The Witch of Cologne (2 page)

Ruth takes the basket and hoists it onto the cart, then pulls herself up to sit shivering on the wooden seat while Miriam climbs in beside her.

The coachman makes a clicking sound and the huge draughthorse rolls its flanks mournfully into action. As the town crier turns at the sound of hooves the cart is already disappearing into the fog.

The port master, surly and pockmarked, takes the five Reichstaler bribe from the coachman and spits into the gutter. For Jews he is prepared to turn a blind eye, but he is not
willing to condemn his soul to eternal damnation. The decree is that no Jew shall stay overnight in the Holy Free Imperial Catholic city of Cologne, but if the rich want the Hebrew doctors to visit them that’s their business. Still, if anyone should care to ask the port master, he would care to tell—for a price.

Bleary-eyed with sleep he watches the cart drive through the huge wooden gates. The hooded woman is young and haunting with her chiselled profile and white skin, her green eyes visible below her cowl. The port master knows who she is: the witch from Deutz, the best midwife in the Rhineland. He beckons his son over and picks up a wooden stick. Crouching, he draws the sign of the cross and two wavy lines beneath it in the mud—a hex to ward off the sorceress’s evil spirit. Pointing to the cart as it winds down towards the harbour, he tells the boy that he’s heard the woman uses Jewish magic, the kabbala, to protect her own and can draw out spirits from the sick as well as create a golem, a slave-giant made from the river clay itself.

‘They say that on the Passover she sacrifices young boys then drinks their blood. Meister Brassant must have been desperate to employ such a woman,’ he whispers, checking over his shoulder for spies.

Confused, the pimply-faced adolescent thinks of how he lusted for the woman the moment he saw her. Could that be her magic too? With one hand the boy pushes down his erection, crossing himself with the other in case she has cursed him.

Ruth leans back in the cart. Behind them the hollow thud of the huge wooden gates sounds out; she does not care to turn around.

There are many in Deutz who would consider it an honour to enter the walled bastion; Ruth is not among them. The so-called free city with its churches and holy relics is an irresistible lodestone for the desperate pilgrims who pour through its gates every day seeking redemption, hoping for a miracle as they claw over each other to gaze at the crumbling bones of the three Magi. But Cologne seems quaint to Ruth after five years in Amsterdam, a city bursting with enlightenment. She misses the exhilaration of debate, the fierce intellectual curiosity that had no fear, the celebration of a Republic, of a democracy which would free all those young spirits after thirty years of war. The energy of revolution. Of change! Here, in this medieval stronghold, all is backward-looking. Trapped in the Middle Ages, Cologne still rests on its former glory as a trading power.

If the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the glorious mercantile years of Cologne, the seventeenth century belongs to Holland. The Dutch religious tolerance, born out of a commercial pragmatism, serves the fledgling Republic well. The Netherlands has become the new axis for philosophy as well as medical and scientific advances. A magnet for all who think beyond the narrow confines of a world where church and state are one and the sun still flies around the earth.

The wooden docks and the sailing ships beyond come into view. As the mist clears the Rhine glistens under the moonlight. On the right are moored the great seagoing vessels of Holland, Spain, France, even England. On the left the smaller German river boats wait to take the cargo upstream to Münster, Bremen, Hamburg and beyond. This constant exchange of cargo is how the city has always made its money, exploiting its strategic position on one of the main trading routes of the Middle Ages. The glorious Rhine. What must it have been like a hundred years before? A bustling harbour full of activity and intrigue. Now there is industry but life is
harder, the port quieter. The discovery of the great territory which lies beyond the European horizon—the East Indies, China and the Americas—is destroying custom. These new trading routes have eclipsed the old paths and Cologne, starved of commerce, suffers.

Ruth counts ten oceangoing ships and a flotilla of hopeful sailing boats anchored against the wooden jetties. It is still a magnificent sight. The fading moon catches the tips of the small waves rippling across the river and creeps up across the carved wooden prows of the sleeping ships, transforming the oiled riggings into ghostly snakes of silver and blue. No matter how familiar the panorama, Ruth can never suppress the excitement which fills her each time she sees a ship with its cargo of mystery, gliding into the harbour like a crane.

