The Witch of Cologne

‘Jugged hare and stewed cabbage!’

Hanna marches across the parlour and plonks a platter piled high with food onto the small table.

‘You haven’t eaten since yesterday. It’s not right, you should be eating for two.’

Ruth, smiling, gets up and puts her arm around the vast waist of the housekeeper. ‘Hanna, you feed me enough for twins.’

‘God willing.’ The housekeeper touches her pocket. ‘Finish that plate and I’ll give you another surprise.’

‘Is the master due back?’

‘That I don’t know, but I have other news. From Holland…’

Ruth, unable to wait, thrusts her hand into Hanna’s pocket and pulls out a letter. As she unrolls the parchment, the housekeeper peers over her shoulder.

‘Is it news about the

war with the English? I have a cousin on the Dutch fighting ships there.’

‘No, although he mentions the war.’

‘He? This isn’t a rival for your heart, is it, Fraülein Saul, because if it is and the master finds out I won’t be long in this house.’

‘No, this man is a rival for no one’s heart. He is a great prophet and, as you know, prophets live above the weakness of the flesh.’

‘Does such a man exist? I think not!’ Hanna snorts and marches out again in her noisy clogs.

Smiling, Ruth wonders what Spinoza would make of the stoic housekeeper’s pragmatic truths. Then she stretches, her back aching from the weight of her womb. Glancing out at the band of sunlight which has just begun to cut through the bluish morning she decides that, better than jugged hare, some fresh air will improve her mood.

Sitting on a bench with moss creeping over its marble feet, she barely notices the faint promise of warmer weather tinting the breeze, the thawing snow which has begun to roll back to reveal the glistening grass beneath.

Rijnsburg, January 1666

Dear ‘Felix’,

Forgive my long silence. Here too there has been plague and it, and the long English war, have kept me from correspondence.

I am much grieved to hear about your plight. I too know the despair into which you must now be plunged. I have lost many dear friends this season—including Pieter Balling, which is a profound loss indeed—and despite many deaths to the scourge on both sides of the North Sea, the English continue to raid and wage war on our navy. These are unpredictable times and with that uncertainty comes the most insidious passion of all: fear. The Dutch are turning to the certainties of the past; Jan de Witt and his Republican cause lose support daily. It becomes increasingly dangerous for the enlightened philosophers who support my work. Even at the university of Leiden I have heard of several who have been severely reprimanded for quoting my texts. There is a necessity to protect ourselves, my dear earnest little Felix, for it is precisely in these dark days that there is a need for those who can see beyond the starving belly, beyond the plague cross painted on the door, beyond the priest offering penance and a holy wafer.

Stay cautious and be like the wind: invisible but far-reaching.

Yours, Benedict Spinoza

His voice seems to speak out from another universe, one so remote that Ruth can see it only as a mirage in which she once lived, gloriously naive, wonderfully hopeful. It is not a being she can relate to now. Smiling sadly she folds up the letter and tucks it deep into her bodice.

Lord, give me strength to battle my doubts and believe in my love, she prays, yearning for Detlef’s reassuring presence to dismiss the ghost of her father’s burning figure, Rosa’s screaming face and the terrible guilt of the survivor.

‘They say they will declare the scourge officially over as soon as next week. A good third of the city has perished but this last week there were only ten new deaths reported. Sadly Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep’s sister was amongst them. We are blessed, Ruth, to escape all this and more.’

Detlef stands naked in a large horse’s trough beside an old barn. He pours the icy water over his chest, gasping with the cold, his skin reddening, then scrubs himself down with a wet rag and a cake of salt. Ruth, her arms holding clean clothes for him, a woollen shawl crossed across the breast of her long muslin dress, shivers in sympathy. His horse, still restless from the long ride from Cologne, stands fastened to a post, munching on a bucket of oats.

‘The archbishop waits until we have buried our last before he returns. I suspect he has lost his stomach for funerals, but his absence has been to my advantage.’

After rinsing himself with the bucket, Detlef steps out.

‘I hear you are championing a young man from the ribbon guild, Nikolaus Gülich,’ Ruth says, handing him a drying cloth of rough hessian. Detlef rubs the towel against his skin until it burns.

‘Who told you that?’