He runs his finger along the straw pallet: here the canon must have lain with the witch, how many times? As many as the days in a year? Carlos, both fascinated and sickened, suddenly has to leave this room of vice.
Out on the landing he retches then leans his burning face against the cool stone wall. It is then that he hears it: a soft wailing, like an animal or a baby, vibrating through the stone beneath the noise of shouting soldiers and crashing furniture.
Alert with renewed hope, the inquisitor stares down the corridor, assessing which room the faint wail might have come from. He walks across the wooden boards and into the first room. Empty now, it was once a library and several of the bookcases are still piled high with ancient manuscripts. A stately woman stares down from above a small desk; she bears a slight resemblance to the canon. Carlos, unable to tolerate the noblewoman’s supercilious gaze, jabs his short hunting knife into the canvas which rips loudly. He slashes at the eyes, the arrogant face, over and over. Finally, satisfied that the chamber is concealing nothing, he leaves.
Back in the corridor he falters as confusion overwhelms him. Several doors present themselves like the riddle of a maze: which one are they hiding behind, which one? Bewilderment and nausea rise up in him, piercing his brain alongside the insistent acrid odour of brimstone.
‘Lilith,’ Carlos speaks the demon’s name. ‘Show me the right way. Help your loyal servant,’ he continues in Aramaic, knowing the incantation will be incomprehensible if overheard. The smoke from the bonfire the soldiers have lit outside curls up the staircase creating a fog. Carlos, sensing something more, stares into it. At its misty edge the shape of the fiend appears, a curvaceous phantom of vapour; one graceful arm of swirling grey lifts and points. Following its direction, Carlos approaches a door barely visible beneath a low arched beam. Bending his head he turns the handle and enters.
The chamber is deserted. The purifying smoke seems more intense here, Carlos can smell nothing but amber, brimstone and salt petre. There is a neatly rolled-up pallet in the corner, a washing stand and a rosary hanging over it. The housekeeper’s sleeping quarters, he guesses. A small window is framed by a lip of thick slate and glows with the sunset. The inquisitor reaches across and lights a candle. The flame leaps up and illuminates the wood panelling of the walls. Nothing seems amiss but he cannot allay his suspicion.
Inside their hiding place Ruth and Detlef hold themselves statue-like as they listen to Carlo’s creeping footsteps and laboured breathing. The sleeping baby is on the breast. The bloodstained rags are pressed between Ruth’s legs, crusty with afterbirth. Suddenly the child stirs. Detlef reaches for him but Ruth stays his hand; both stare down at the wrinkled crimson face, willing the child to keep his peace. Oblivious, the babe innocently shifts his weight, snuggling closer to Ruth’s breast. Again Detlef reaches for his blade.
Outside Carlos is convinced he can hear faint rustlings behind the wall. He freezes, waiting for another sound, a sign that will reveal his prey. On the other side of the panel, inches away, Ruth runs her fingers over the raised hennaed hex on her now slack womb and prays.
In that instant Carlos is distracted by the miaow of a cat. Looking down he sees that a small kitten is rubbing itself against his legs. It miaows again, sounding remarkably like a baby. The friar picks it up and ruefully carries it out of the room.
Inside the alcove Detlef’s blind fingers find Ruth’s face; her cheeks are wet with tears. He pulls her and the baby into his arms. They lie with her head curled against his chest, the sleeping babe at her breast. To Detlef it seems as if this darkness is beyond fear, beyond time and space, perhaps beyond mortality itself. Feeling the weight of Ruth’s slight body against his, and the extraordinarily soft flesh of this tiny mortal which is now his child, he suddenly understands love in a way he has never experienced it before, as if tendrils of his very being have intertwined with this woman to make a new soul. Part of him remains in wonderment at the circumstances that have led him to this moment: this instant of great danger yet great hope.
Aware of a new, raw creature emerging from within him, unfurling like the tentative blossom of a poppy, translucent damp petals reaching out of a spiky bud of cynicism and disbelief, Detlef is both exhilarated and exhausted by the abundance of possibilities his future now holds. Weary beyond terror, he finally closes his eyes and lets his head rest against Ruth’s shoulder.
