Detlef harnesses the large draughthorse to the simple wooden buggy. Bandits will be a constant threat, he thinks, trying to gather his thoughts while deeply conscious of the danger of lingering. They cannot afford to look like aristocracy or even wealthy bürgers, especially crossing the border and certainly not on the roads between. The cart is rough but it will suffice, he rationalises. At least this way they will look like poor farmers not worth robbing. But as a precaution he has sewn several bags of gold coin into his clothing—protection money—while strapped to the back of the cart are the few expensive antiques the soldiers did not destroy: a chest filled with linen, his aunt’s fine French walnut desk and a box of family jewels to sell in Amsterdam to secure enough money to rent lodgings.
‘Ruth!’
She looks up from where she is kneeling beside a freshly dug mound of earth. A makeshift cross, two pieces of broken wood nailed together, mark it as a grave. Hanna’s grave. Carefully Ruth pushes a small scroll covered with Yiddish writing into the soft earth. It is a woman’s prayer for finding peace.
‘Say your prayers but they won’t bring her back.’
Joachim, Hanna’s brother, full of anger and grief, stands clutching his cap in his hand. His ruddy face is rigid with the struggle to hold back tears.
‘Last sister I had. One gone in the Great War, two in the plague, and now this. She died for you, she would have done anything for the master.’ He spits into the newly turned earth.
‘She was a good servant,’ Ruth says faintly.
She would like to take the labourer’s hands, to comfort him in his glowering resentment, but knows this would only fuel his anger. Instead she places a single spray of lilac on the grave.
‘Aye. That’s one way of putting it. Should have thought about herself and run. But not Hanna—them that serve don’t survive.’
Donning his hat, he walks sullenly over to Detlef and helps him haul the last box up onto the cart.
They had found her body swinging from the old linden tree in the centre of the courtyard. Detlef cut down the battered corpse and tenderly laid the housekeeper on the ground, talking all the while, reassuring her that all would be right, that the meats would be cured, the apples picked, the apricots dried, that he would make sure Brunhilde the sow was taken care of. He even promised to carry a message to her cousin in the Dutch navy until he realised that he was talking to himself. It was then he found himself weeping over the long grey hair which lay like a halo around the bloated blue face, twigs and straw still woven between the strands.
The baby, wrapped in a blanket and lying on the grass beside Ruth, wakes and starts bawling.
‘My love, we must leave now!’
Detlef tightens the strap around the horse. He would like to pick Ruth up in his arms and tell her that life will resume its normal shape, that one day it will be safe to love again, but he cannot. The raped and desolate house is testimony to his own horror, a horror he cannot yet articulate nor has the energy to battle, but senses that one day he will. The only thing he can do now is force his body into flight and save his family.
‘Please, it is dangerous to tarry.’
Finally Ruth hears him. Lifting their son, she walks to him, knowing that beyond lies Amsterdam and freedom.
– HOD –
glory
Nieuwendijk, Amsterdam, Spring 1670
The midwife, weary from the night’s work, stops to catch her breath after climbing down two flights of narrow wooden stairs. The maid, a buxom blonde with the attractive features of a Frisian, carries a small placard covered in red silk and trimmed with lace. She smiles as she leads Ruth through the voorhuis. As they step into the large entrance hall with its immaculately scrubbed black and white tiled floor, the morning sun floods in through the large windows. The room is empty apart from two elegant French chairs and a three-legged pedestal table placed against a wall. A large Ming vase sits proudly on top of the table beside a bowl of blooming tulips.
‘Where are the rest of the family? The neighbours?’ Ruth asks in Dutch, surprised to see the hall devoid of expectant faces.
The maid holds up the red silk notice with the small white card in the centre. After four years back in Amsterdam Ruth knows that the white card means the newborn is a girl while the red silk indicates that the baby lives. ‘They are waiting to see this, then they will visit. It is Madame’s third child.’
‘But this one will survive,’ Ruth replies, wondering about the skills of the midwife who delivered the first two, both stillborn. An incompetent judging from the scarred labia of her poor patient.
‘Praise be to God…and your craft.’ The servant crosses herself.
She then unlatches the heavy oak door that opens onto a tree-lined road running along a canal which forms a luminescent band of dancing light. Smiling proudly the girl hangs the sign over the silver door handle cast in the shape of a dolphin.
‘They say that your husband is a great preacher. A Remonstrant who speaks of the Republic and a future that we—even working folk—can shape ourselves.’
‘He is a great thinker but sometimes he takes unnecessary risks,’ Ruth answers cautiously.
‘So the story about him having to climb out of a church window to escape arrest is true?’
Smiling at the open admiration in the young girl’s face, Ruth answers without thinking. ‘Yes. That was the sermon that suggested Jesus’ birth might not have been as virginal as the Bible says; that the divine spirit came through Joseph and Mary’s very mortal love for each other.’
‘A dangerous notion indeed.’