft. The real witch-haters were up at the front, hollering in the local variant of German, which sometimes sounded maddeningly like English. Jack could not make out what they were saying. It sounded like threats. That was nonsensical, because the witch was about to be killed anyway. But Jack heard snatches like “Walpurgis” and “heute Nacht,” which he knew meant “tonight” and then he knew that they were threatening not the woman who was about to die, but others in the town they suspected of being witches.

The head of the woman had been shaved, but not recently. Jack could guess, from the length of her stubble, that her ordeal had been going on for about a week. They had been going at her feet and legs with the old wedges-and-sledgehammers trick, and so she would have to be burnt in the seated position. When they set her down on the pile of faggots she winced from the pain of being moved, then leaned back against the stake, seeming glad that she was about to leave Bockboden for good. A plank was nailed into place above her, with a piece of paper on it, on which had been written some sort of helpful information. Meanwhile, a man tied her hands behind the stake-then passed the loose end of the rope around her neck a couple of times, and flung the slack away from the stake: a detail that infuriated the front-row crowd. Someone else stepped up with a big earthenware jug and sloshed oil all around.

Jack, as former execution facilitator, watched with professional interest. The man with the rope pulled hard on it while the fire was started, strangling the woman probably within seconds, and ruining the entire execution in the opinion of some. Most of them watched but didn’t see. Jack had found that people watching executions, even if they kept open eyes turned to the entire performance, did not really see the death, and could not remember it later, because what they were really doing was thinking about their own deaths.

But this one affected Jack as if it were Eliza who’d been burnt (the witch was a young woman), and he walked away with shoulders drawn tightly together and watery snot trickling out of his nose. Blurry vision did him no favors vis-a-vis navigation. He walked so fast that by the time he realized he was on the wrong street, the town square-his only star to steer by-was concealed around the bends of Bockboden. And he did not think that aimless wandering, or anything that could be considered suspicious by anyone, was a good idea here. The only thing that was a good idea was to get out of town.

So he did, and got lost in the woods.