On the opposite bank lie the small towns of Deutz and Mülheim, located within the Protestant domain belonging to the Hohenzollerns, an area outside the Catholic territory of Cologne. Looking downriver towards Mülheim, Ruth can just see the grey tower of the small Calvinist church which sits at the top of the main street. Its tiny scale forms a stark contrast to the towering half-built spire of the Catholic cathedral on the opposite shore with the wooden crane on top, bent out like a beak.

To the south of Mülheim is Deutz. Ruth grew up in the narrow crowded streets of the small ghetto, amongst the remnants of what was once the thriving Jewish community of Cologne before the infamous pogrom of St Bartholomew’s night in 1349. That night nearly every Jewish man, woman and child within the city walls was slaughtered. The few who escaped emigrated to more sympathetic cities like Frankfurt or Amsterdam, even as far east as Cracow. But some families struggled on. And, joined by new settlers, recreated a small outpost on the right bank of the Rhine in Protestant territory which was marginally more tolerant.

A cluster of Jewish women are waiting at the river bank for a barge to take them back across to Deutz. Ruth guesses they have been selling their wares—hot bread and cheese—to the Dutch and Spanish sailors marooned on their boats due to quarantine. Despite the fact that she is wearing the same uniform, the Orthodox women look archaic to Ruth with their double-peaked caps and long-sleeved robes, the obligatory yellow circle stitched onto the breast. Absent-mindedly she traces her own circle, which Miriam has dutifully sewn on. It is the emblem Jews have been forced to wear in Germany for over a century and means that Ruth cannot travel into Cologne, or anywhere else in the Rhineland, without permission. It is a decree which has forced many Jews to resort to bribery or journeying with a Christian escort to ensure safe passage.

The cart arrives at the first of a series of barges which together form a floating bridge across the Rhine. Ruth and Miriam disembark and the driver leads the nervous horse onto the vessel. In the distance the midwife can see the water mills grinding away, while in front of her the chimneys of Deutz blow thin streams of grey into the sky. It seems centuries away from her time in Amsterdam.

The cart rolls over onto the next barge. It is January and the river roars past, swollen with melted snow. The frosts have been bitter for as long as Ruth can remember, although her father often tells of the winters of his childhood which lacked the icy harshness and relentless cold of recent times. ‘It is God’s retribution for thirty years of war—Christians fighting Christians, over what? No wonder he let the North Sea freeze and allowed King Gustav to march across with his army of toy Swedish soldiers.
Altsding lozt zich ois mit a gevain
…everything ends in weeping,’ Elazar would finish philosophically.

Ruth turns back towards the rushing water and allows the incessant roar to fill her head and empty her mind. It is a
deliberate ploy she uses when she remembers her father; it is the only way she can rid herself of the overwhelming sorrow she feels when she thinks of how he cannot forgive her for her flight, her silence and now her presence back in her hometown. She has spent hours standing outside the house she grew up in, waiting for the old man to make that first step, to lift the religious ban. But Elazar has not yet found forgiveness for his daughter’s betrayal.

When Ruth first returned from Amsterdam, it was only through her father’s pleading with the rabbinic council that she was allowed to stay in Deutz at all and practise as a midwife. Now, regarded as a heretic by the community, no amount of safe deliveries will ever absolve her. And as the chief rabbi, any clemency would be seen as an audacious and politically dangerous move—in this way Elazar’s hands are tied. But still Ruth lives in hope. She longs to sit beside her father and speak with him of her travels, to reassure him that the young daughter he knew still exists. But she struggles to fit in; in reality she never has. Life back in Deutz is a constant balancing act between the security of tradition and superstition and the searing intellectual curiosity she was born with. Cursed with, she sometimes thinks.

They arrive at the opposite bank. With wheels creaking the cart rolls off the barge and into the thick mud. Ruth shouts at the coachman to avoid the town square—the resident street of chief Rabbi Elazar ben Saul—and she and Miriam climb back on board.