The soldiers crouch beside the roaring fire. A chaotic mountain of broken tables, mirrors, paintings and ornaments waits alongside to feed the blaze. The young guards’ faces, stained with grime and dust, are flushed with the wine they have raided from the cellar. One of the chevaliers sings a mournful Basque melody as he throws a leg of the broken virginal into the flames. The bonfire flares up, throwing light onto the façade of the house, silhouetting a sinister shape that rotates at the end of a rope.
The inquisitor and the captain stand some distance away beside the tethered horses.
‘Monsignor, with all due respect we have explored both the cottage and the grounds. I fear the accused and his accomplice escaped before our arrival.’
“Tis strange for I sense that they are still nearby.’
‘My men have searched everywhere—the barn, the pig sty, the servants’ quarters, even the chicken coop. And you won’t be getting anything out of the housekeeper now.’
Carlos looks over to the raided house, the oak door swinging open, the smashed china, the tapestries scattered on the ground, the wooden shutters banging in the wind. Violated, it is a shattered reflection of its former tranquility.
‘He will be at his brother’s estate. I am told it is thirty miles east of here.’
‘My men will not ride at night.’
‘They must and they shall.’
The captain stares briefly into the determined face of the inquisitor. The officer has taken this commission reluctantly; if he had his way he would be fighting the Ottomans for the glory of the Hapsburg Empire, not chasing an errant canon and his Jewish mistress. But his colonel allowed him no option. If the Spaniard wants to be at Count von Tennen’s estate before dawn, so be it. Let the zealot Dominican deal with the disgruntled chevaliers. The captain spits into the mud.
‘In that case, my good Monsignor, perhaps it would be more appropriate for you to announce your intentions to the men yourself. They are weary in body and spirit but I am confident your rhetoric shall be pretty enough to inspire them to new spiritual heights and maybe even back into the saddle. And if not your rhetoric then your purse will suffice. Good luck to you, sir.’
With a smile he saunters back to his troops.
An hour later the small platoon, exhausted but fortified by thoughts of the extra one hundred Reichstaler the inquisitor has promised them, ride out of the courtyard and down the narrow tree-lined lane.
A huge yellow moon transforms them into a mass of benign silvery phantoms whose pensive silence is broken only by the clinking of their brass stirrups and the whisper of the plumes on their helmets. The only witness to their departure is a solitary bull, made restless by the scent of a cow in heat four miles away. The creature paws at the ground, nostrils flaring at the aroma of horse and man. But even he knows better than to bellow.
The point of light slowly grows to a slim crescent. It travels across the cracked wall grimy with ancient dust, suddenly hitting a glint of gold which, as the light becomes stronger, reveals itself as blond hair. The bar of light continues its path down the creased forehead, over the closed orbs fringed with long dark eyelashes that open and blink for a second as the pupils, swimming in the centre of a deep sapphire, dilate and focus.
Detlef stares into the sliver of dawn sunlight. As the feeling slowly needles back into his cramped limbs he remembers where he is. For a moment he panics—is she safe? Where is the babe? Terror fills him until the warm weight of Ruth’s body makes itself apparent. He looks down: she is curled up asleep, her head resting against his chest. The baby, wrapped in rags, one arm extended, still stained wit
h blood and mucus, fist clenched resolutely, lies at his mother’s naked breast, eyes screwed shut, mouth pursed in concentration. For a moment Detlef fears the child has died in the night, when suddenly his eyes blink open and the perfectly formed baby boy stares up at his father with a wide and fearless gaze, as if challenging him on the very reason for his existence. Detlef, caught between wonder and amusement, stares straight back. He reaches down and caresses the soft furry blond down which covers the small head. To his amazement he can cup the whole skull in one palm.
My child, he thinks, allowing the thought to become a solid truth, my own flesh and blood. A wave of emotion surges through him, leaving him wanting to use all his powers to cast a circle of protection around his new family.
