EQMM 2003-02 by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

Author:Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine [Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: detective
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2003-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Hunchback and the Stammerer

by Edward Marston

Under his real name, Keith Miles, Edward Marston has already contributed several stories to EQMM. Like other work published under the Marston byline, this new story is historical, though it is set much earlier than the Elizabethan novels usually associated with the name. The sixth book in the Marston series featuring Elizabethan stage manager Nicholas Bracewell came out last August. Look for The Bawdy Basket (St. Martin’s).

The monastery of Saint Gall, 883.

My name is Notker, the St-St-St-St-ammerer.

Have no fear, my friends. I jest with you. Though my tongue betrays me whenever I open my mouth, my pen is as fluent as the stream that flows beside our monastery. Here I sit, old, weary, and toothless, shivering in this inhospitable place where I have lived out my days. The Benedictine house of Saint Gall is in the upland valley of the Steinach, in the German Swiss canton of Saint Gallen. It is bleak and remote. We suffer all the privations enjoined by the founder of the Order, and I, of course, your humble narrator, suffer the additional burden imposed upon me at birth. A stammer can cause endless amusement among those who can speak without impediment, but it is a heavy cross to bear for the stammerer himself.

Monks are capable of great cruelty. They tease me incessantly. My nickname is N-N-N-Notker even though that particular consonant is one over which I never stumble. Labials are my real enemies. My lips tremble at the very thought of them. But nothing terrorizes me more than the letter S. Ask me to tell you about saints such as Simeon Stylites or Simplicius or the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and I will hiss embarrassingly at you for hours on end. Like others who were born to stammer, I have learned to choose my words with care or, on occasion, to express myself in ways that require no speech at all. That is why I am drawn to tell this hitherto unpublished story about Carolus Magnus, the Emperor Charlemagne. It features a man not unlike myself in younger days: naive, devout, and deeply loyal to his ordained ruler. An unlikely hero, perhaps, but one who deserves praise. How many of you realize that Charlemagne’s life was once saved by a monk with a pronounced stammer?

We also serve who only stand and bite our tongue.

Charlemagne is remembered primarily as a military leader, as a supreme general who fought over fifty campaigns in the course of his long life. Danes, Slavs, Saxons, Avars, Dalmatians, Lombards, and Spaniards alike found it impossible to resist the inexorable extension of his empire. Yet he was impelled by no mere lust for glory. Behind the recurring wars was a holy purpose. He strove to defend the Christianity of the West against the enemies who threatened it on all sides and, in the wake of his victories, he was able to promote the most wondrous renaissance of learning.

Charlemagne’s renowned Palace School in Aachen was a haven for the finest scribes, teachers, scholars, and illuminators of manuscripts.

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