The Three Kings of Cologne

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The workmen found the body on the fourth day.

The first two days had been spent clearing the thickets of brambles, struggling saplings and carpet of weeds that had overrun the site for the past ten years, ever since the Magdalen nuns had abandoned it as a burial ground. Indeed, the plot had never, to anyone’s knowledge, been used for that purpose, the number of Sisters who comprised the cell having gradually dwindled until, in this early spring of the Year of Our Lord, 1481, there were only three of them left.

The digging proper — turning the soil and removing the larger stones — was begun at dawn on the third working day; but it was not until halfway through the following morning that three of the labourers, trying between them to prise loose a particularly solid and obdurate boulder, dug down far enough to uncover what was obviously the skeletal remains of a human foot and leg.

Further investigation revealed the rest of what had undoubtedly once been a woman, with some strands of the long, dark, waist-length hair still clinging to the scalp. As I understood matters later, the workmen at first assumed that a mistake had been made; that at some time or another one of the nuns had been buried in the intended graveyard and the interment had subsequently gone unrecorded. But when the scandalized Sisters had pointed out that no nun would be buried wearing several fine gold finger rings, a gold and amber necklace and a girdle of gold and silver links, boasting an amethyst clasp, this idea was swiftly dispelled.

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