Just then Ruth wakes and immediately the babe nuzzles blindly into her breast.
Detlef harnesses the large draughthorse to the simple wooden buggy. Bandits will be a constant threat, he thinks, trying to gather his thoughts while deeply conscious of the danger of lingering. They cannot afford to look like aristocracy or even wealthy bürgers, especially crossing the border and certainly not on the roads between. The cart is rough but it will suffice, he rationalises. At least this way they will look like poor farmers not worth robbing. But as a precaution he has sewn several bags of gold coin into his clothing—protection money—while strapped to the back of the cart are the few expensive antiques the soldiers did not destroy: a chest filled with linen, his aunt’s fine French walnut desk and a box of family jewels to sell in Amsterdam to secure enough money to rent lodgings.
‘Ruth!’
She looks up from where she is kneeling beside a freshly dug mound of earth. A makeshift cross, two pieces of broken wood nailed together, mark it as a grave. Hanna’s grave. Carefully Ruth pushes a small scroll covered with Yiddish writing into the soft earth. It is a woman’s prayer for finding peace.
‘Say your prayers but they won’t bring her back.’
Joachim, Hanna’s brother, full of anger and grief, stands clutching his cap in his hand. His ruddy face is rigid with the struggle to hold back tears.
‘Last sister I had. One gone in the Great War, two in the plague, and now this. She died for you, she would have done anything for the master.’ He spits into the newly turned earth.
‘She was a good servant,’ Ruth says faintly.
She would like to take the labourer’s hands, to comfort him in his glowering resentment, but knows this would only fuel his anger. Instead she places a single spray of lilac on the grave.
‘Aye. That’s one way of putting it. Should have thought about herself and run. But not Hanna—them that serve don’t survive.’
Donning his hat, he walks sullenly over to Detlef and helps him haul the last box up onto the cart.
They had found her body swinging from the old linden tree in the centre of the courtyard. Detlef cut down the battered corpse and tenderly laid the housekeeper on the ground, talking all the while, reassuring her that all would be right, that the meats would be cured, the apples picked, the apricots dried, that he would make sure Brunhilde the sow was taken care of. He even promised to carry a message to her cousin in the Dutch navy until he realised that he was talking to himself. It was then he found himself weeping over the long grey hair which lay like a halo around the bloated blue face, twigs and straw still woven between the strands.
The baby, wrapped in a blanket and lying on the grass beside Ruth, wakes and starts bawling.
‘My love, we must leave now!’
Detlef tightens the strap around the horse. He would like to pick Ruth up in his arms and tell her that life will resume its normal shape, that one day it will be safe to love again, but he cannot. The raped and desolate house is testimony to his own horror, a horror he cannot yet articulate nor has the energy to battle, but senses that one day he will. The only thing he can do now is force his body into flight and save his family.
‘Please, it is dangerous to tarry.’
Finally Ruth hears him. Lifting their son, she walks to him, knowing that beyond lies Amsterdam and freedom.
– HOD –
glory
Nieuwendijk, Amsterdam, Spring 1670
The midwife, weary from the night’s work, stops to catch her breath after climbing down two flights of narrow wooden stairs. The maid, a buxom blonde with the attractive features of a Frisian, carries a small placard covered in red silk and trimmed with lace. She smiles as she leads Ruth through the voorhuis. As they step into the large entrance hall with its immaculately scrubbed black and white tiled floor, the morning sun floods in through the large windows. The room is empty apart from two elegant French chairs and a three-legged pedestal table placed against a wall. A large Ming vase sits proudly on top of the table beside a bowl of blooming tulips.
‘Where are the rest of the family? The neighbours?’ Ruth asks in Dutch, surprised to see the hall devoid of expectant faces.
The maid holds up the red silk notice with the small white card in the centre. After four years back in Amsterdam Ruth knows that the white card means the newborn is a girl while the red silk indicates that the baby lives. ‘They are waiting to see this, then they will visit. It is Madame’s third child.’
