The Witch of Cologne

‘The pageant of death, cousin. Where have you been? You obviously missed the proclamation this morning. It was rung out all over the city.’

‘What proclamation?’

‘The plague! The first house has been barred up and painted with the red cross.’

He turns to his cleric. ‘Make a record of the date: August twenty-ninth of the year of our good Lord 1665.’

Shocked, Detlef hurries to the door. ‘We must make haste—the pesthouse must be opened up, the sick must be collected. We have to issue plague orders, the dogs and cats must be eradicated, everything must be done to stop the infectious vapours spreading—’

‘You will go nowhere, Detlef! As a Wittelsbach it is your responsibility to protect yourself and your lineage. Retire to the country immediately, that is my advice. I myself am off to Bonn.’

‘You think you can escape the disease by leaving?’

‘Indeed, with the help of this wondrous device which I shall wear happily in a closed carriage all the way out of the city. In the meantime I have left instructions with Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg and the rest of the council as to the running of the cathedral in my absence, as well as the pesthouse—which has already started to stink with the ailing.’

‘With all due respect, your grace, you must realise that the city needs its greatest shepherd in this its darkest hour…’

‘And as their shepherd I have every intention of being there afterwards, when the disease has left the city and we have the mending of souls and the rebuilding of families to attend to.’

‘But even the archbishop of London chose to stay with his parishioners—’

‘Do I care? The protection of my health so that I may attend the living and the bereaved after the Black Death has left this city is more important. In other words, Detlef, I intend to survive. Now make haste!’

Maximilian Heinrich pushes the mask firmly back down and sweeps out of the room, his attendants following.

September, 1665

Dear Benedict,

The plague is now upon us. Many have fallen in Cologne: it is said that nearly a quarter of the populace has perished. Here in Deutz we have lost some but not in such large numbers. Miriam and I assist the good doctor Schlam, toiling night and day to tend to the dying. These we have isolated and I believe it is this segregation and the custom of our people to wash daily that has saved many. But a death is a death and our burden is increased by the fact that Cologne has closed its gates and the flow of grain and provisions across the Rhine, upon which our town depends, has ceased.

Tuvia ben Ibraham, my father’s assistant, was one of the first to perish. His death has left my father much diminished. It is as if the last vestige of my father’s hope died with him. The rabbi has not spoken since and spends many hours alone in the temple, not praying but whispering to ghosts. I fear for his sanity but have not the vigour to attend to him like a good daughter. Instead, when I am not administering to the sick, I like many, search the forest for mushroom, wild fowl, dandelion, anything we can place into our starving bellies. My own hunger is twofold, but of that I cannot speak.

If you have any comforting advice or word of wisdom in these dark times, please write. I can feast on one of your philosophies for many days.

In friendship,

‘Felix van Jos’

There is nothing to seal the letter with. She cannot send it anyway for all transportation has stopped between the Rhineland and the Netherlands. She touches her neat script in wonder. How can her hand remain so steady after these last four moons? Even unsent the letter comforts her. It is an echo of life before, a ritual which gives inward definition to a frenzied world in which chaos has flown down the chimney and everything is broken. Almost broken.

Ruth picks up a small stone from the table and begins sucking it. It helps ward off the nauseating hunger which gnaws constantly at her belly. The cheap tallow candle, virtually melted, splutters, sending a puff of acrid smoke towards the blackened ceiling. The cottage is nearly unrecognisable in its disorder: bunches of herbs are strewn across the floor, their stems plucked entirely clean and boiled several times over; an eaten carcass of a rabbit hangs from the curing spit, barely a thread of flesh left on it. One muddy tree root, still half-covered with earth, squats like an animal dropping in front of the huge stone hearth, now empty. Scattered across the table where she is sitting are a few dandelions and a bouquet of straggly nettles. The only clean space is the one she has created immediately around her, a small kingdom in which the single page of parchment reigns.

Outside Ruth hears the bell of the Hevra Kadisha cart as they go to collect an

other corpse. She does not allow herself to wonder who it is. All such thoughts stopped with Tuvia’s death; there has not been time, the containment of the disease has absorbed her waking hours and stolen all her dreams.

Until now, twenty deaths and four full moons later. This day she was called to the house of the tailor, the very same father whose son she delivered after her first night with Detlef. The sight of Herr Rechtschild’s pallid face creased in agony, the telltale lumps blossoming like poisonous fruit below his neck, jolted her back to the night of the delivery when her body still sang with Detlef’s touch. Before this moment, Ruth has not allowed herself to dwell on either memory or hope. Since the gates of the walled city were sealed there is no way of getting news in or out of Cologne. Ruth does not know whether Detlef is still in residence, or even if he lives.

The candle splutters and finally dies. Now only moonlight filtering through the dusty windows illuminates the room. Ruth, her body racked with exhaustion, stands in its rays. Glancing down at her ragged dress stained with soil and sweat, she cannot imagine that once a man loved her, and that the grieving sleepwalkers who now roam the lanes were once human and in their humanity were once also loved.

She pulls the dress over her head and lets it slip to the ground then steps out of her filthy petticoat. She stands naked. Her breasts are ripe, the nipples a dark wine. She cups her swelling womb and closes her eyes, feeling for the growing child beneath.

Condensation drips down the grey-green stone walls of the pesthouse. Oblivious to the human agony below, a swallow tends to the mud nest she has wedged precariously between two wooden rafters. Beneath the industrious bird lie row after row of the infirm. Thrown on the dirty straw, the sick are contorted and delirious like the victims of some massive shipwreck, their eyes already flooding with the resignation of the drowning. Nuns in the brown habit of their order scurry between their patients, removing pails of diseased slops, many wearing cotton masks packed with herbs in a desperate attempt to ward off the extraordinary stench of disease.

Detlef kneels in the centre of this bedlam, a peculiarly tranquil oasis of calm, his face gaunt, a thin yellow beard creeping up the hollow cheeks. His robe is strangely clean as if he has struggled to keep a semblance of dignity amid the carnage. In his hand he clutches a flask of holy oil with which to anoint the poor creature lying before him. The young man whose ravaged beauty still shines beneath the hideous sores is a law student Detlef once knew as a pupil, barely twenty years of age. His bloodshot green eyes burn in the waxen mask that his face has become as he stares at the canon, furious that he is dying.

Secretly dismayed at the uselessness of the sacrament, Detlef is determined to carry out his task with as much grace as possible. Hiding his revulsion he reaches for the ulcercovered hand.