The Witch of Cologne

The midwife looks sharply at the housemaid. For a minute the thought crosses her mind that this innocent-faced wench might be a spy. Recognising her accent as northern, Ruth wonders whether she could be a royalist, following the young Prince William of Orange as most in the north do, and not a supporter of Jan de Witt’s Republic.

‘My husband was pardoned by the authorities.’

‘As he should have been,’ the maid answers, reaching into her pocket to pay the midwife.

But Ruth cannot dismiss her distrust. She has become suspicious like the rest of Holland, she realises. The midwife is still amazed at how Amsterdam’s famous tolerance has begun to evaporate as financial insecurity looms. Jan de Witt has come under fire for his naval war with the English and, disapproving, the hidden royalists have begun screaming for Prince William of Orange, barely a man, to be reinstated. The country Ruth has begun to love grows ugly with reactionary sentiment. It is but fear of the French king and his growing greed for the Dutch colonial wealth, she thinks, a dread which infects the bürgers who care only for their own prosperity from the spice islands. These Hollanders forget nothing and forgive even less. Armed with these fears they tear at de Witt’s glorious dream of the Republic.

Staring up at the immaculate façade of the mansion, she remembers the arrest of the revolutionary lawyer Adriaan Koerbagh. That event terrified every liberal thinker in the city, for what was the young radical’s crime other than being a close supporter of Benedict Spinoza and her old Latin tutor Franciscus van den Enden? Ruth shivers with sudden dread, her fears growing by the minute. Koerbagh was a br

ave man, a man of the future, who claimed that the Bible is a human work and that Jesus was mortal not divine. Even more revolutionary was his announcement that the real teaching of God is simply knowledge of God and love of one’s neighbour. And how did the good man pay for this brave revelation? With his life. A fate that could easily be her husband’s if Detlef continues with his dangerous outspokenness. As for de Witt, the leader in support of whom many intellectuals had spoken out and risked all, what did he do for poor Koerbagh? Nothing. Now every thinker and philosopher in the Lowlands fears persecution. Ruth worries for Detlef: his voice is too loud; his views anger as many as they inspire. But how are they to live if not by their beliefs? Was not that the reason they fled to Holland? If Jan de Witt is not willing to stand up for his defenders, what hope is there, Ruth wonders.

The maid, reading her fears, reaches out.

‘Be not alarmed. I follow the beliefs of my master and your husband’s courage is appreciated here. I wish merely to attend his sermons.’

‘Thank you. I do believe a notice will be posted soon announcing Pastor Tennen’s next lecture,’ Ruth replies curtly.

As the midwife walks away the maid speculates about what the woman is concealing. Surely she could feel only pride to be married to such a visionary.

The Herengracht is a broad canal flanked by wide affluent streets either side. Many of the wealthiest trading families of Amsterdam live here and the elegant red-brick houses, packed neatly alongside each other, run the entire length of the canal. The ridged roof of each immaculate residence is decorated with the crest of the guild the owner belongs to. Some houses even have pulleys attached so that heavy goods and furniture can be hoisted up into the building.

Ruth, dressed in a fashionable bonnet and a satinisco blue and yellow overcoat, walks across the cobblestones, hurrying from the shade of one elm tree to another. She hails a boatman and instructs him to take her over to Harlemmerstraat.

The boatman, a tall thickset man bearing a scar across his cheek from the Spanish wars, holds out his palm, a straw held between his fingers. He watches the shadow cast by the makeshift sundial, surmises the correct time then agrees to the journey. His son steadies the midwife’s arm as she steps into the barge carefully balancing her bag of instruments.

Ruth glances across the shimmering water towards the sun. With luck she will be home before Detlef begins his morning toilet. She left him dozing heavily, his arm thrown beyond the curtain which separates the sleeping alcove from the rest of their humble room. He has just returned from Rotterdam where he gave sermons in the scattering of Remonstrant institutions across northern Holland.

Once Detlef decided to become a Protestant, he chose to join the Remonstrants over the other Calvinist faiths because he was drawn to the Dutch theologian Arminius, their founder, who had challenged Calvin’s doctrine of predestination some sixty years before. The Remonstrants are the most liberal and least dogmatic of their revolutionary brethren: their variations from orthodoxy are conditional rather than absolute, they believe in universal atonement, the necessity of regeneration through the Holy Ghost, the possibility of resistance to divine grace and the possibility of relapse from grace. All this, and more, drew Detlef to them, and within their ranks he has found acceptance of both his marriage and his beliefs.

Although Ruth is proud of him, a gnawing apprehension always grips her when he is away on his travels. Part of her wishes they had stayed anonymous: Herr and Frau Tennen, married by a Protestant preacher in a forest chapel near the German border with Mother Nature the only witness. But after two years as pastor in a small church in the Nieuwendijk, a working-class slum famous for prostitution, Detlef became swept up in the intellectual fury of the times. His sermons spoke increasingly of the importance of the Republic, of a democracy where all should be equal, of the human aspects of the Bible rather than its divinity. But it is only since he has introduced anti-slavery sentiments and disapproval of the Dutch slave traders into his orations that he has begun to attract real enemies.

Would she have him any other way? It is impossible to imagine. She has watched Detlef transform from an individual with little belief in the notion of the inherent goodness of man to a humanist convinced that, with guidance, man is able to elevate himself above his base nature. Now, free from the machinations and politics of Cologne, Detlef has found a vocation in direct communication with his congregation and it has infused him with purpose. How could she wrest him away from that for the sake of remaining incognito? To do such a thing would be to strip him of a dignity he has finally won through his actions rather than his birthright.

The canal narrows and the streets on either side become visibly poorer, the newer elegant mansions replaced by slender older houses sandwiched together, the upper storeys hanging over the cobbled pavements, the frontages noticeably dirtier. A stench rises up from the water, a dead cat floats by forcing Ruth to hold a handkerchief to her face.

The barge approaches the small pier at the bottom of her street. Already at the musico on the corner—a bordello thinly disguised as a theatre—several sailors and a chevalier are sitting around an oval table smoking clay pipes. Ruth guesses they are revellers from the night before. A stout prostitute, her broad face flushed with beer, straddles the lap of one man while coquettishly snatching the meerschaum of another. The rosy-faced men, drunk, roar with laughter as she blows smoke rings into the haze of morning light.

The barge bumps up against the straw-filled buoy and after handing the boatman his fee of two stuivers, Ruth climbs up onto the wharf and makes her way towards a humble red-brick dwelling with open wooden shutters.

Detlef is sitting at his desk, a heavy day coat of blue serge hanging over his shoulders. There are grey flecks through his blond hair which now hangs down to his shoulders. She watches his hands as he writes, the feathered quill dancing across the page. Youthful in their energy, they are now more worn, the chafed knuckles bonier, vulnerable. She walks up behind him and buries her face in his neck and shoulder, breathing in deeply. Home. The scent of him, and with it trust, security.

He drops his pen and reaches blindly for her behind him.

‘How was the birthing?’

‘Hard but successful. They now have their first child and she will live.’

‘My wife, the saviour of many.’

‘In this case your fame preceded my own. The young maidservant was most curious about the infamous Pastor Tennen and his radical teachings.’

‘You are jealous?’

‘I would prefer it if my husband were less of a public figure and more a creature around whom I could wind my domestic security.’

‘We are safe, Ruth. This I promise you.’

Detlef swings around and faces her. The lines in his face have deepened and the last vestiges of youth have vanished. A new maturity has blunted the edges of a severity she once found arrogant. It is as if finally he is comfortable in his own skin.