Soon they are on the outskirts of the settlement, trundling down a back lane which opens out into the countryside that lies beyond Deutz. Forest, much of it green saplings, has started to creep over the fallow farmland, swallowing up the edges of the small town. It amazes Ruth how much of the countryside, particularly in the north and north-east, still has not recovered from the Thirty Years’
War. The land here remains lush, but further north lie the abandoned fields, the burnt-out farmhouses. A third of the peoples of Germania have been slaughtered, their lands ravaged repeatedly by Protestant and Catholic, Frenchman, Swede and Prussian.

She stares at the broad back of the coach driver. He probably fought, she thinks, they all did. But he was one of the lucky ones. In many places the working men are only now reappearing, most of them refugees in search of a new start in the empty cities of the north and south. Dutch Calvinists, Italians, even Swedes have fled to the Rhineland, their suffering visible in their hollow cheeks and haunted eyes. Suspicious of these strangers, the local Germans grow defensive and bitter. Resentful of the loss of their own sons, they are being forced to embrace more difference. Now is not a good time to be a foreigner.

The horse whinnies and rears then refuses to go on. The coachman, grumbling, dismounts and trudges through the slush towards a frost-covered mound in the centre of the road. He pokes at it with his whip and an arm falls out, the skin mottled blue and muddy against the snow. The coachman lurches back and covers his mouth with his sleeve.

‘Plague!’

He stumbles back to the cart. Ruth climbs down to examine the corpse but the driver grabs her arm.

‘One touch and we’re all doomed!’

‘Calm yourself. I will know if it is plague or just poverty—remember I have some training as a medic.’

She pulls away from him. Carefully brushing the snow from the wizened face of the man, she finds none of the telltale marks or swellings that speak of the Black Death. The corpse looks about sixty but Ruth guesses he was more likely forty; just another one of the thousands uprooted by the war who spend their lives walking from village to village begging
for food, sleeping in ditches and fields. The lost peoples of Middle Europe.

‘There is no plague here, just Mother Starvation. Load him up onto the cart, we’ll give him a burial back in the village.’

‘He’s a Christian,
you
can’t bury him.’

‘In that case we’ll leave him at the church door.’

‘It’s too much trouble. He’s just driftwood, he’s worth nothing to anyone.’

‘He still has a soul.’

‘But is it Lutheran or Catholic?’

‘Do you think God cares?’

The coachman stares at her. If she were a man he would hit her. There is something about her authority which intimidates him. Maybe it is true that she has supernatural powers. He once drove her to the house of a possessed man and she had cured the shuddering invalid before his very eyes. The coachman is not prepared to argue with the devil. Still protesting he throws some old sackcloth over the body and hoists it up onto the back of the cart. The corpse weighs as much as a bag of twigs and there isn’t even enough flesh on it to sell it to the secret anatomists back in Cologne. Curse the Jewish witch, he thinks, this would be the last time he drives for her if she didn’t tip so well.

The cart wheels start up again. Soon the tall pine trees laden with snow give way to small neat fields where the Protestant farmers grow wheat, barley and oats. But now the fields are blanketed in white. Ruth knows some of the families: some, Dutch Calvinists; others, Lutherans from the north. She has delivered their babies. They are hospitable enough but guarded, always cautious.

The cart trundles its way towards Deutz. A hawk circles above, hopeful for carrion. Spiralling up from the cottage roofs are pillars of smoke from the bakeries. Today is Friday and already, even at six in the morning, the wives
and daughters of the community are preparing for the sabbath meal.

Ruth is overwhelmed by a sense of homecoming. It is this feeling of belonging which finally drove her back to Deutz and reinforces her desire to reunite with her father. It is stronger even than the soaring emancipation she found in Amsterdam.

