The Witch of Cologne

Ruth’s hand is lying palm up on the pillow beside her sleeping head. Her nails are bitten and chewed. A tendril of black hair winds its way across the yellowed hessian, creeping under the petite hand, the fingers of which Detlef now realises are surprisingly long for such a small palm. They are working hands. Reddened by the cold. Scratched by labour. The skin visible on the fingertips is callused and coarse. They would be rough to touch, abrasive on his body. Distracted by the thought he becomes aware of his breath quickening.

He is standing in the room where Ruth lies sleeping. To him it seems as if this place has a twilight of its own, a half-light between reality and dream. He cannot remember how he got here, only that instinct drove him up the narrow wooden stairs beyond the level where his brother sleeps, up higher to the servants’ quarters, knowing that here, somewhere, she would be. Like the kernel that lies at the heart of a rosebud, like the glimmer of pearl fluttering up through green water. And without calling out her name, without knowing which door to push open, but guided by a certainty of sensation, he has found her. As if, for the first time in his memory, he did not have to apply thought or strategy but an inherent knowledge summoned up from his very soul.

He had found her room directly, just as he had known she would be sleeping, her hand in exactly this position, before he even pushed the door open. And now he stands paralysed, his head bent under the low ceiling, the candle burning in his hand, not daring to breathe, to move a muscle.

Will he ever have this pleasure again? Of seeing the shadows of this woman’s life run across her face like quicksilver: one moment a small girl, the next a woman with pain twitching beneath the eyelids, the flesh of which he would swallow like honey. She does not know that he is there. She does not realise that the pulp of his heart pulses only while hers does, that the ambition of her spirit has reawakened his. He would burn for her. He would sacrifice church, power and state, but now, before her, he is too frightened even to utter her name. Such a simpleton, such a stunned idiot is he.

The torrent of jagged emotion and fragmented imagery fills him until he finds his knees shaking. Longing to lie down next to her, to take those fingers into his mouth, he leaves as silently as he entered.

The silver and ruby bead of a rosary looms like a glittering boulder on a vast plain of snow. For an instant Ferdinand speculates that he might actually have made it to heaven. Then, as his eyesight pulls into focus and a dull pain starts to throb in his midriff, he realises with a curious mixture of faint regret and exhilaration that he is still alive. As sensation rushes back into his numbed limbs he swallows and discovers that his mouth is too dry to speak. Rolling over he finds himself wedged against the side of Alphonso’s sleeping figure. The prince lifts an arm that feels as heavy as iron and throws it across the actor.

‘Water,’ he manages to croak. ‘Water.’

– TIPHERET –

Equilibrium

Deutz, June 1665

Dear Benedict, It is now the month of June and I am back at Deutz, thank the good Lord. I am released after successfully treating Prince Ferdinand of Hapsburg for a cancer. In the dead of night and in utmost secrecy I was then transported back here. For all this I have to thank Canon Detlef von Tennen, the man I have written of before: a cleric who is a maze of paradoxes and whom I have not seen since the events at Das Grüntal, the country estate of his brother, a good four weeks ago. I may never see him again, which would be a great pity for it is not often one meets a man who can share in the pleasures of the mind as well as the spirit. But I digress. Tell me, are you well? Here there is much talk about the Black Death in Leiden. I fear for you; Rijnsburg is so close to that great city, would it not be prudent to embark for a safer harbour? A great philosopher is not impervious to the perils of a mortal man, Benedict, and in this I beg you to act responsibly.

Your loving friend and colleague,

‘Felix van Jos’

The journeyman from Mülheim, a Dutch boy of about sixteen, rides up to the cottage, a leather sack of mail slung over his shoulder. Flicking the flies away with her tail, his old mare rolls her steaming flanks as she throws one hoof in front of the other. It is hot. The forest beyond is vibrant with birdsong, its canopy in full bloom. As the boy approaches, apple blossoms shower down on him, carried by a breeze from the orchard the midwife has cultivated next to her barn.

Ruth, her face and body swathed in the fine net of the beekeeper, bends over a woven cane hive positioned at the end of her herb garden. Upon hearing the journeyman’s cry she carefully replaces the tray of honeycomb swarming with indefatigable furry bees in the dome. Pulling the net hood from her brow she runs down to greet him, passing Miriam who stands between the rows of cabbages, hoe in hand. The young girl smiles shyly at the journeyman who waves brazenly back.

‘Is she talking yet?’ the youth asks Ruth, still staring at Miriam.

‘Not yet. But the terror is leaving her eyes.’

‘She’s a good woman, someone ought to marry her—someone of her own people, that is,’ he adds hastily.

‘They should but they won’t now. This is for Holland.’

Ruth hands him her letter then presses two Reichstaler into his hand.

‘Piet, travel safely.’ She reaches into her skirt and pulls out a small pomander stuffed with rosemary, frankincense and cloves. ‘And wear this for the plague.’

‘Don’t worry about me. Father says I have horse’s blood. The scourge won’t get me.’ The youth shrugs with awkward adolescent bravado but tucks the pomander into his breast anyway.

‘Looks like you have a visitor, Fräulein.’

Further down the lane a tall thin man has come into view. Tuvia. Carrying a basket, sweating under his heavy wide-brimmed hat and black gown that sweeps the dusty path, he strides with a blind but determined purpose. Sensing that he has been seen, the young rabbi’s awkward bearing becomes even more extreme.

‘That’s the strangest swain I’ve ever seen, but eager, eh miss?’

With a wink and a smirk the youth gets back onto his horse and trots off.

Ruth watches Tuvia draw nearer. She should go to greet him but finds that obstinacy has pinned her to the ground.

The young rabbi, his olive skin burgundy with the heat, finally reaches her. Now Ruth can see the ridiculous poppy he has slipped into the band of his hat, the bunch of violets hanging out of the straw basket he carries defiantly in front of him, the flush of courtship playing across his tortured features.

‘Good morrow, sister.’

‘Good morrow, Reb Tuvia. You are a long way from home.’