The Witch of Cologne

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.

The Holy City of Cologne

The 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.’