T
he lock of flaxen hair is thick and coarse. It lies entwined in three long fingers that Detlef blearily recognises as his own. Slowly the crimson coverlet embroidered with the crest of the now defunct von Dorfel family comes into focus. Birgit…the night before…the heavy claret still echoing at the back of his furry tongue. Birgit. And sure enough, as his other four senses shake themselves awake, the pungent scent of his lover, the soft hot curve of her buttocks pressed into his hardening groin, the rest of her waist-length hair—some of which now etches an irritating path across his face and up his nose—and finally her light snore, which always reminds him of an indulged cat, confirms his worst fear. That again he has overslept in the illicit bed of his married mistress. The young canon sits up with a jolt and inadvertently pulls the lock of hair with him.

‘Detlef!’

Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep née von Dorfel untangles her hair from Detlef’s fingers. Her symmetrically pleasing features are just a little too heavy. Cynicism and good living have
already started to thicken the pert nose. Her round cheeks, once concave, are on the verge of burying the ice-blue eyes above them.

‘You would render me bald as well as an adulteress?’

Smiling, she slips her hand under the coverlet, reaching for his penis. Detlef allows one caress then scowling pushes her hand away.

‘I have a mass to attend.’

‘Let me be your sacrament.’

‘You will go to Hell for that.’

He swings his legs out of the bed and reaches for his robe, which he notes with some distress lies like an abandoned skin on the chequered tiles of the ornate bedroom.

‘Impossible. Are you aware of exactly how many indulgences the good merchant, my husband Meister Ter Lahn von Lennep has purchased on my behalf?’

Birgit smiles at him in the round Italian glass which reflects the sumptuous interior of the bedroom, the rich tapestries and treasures her husband, an importer, has lavished on her in an impotent bid to win her affection. Staring at her reflection, Birgit decides that she looks like Venus herself. Her bountiful white flesh framed by the Moorish silk curtains, one stream of sunlight illuminating her rose-tipped breasts. Arching her back, she shifts slightly to throw her profile into a better light, a minute movement of the consciously beautiful. She doesn’t even have to remove her gaze from her lover, the only man who has been able to elicit any emotion from her. The one person she has ever cared for—and, with that terrible realisation, fears, for she knows she would not be able to withstand the loss of such a love.

‘Four hundred and six indulgences.’ Detlef’s answer is quick and betrays him.

For an instant he looks away, and finds himself confronted by a small portrait of the illustrious couple of the household.
Birgit looks so youthful one could almost imagine an innocence, he observes, drawing some satisfaction from the ageing evident in a crinkling at the corner of the eyes of the flesh and blood woman sitting before him. Is he capable of discerning between lust and love, or has lassitude stolen even that from him, he wonders. Frightened that she should guess his thoughts, Detlef keeps his gaze averted.

‘You should know that as the chief canon under Maximilian Heinrich I have knowledge of all the donations to the cathedral. Your husband is a very generous and a very…apprehensive man. He must think you are a compulsive sinner.’

Birgit watches him walk across the room. The natural grace of his movements makes her ache for him. His long shapely legs dusted with light blond hair, the line of his narrow hips hearkening back to youth, the high curve of his tight buttocks and finally his heavy sex lolling against his thigh, taunting her with its perfect curved beauty. For a moment she hates him for the power he has over her. A second later she is tempted to confess all. She would like to ask this man of God: is it a sin to love? For surely the magnitude of the affection she feels defines it as a natural act. Instead, generations of aristocratic breeding forces her guard, she dares not be vulnerable. Pulling her robe around her, she finds herself answering, ‘If I am to be a compulsive sinner, then I am unable to help myself and therefore I am, by definition, an innocent.’

Detlef, his robe now slipped securely over his shoulders, laughs. Despite her wantonness Birgit is a wit, a characteristic which draws him back to her bed again and again.

A tap on the bedroom door startles them. Both stop still. Their liaison is tolerated but cannot be openly flaunted. Detlef gestures to Birgit who moves silently towards the door and cautiously opens it. A young housemaid whispers into her ear.

She turns to Detlef. ‘It’s that buffoon, your assistant.’

Detlef joins her. Groot, a short stocky man with political ambitions beyond his intellectual capabilities and an unfortunate wall eye, pushes past the maid. Bowing deferentially to Birgit, he keeps his eyes lowered.

‘Groot, to have sought me out here in my good lady’s chambers is a grave folly for both of us.’