‘But this one will survive,’ Ruth replies, wondering about the skills of the midwife who delivered the first two, both stillborn. An incompetent judging from the scarred labia of her poor patient.
‘Praise be to God…and your craft.’ The servant crosses herself.
She then unlatches the heavy oak door that opens onto a tree-lined road running along a canal which forms a luminescent band of dancing light. Smiling proudly the girl hangs the sign over the silver door handle cast in the shape of a dolphin.
‘They say that your husband is a great preacher. A Remonstrant who speaks of the Republic and a future that we—even working folk—can shape ourselves.’
‘He is a great thinker but sometimes he takes unnecessary risks,’ Ruth answers cautiously.
‘So the story about him having to climb out of a church window to escape arrest is true?’
Smiling at the open admiration in the young girl’s face, Ruth answers without thinking. ‘Yes. That was the sermon that suggested Jesus’ birth might not have been as virginal as the Bible says; that the divine spirit came through Joseph and Mary’s very mortal love for each other.’
‘A dangerous notion indeed.’
The midwife looks sharply at the housemaid. For a minute the thought crosses her mind that this innocent-faced wench might be a spy. Recognising her accent as northern, Ruth wonders whether she could be a royalist, following the young Prince William of Orange as most in the north do, and not a supporter of Jan de Witt’s Republic.
‘My husband was pardoned by the authorities.’
‘As he should have been,’ the maid answers, reaching into her pocket to pay the midwife.
But Ruth cannot dismiss her distrust. She has become suspicious like the rest of Holland, she realises. The midwife is still amazed at how Amsterdam’s famous tolerance has begun to evaporate as financial insecurity looms. Jan de Witt has come under fire for his naval war with the English and, disapproving, the hidden royalists have begun screaming for Prince William of Orange, barely a man, to be reinstated. The country Ruth has begun to love grows ugly with reactionary sentiment. It is but fear of the French king and his growing greed for the Dutch colonial wealth, she thinks, a dread which infects the bürgers who care only for their own prosperity from the spice islands. These Hollanders forget nothing and forgive even less. Armed with these fears they tear at de Witt’s glorious dream of the Republic.
Staring up at the immaculate façade of the mansion, she remembers the arrest of the revolutionary lawyer Adriaan Koerbagh. That event terrified every liberal thinker in the city, for what was the young radical’s crime other than being a close supporter of Benedict Spinoza and her old Latin tutor Franciscus van den Enden? Ruth shivers with sudden dread, her fears growing by the minute. Koerbagh was a br
ave man, a man of the future, who claimed that the Bible is a human work and that Jesus was mortal not divine. Even more revolutionary was his announcement that the real teaching of God is simply knowledge of God and love of one’s neighbour. And how did the good man pay for this brave revelation? With his life. A fate that could easily be her husband’s if Detlef continues with his dangerous outspokenness. As for de Witt, the leader in support of whom many intellectuals had spoken out and risked all, what did he do for poor Koerbagh? Nothing. Now every thinker and philosopher in the Lowlands fears persecution. Ruth worries for Detlef: his voice is too loud; his views anger as many as they inspire. But how are they to live if not by their beliefs? Was not that the reason they fled to Holland? If Jan de Witt is not willing to stand up for his defenders, what hope is there, Ruth wonders.
The maid, reading her fears, reaches out.
‘Be not alarmed. I follow the beliefs of my master and your husband’s courage is appreciated here. I wish merely to attend his sermons.’
‘Thank you. I do believe a notice will be posted soon announcing Pastor Tennen’s next lecture,’ Ruth replies curtly.
As the midwife walks away the maid speculates about what the woman is concealing. Surely she could feel only pride to be married to such a visionary.
The Herengracht is a broad canal flanked by wide affluent streets either side. Many of the wealthiest trading families of Amsterdam live here and the elegant red-brick houses, packed neatly alongside each other, run the entire length of the canal. The ridged roof of each immaculate residence is decorated with the crest of the guild the owner belongs to. Some houses even have pulleys attached so that heavy goods and furniture can be hoisted up into the building.
The Witch of Cologne Page 37