The Witch of Cologne

To Detlef it feels as if he is gliding over the dew-covered grass. Not even the daisies appear to bend under his weight. He moves compelled by a greater force than rationality, than self-preservation, a force beyond his conscious mind. He is barely aware of his actions but knows that for the first time in his life he is acting out of a greater passion than self-love.

He pushes open the door; the main room is empty. A candle still burns on the table and a fire smoulders in the huge fireplace. A half-eaten apple stands on the table. He

feels as if he is not here, as if he is an invisible observer, an ethereal spirit that is being swept in with the wind and is able to watch unseen. Everything is vivid. Every detail in the room magnified. He can see the toothmarks left in the apple, he can sense the trail of scent, heat and fine dust Ruth has left swathed across the centre of the room. A great desire surges through him, painfully fused with an inherent sense of sorrow, as if he is unable to make one more move towards what he knows undeniably to be his fate.

Ruth is standing in the alcove that houses her bed. On the floor is a wooden bucket filled with water she has boiled on the fire. Naked from the waist up she leans over it, washing herself with a cloth. As she wipes her neck and breasts she finds herself thinking about the canon, how in the silence of that long coach journey she realised there is much that can be communicated without words, that it is possible to have a discourse of the mind with a man she would have expected to share nothing in common. She tries not to remember his beauty. She tries not to think of him as a man. She does not want to be distracted by a passion that cannot afford to exist even in imagination or unspoken longing. An impossible desire. An improbable love. Sighing, Ruth sponges the last of the soap away and in an instant becomes aware of being watched.

The man is standing in the centre of the room beyond. He is familiar and yet not familiar. She does not know the face, the hair, the attire or the dirty features beneath the hat, but there is something she recognises in his physique, in the way he holds his body, that makes her hesitant for one tiny moment. Then, screaming, she covers herself.

Before she can run he is there, holding her, his hands clapped over her mouth. ‘Ruth! Stop, please! It is me, Detlef,’ he whispers as he holds her struggling body close, the first

words he has uttered in over five hours. Deafened by the panic beating in her ears she does not hear him.

‘It’s Detlef, it’s me, Detlef, Detlef,’ he continues to murmur, trying to reclaim his action, this intrusion which is so foreign to his nature that suddenly he no longer knows himself. In the same instant Ruth hears him and stops fighting.

They stand suspended: the cloaked man with his arms wrapped around the half-naked woman. Then, to her surprise, the proximity of him, his maleness, his scent, the taste of salt and earth, the bulk of his long fingers against her tongue, awake within her a desire so long denied that she loses control. Her trembling limbs wind themselves around him, she presses herself against his hardening groin, her hands searching for his skin, tearing at the yellowed lace at his neck. Detlef, unable to hold back any longer, finds her mouth and lifting her up onto his hips, draws her face down to his. Hat and wig fall to the ground, the feather trailing in the bucket of water, as the intelligence of his tongue tames her kisses.

He drops to his knees and traces a path down to one nipple while teasing the other. Her body astounds him. It is not thin as he imagined, but slender with full breasts ripe with large dark areolae. Impatient for the rest of her, he unlaces her skirt and lets it fall to her feet. He is shocked at the smoothness of her skin. Ivory white, the fine down on it jet black. She tastes like cinnamon, the faint scent of lemon across her belly. She is so small that even kneeling his face is breast height. He runs his fingers down, caressing her high buttocks, feeling her quiver beneath his hands, then buries his face into the soft fur between her legs. She smells impossibly sweet. Parting her with his fingers he finds her centre between the folds of flesh, a tiny bead between his lips. Above he can hear her moan as her fingers weave through his hair trying to pull him up to his feet.

‘Please,’ she murmurs, ‘please, I am ashamed.’

But he persists, his own excitement growing with hers until he is so hard beneath his breeches that he is frightened his seed will spill. Finally she manages to pull him to his feet. He stands there, breathing hard, rigid against the rough cloth as she reaches down to release him.

‘But you are virgin.’

He grabs her wrists and holds them for a minute, trying wildly to collect his thoughts. In lieu of a reply she leans forward and buries her face in his chest.

Moaning softly he drops her wrist and allows her to reach down into his breeches and pull him free. For a second she looks at his sex in wonderment. Forgetting who she is or even what she is, she drops to her knees, caressing the velvet head caught so neatly like a pearl in its own case. She touches him, caressing him backwards and forwards, her touch deceptively deft. Detlef cannot believe that these are her hands encircling him, that these are her eyes staring up at him, watching him lose himself. Now, as his orgasm begins to mount, climbing up gloriously behind his balls, in the pit of his stomach, behind his eyes, he pushes her to the ground, throwing his hand between her legs. Finding her wet he pulls her beneath him and enters her with one hard thrust. She screams, pushing her face deep in the abandoned clothes as, forgetting everything in her tightness, he enters her over and over until they cry out in ecstasy.

She is in his arms, her head cradled between his shoulder and chest. They have been lying like this for hours. She will not sleep for fear that she will wake and find she has been dreaming. She could not believe, while he gently sponged the blood from her thighs, kissed her over and over between her legs until again the pleasure rippled up from her belly, that physical love could be so naturally married with the emotional; how such an act could rid her of all sensible thought and render her future suddenly meaningless without him; how she could ever have considered a life without this utterly human deed which has imbued her suddenly with renewed faith.

‘Shall I be there too, fresh-wounded, your latest Prisoner—displaying your captive mind—/With Conscience, hands bound behind her, and Modesty, all Love’s other enemies, whipped into line,’ she whispers softly in Latin.

‘Ovid, from the Amores?’

She nods, smiling slightly.

‘Where did a woman like you learn Ovid? He is not a poet for chaste women, even philosophising women like yourself.’

‘Spinoza always said a woman like me should not marry or bear children for I have a man’s mind trapped in the body of a female.’

‘Is sex so separate, Ruth? I for one do not consider your ambitious spirit to be unfeminine.’

Ruth, her fingers curled into his hair, her body singing in a way it has never sung before, smiles.

‘This shall be the ruin of us,’ she whispers, hoping that he might not hear her.

But Detlef, savouring her pleasing weight upon him, his loins deliciously emptied, hears everything. He reaches down and tilts her face up to his.

‘We are already ruined, for I have ruined you and you I.’

‘Am I your first woman?’ she asks, a sardonic smile playing across her mouth.

‘In an unfathomable way.’

‘To be condemned by our communities, all that we are governed by…’

He watches her, trying to read what lies behind her eyes.