‘Many apologies, Canon, but you are called suddenly to council this very morn. The inquisitor has arrived.’

‘Which inquisitor?’

‘The Spanish Dominican, Monsignor Carlos Vicente Solitario. Counsel to the Emperor Leopold and member of the Grand Inquisitional Council. They say that the archbishop is in ill humour to receive him, therefore he has bestowed the honour upon your good grace’s shoulders.’

‘A pox on the Spanish.’

‘A sentiment Heinrich is sure to share, given King Philip’s present relations with the French.’

‘His Highness Maximilian Heinrich to you.’

Groot bows low again, muttering apologies as he backs out of the chamber.

‘And pray reduce your bulk to a shadow as you leave these premises!’

Detlef slams the door shut on the intrusive cleric. For a moment he leans against the painted wood. Groot’s aspirations irritate him; aware that he would trade loyalty for advancement Detlef realises the cleric knows too much. But there will always be a part of the canon that is exhilarated by the possibility of betrayal.

Danger is an aphrodisiac; Detlef is more decadent than he would care to admit and far more of a free thinker than Groot could ever imagine. He thinks of the revolutionary treatises he has hidden in his chambers: papers from Holland containing the latest philosophical and religious debates which, if discovered, could see him burn as a heretic.

A proverb of his father’s floats back into his memory: information is the gunpowder that both builds and destroys empires. The old viscount, addicted to the battlefield, had drummed the saying into his second son, whom he always regarded as stupidly idealistic. It would be wise to keep a record of the youths Groot favours, the canon reminds himself, should the ambition of his assistant render him untrustworthy.

Birgit moves up behind Detlef and winds her arms around his waist, pressing her breasts against him through the thin calico.

‘Who is the inquisitor?’

‘Some zealot Emperor Leopold has thrust upon us. Probably another bloodhound for the nervous sovereign who is worried about Maximilian Heinrich’s lax French manners. Leopold fears that the archbishop—like a typical Wittelsbach prince—is in bed with King Louis and plans to cuckold him behind his back.’

‘Is Heinrich such a coquette?’

‘Maximilian Heinrich is a politician.’

‘Is it a contradiction to be both politician and a man of God?’

‘Nay. But Heinrich sees no difference between campaigning for God and campaigning for his Parisian friends.’

‘And yourself? Be politician for me,’ Birgit murmurs seductively as she runs her fingers across his torso then moves down to bury them into his soft fleece. She loves to reach for him blind like this. Taking him between her fingers, marvelling at the way he always blossoms under her touch.

This time he does not move away. Reaching over his shoulder he lifts a strand of her hair.

‘You wish for me to usurp Heinrich?’

He curls the lock once around; it tightens but he does not yet pull.

‘They say the emperor’s nephew, Prince Ferdinand, will be visiting the count your brother this hunting season…’

‘And you want me to speak to the prince and secure a title for you and your impotent bürger?’

He keeps winding the hair around as she continues to caress him.

‘You forget that I was once a von Dorfel, a rank equal to—nay, above—any Wittelsbach.’

Her voice detached from her actions only excites him further. He closes his eyes for a second, standing perfectly still as tendrils of pleasure burn up his body.

‘Birgit, you are mistaken. Your loyalties are misplaced, they belong to the old world. The future is the new world which belongs to the bürgers and the plain men of Luther.’

Instead of answering she frees him from his gown. With his sex between both hands, pressing herself hard against his back, she imagines that his body is an extension of her own, that the throbbing organ between her palms is part of her own flesh. Oh to be a man, to have all fortune’s paths laid out before one: what she would have done, could have done, she thinks. Allowing love to delude her, she imagines this is what they are: one being. Irrevocably bound by both ambition and destiny. For a moment she cleaves to him like this.

‘Why, Detlef, could you be a heretic?’

‘Unfortunately I lack the passion. We differ, Birgit. You are passionately ambitious, whereas I have passion only to forget what I have become.’

‘Grant my husband and me our title and I promise I will reinstate your faith.’

She strokes him faster, sensing his climbing pleasure. He laughs dryly, his voice catching in his throat.

