The Witch of Cologne

‘You have my permission. But if she or the child dies, you die with them.’

Ruth hardly pauses, her only concern for the patient she attends. She nods and, with a detachment that implies no servitude, curtsies.

‘I will pray anyway,’ Brassant adds as the midwife steps back through the darkened doorway. Just then the labouring woman cries out. Shuddering, the gold merchant crosses himself and kisses the rosary. He has already lost two wives and four children and he dreads the loss of another.

Sinking to his knees he prepares himself for a desperate bargain with God. After all, wasn’t it only last month that he’d paid a hundred Reichstaler for his sins, as much as he hates donating anything to Archbishop Maximilian Heinrich, whom he—like most of his fellow bürgers—regards as an untrustworthy political opponent rather than a spiritual guide. Times are complicated indeed, Brassant thinks, when you have to rely on a Jewish witch to save your wife and a trumped-up French sympathiser in a gilded vestment for redemption.

The copper surgical knife, fashioned by Ruth herself, floats in a cauldron of boiling water slung over the small fire. There is a strong smell of burning cloves. Meister Brassant’s personal medic has insisted on smoking the small bedchamber, holding fast to the Christian superstition that the aroma will ward off evil spirits who could steal the soul of the child as it enters the worldly domain. The midwife, having studied medicine in Amsterdam, a city renowned for its innovation in the new science, has her doubts. But her old mentor, Dirk Kerckrinck, has recently sent her a thesis suggesting that disease may be carried by the invisible aether that fills the air. Because of this hypothesis she tolerates the quack’s bunches of smouldering herbs that make the air nearly unbreathable. Besides, now that she has called on the old ways as a precaution, it would be a hypocrisy not to allow the medic his quirks.

Stepping into the circle of ashes Ruth again feels between the woman’s thighs. The baby has dropped further and the patient’s vulva is stretched paper-thin. If she does not cut, the woman will tear. Yet she will never survive the baby emerging buttocks first.

Ruth pauses. She has attended a breech birth like this before, in one of Amsterdam’s dockside slums with Dirk Kerckrinck. But then the patient was an unmarried housemaid, not the wife of a wealthy bürger. And while Kerckrinck, son of a nobleman from Hamburg, could afford an accident, for Ruth a mistake now means an instant death sentence.

The midwife recalls how Kerckrinck, having failed to turn the baby from the outside, decided to turn it from within. An audacious move for a student with only two years’ training. Ruth, dubious, had argued against it while both of them pored over Galen’s definitive anatomy manual, De usu partium. Ignoring her qualms, the young medical student had cut the skin of the vulva then slipped enough of his fingers inside to manipulate th

e unborn child while she assisted from outside the womb. Both the maid and her child lived. In acknowledgment of its miraculous survival, Kerckrinck had christened the baby Moses.

Abigail Brassant groans again, pleading with Ruth to end her agony. Even in extreme pain the young woman radiates a luminosity which reminds Ruth of the Nordic princesses described in Herodotus’ History. The young girl must have been a prize for the old man waiting anxiously in the next room. Chaucer would have called it the marriage of January and May: a transaction in which romantic love is traded for security. The thought depresses her. For all her fierce practicality and intellectual rigour, she has not been able to exorcise the tantalising possibility of the existence of a soulmate: a man who would match her in both ideals and vision. Rather than face the inevitable disappointment she believes an arranged marriage would bring, Ruth has secretly wedded herself to a vow of celibacy.

She reaches for a crystal bottle containing an elixir of pure alcohol mixed with thorn apple and tinctured with laburnum, a concoction she has invented herself. She pours a few drops onto a handkerchief and places it over the young woman’s nose and mouth. A second later Abigail Brassant calms. With pupils large and dilated she stares up at the fresco painted on the ceiling while Miriam supports her weight. A fresco which depicts the honourable Meister Franz Brassant as a rather overweight and decrepit Perseus slaying the gorgon, the midwife notes wryly.

Remembering the diagram she studied in Soranus’ book on midwifery, Ruth takes up the scalpel and carefully makes one diagonal cut at the side of the vagina to open the vulva further. Opiated, her patient barely flinches as blood splashes her white thighs.

Midwife and assistant work together until finally the purple pasty curve of the head appears, pushing the vaginal lips out until they are almost transparent. As the baby begins to emerge Ruth realises that the pulsating birth cord is wrapped around its neck.

Knowing that the child’s death means their own, Miriam stifles a scream with her fist. But Ruth, emotionless, picks up two small copper pegs. She manipulates the slippery head, now half-hanging from the groaning woman, until she can reach the umbilical cord. Clamping it in two places, she deftly cuts the fleshy lifeline and pulls it clear from the neck. Then, carefully, she pushes her fingers inside and eases the child’s passage so that one shoulder comes clear of the vagina then the other.

‘Push,’ Ruth urges the young woman who is now delirious. The woman makes one last effort and the rest of the baby shoots out into the midwife’s hands.

The baby lies in her grasp, his skin coated in white pungent vernix, his genitals swollen and bulbous, his face blue, lifeless.

Covering the baby’s nose and mouth with her mouth, Ruth sucks the viscous fluids clear from the child’s airways then spits them into a bowl. Skilfully she swings the baby upside down, slaps it on the bottom.

Silence. Not even a whimper from the small body dangling lifelessly from her clenched hands. Abigail Brassant moans, her eyes half-open. Convinced they are both doomed Miriam falls to her knees.

Ignoring the young woman’s hysterics, Ruth slaps the baby again. This time a thin miaow sounds and a rosy hue floods the child, transforming the mauve flesh to pink. Smiling for the first time in hours, the midwife holds up the baby as it coughs then begins bawling.

‘It is a boy,’ she tells Meister Brassant who has appeared in the doorway. ‘And he is healthy.’

The merchant rushes over and gathers the child into his arms, age abruptly etching his face. Then, to Ruth’s surprise, he weeps with relief.

Suddenly exhausted, she sinks to the ground.

The town crier, a corpulent Westphalian who lost his left eye in the Thirty Years’ War, steps delicately over the stream of sewage running alongside the wet cobblestones. Curling his fat fingers firmly around the handle of a large brass horn he sounds in five o’clock morning-tide. Nothing stirs except for a large pig snuffling at a pile of icy turnip peelings and old cabbage leaves thrown against the wall of a beer hall. The town crier yawns and, stretching his stiff bones, squints up at Meister Brassant’s windows. There is a light shining in the mistress’s bedroom and the maid has hung a garland of winter poppies over the balcony. A child has been born, a male child. The town crier smiles; with luck he will get a jug of mulled wine and a kiss if he knocks at the back gate, maybe even a little more. Whistling, he kicks aside the cabbage leaves and makes his way across the narrow lane.

While the town crier stands at the wooden shutters waiting for the maid to respond to his tapping, Ruth, her face concealed by a large hood, steps out of the servants’ quarters further down the lane followed by Miriam clutching a covered basket full of instruments of midwifery. The grey of their cloaks blends perfectly with the muted hues of the high rickety houses, precarious towers of wooden beams and plaster which seem to reach out to one another across the passageway, almost blotting out the sky overhead. The two women, painfully aware of being trespassers, fear prickling their scalps, glide across the street towards a waiting cart. Its outline is barely discernible through the hovering mist which has lingered on through the night. Both women move silently with the practice of a race which, over centuries, has learnt to survive by making itself invisible.

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.