In exchange for her silence, they would agree to drop the debt she owed them and she would slip away quietly the next day while the women were eating dinner. Later, as it finally became clear to Barbara and Lienhart that their cover-up had failed, they approached Els secretly to offer her a bargain. In a furious confrontation, Lienhart burst in on the women while they were eating and delivered a savage beating to Els, while she screamed defiantly back at him that he would have to hack off her arms and legs to keep her quiet. They told the women that rumours of what had happened had reached senior members of the council and that an investigation was imminent. Things came to a head when two officials from the city council in charge of monitoring the brothel paid a visit. Some regular clients had even begun to talk about what had happened, wondering aloud how it could be that Els, ‘who had been big, was now so small’. But it was too late to stem gossip about the incident. After Barbara overheard her speaking about what she had seen, she sent Barbel away to work in the public brothel in nearby Ulm.
One, Barbel von Esslingen, had brought a pail of water into Els’ room as she lay in agony and had seen the child’s body laid out on a bench. But it was not long until some of the prostitutes began to speak among themselves about what had happened.
When Barbara discovered this she had forced Els to swallow an abortifacient drink that she had mixed herself, with the result that Els miscarried a male foetus whom the other women reckoned to have been about 20 weeks old.Īfter forcing Els back to work only a few days later and swearing her to secrecy, things had returned to normal in the brothel for a couple of weeks. After interrogating all 12 of the prostitutes working in the brothel at the time, the council learned that the brothel’s kitchen maid, a woman named Els von Eystett, had been forced into prostitution and as a result had become pregnant by one of her clients. It prompted a criminal investigation into the conduct of the brothel-keeper, Lienhart Fryermut, and his partner, Barbara Tarschenfeindin. In the winter of 1471, the municipal council of Nördlingen in southern Germany got word of a scandal in the town’s public brothel.