‘Do you think that by overthrowing Heinrich and being elected archbishop I should find my vocation?’

‘I think we should all be happier…and wealthier. You know how fond of you my husband is…’

‘And all the world loves a rich cuckold. However, for you, and only you, I shall try to speak to the prince.’

Smiling, he pulls down sharply on her hair, bringing her to her knees. With a reverent air, she takes him into her mouth.

While Detlef walks through the bustling lanes towards the cathedral, Birgit stands before her looking glass as her maid helps her into her lustring petticoats.

The taste of her lover still pervades her senses. His scent lingers on her fingers, a secret reminder she will carry all day. Behind her the maid’s chatter is a relentless monotone describing the latest gossip to grip the city: how terrible it is that the archbishop of Münster has sold seven thousand of his citizens as soldiers to the emperor, and how the good merchant Brassant has finally been able to produce a healthy male heir with his child bride. To her surprise Birgit finds her heart contracting as she remembers her own pregnancy. A babe which, had it gone to term, would have been of dubious parentage. Birgit chooses to think that Detlef would have been the father. But as the old merchant forces himself upon her once a month, it was just as likely to have been his, a notion which revolts her.

She looks at the reflected room, at her own visage, a magnificent façade whitened with lead, a flawless artifice unblemished by emotion. And for a moment wishes she was more fallible.

Maximilian Heinrich, prince of Wittelsbach, resident of Bonn and archbishop of the Holy Free Imperial City of Cologne, is squeezed awkwardly into the high-backed throne. In the style
of Louis XIV, with baluster turnings adorning its polished walnut legs, it was an expensive gift from the Prince of Burgundy—expensive but unbearably uncomfortable. The archbishop’s hose is itching and his gout sends shooting pains across the back of one knee. He is presiding over the ceremonial receiving of the traditional rent the bürgers pay their archbishop on the twelfth day of the year: four hundred florins of gold and one hundred measures of oats, a sack of which sits before him. Heinrich, bending over, thrusts his hand into the sack and lets a handful of the soft grain run between his fingers. It is of poor quality, poorer than last year. An apt metaphor for the dwindling esteem in which the bürgers and the archbishop hold one another. In short, it is nothing less than an insult.

Heinrich, an aristocrat, feels the merchants’ distrust keenly. Secretly ambitious to reinstate the old royal families of Cologne who were thrown out of power in 1396, he is at constant loggerheads with the Gaffeln’s artisan policies. It is a delicate balancing act he performs: appeasing them yet privately pursuing his own royalist strategies.

The archbishop tries to comfort himself with the thought that he will be back in his residence in Bonn by the next night. Irritated with the world, and in particular with the divine will which has thrust him reluctantly into his current position, Heinrich looks over his court and finds a target for his ill humour.

‘Wilhelm! Will you stop being so obsequious!’

The archbishop plucks a truffle from a small silver tray and throws it squarely at the man fawning before him. Deftly Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg, minister to the cathedral, catches the truffle, barks once in imitation of the small dachshund lolling at Heinrich’s feet, then grinning inanely pops the delicacy into his mouth.

The small entourage of clerics draws a collective gasp and pauses, suspended. Each man stares intently at the archbishop,
awaiting his cue. Heinrich frowns and the moment stretches out across the wintry beams of sunlight falling upon the grey hessian robes and naked pates of the shivering priests.

‘Touché.’ The archbishop, deciding to be amused, begins to laugh while simultaneously breaking wind.

Relieved by his turn of humour, the entourage bursts into polite applause. Detlef, watching from the stone cloister which leads out into the grass-covered courtyard, smiles wryly then realises too late that Maximilian Heinrich’s beady eyes have fastened upon him.

‘Detlef is not amused—pay heed to his supercilious smile. He believes such antics are below the dignity of the church.’

‘Not at all. The clown also is one of God’s good creatures,’ Detlef replies smoothly.

‘As is the buffoon,’ the archbishop retorts, continuing the exchange with relish. As one the waiting clerics turn expectantly to von Fürstenberg, a man not renowned for enduring insult.