The Witch of Cologne

The count looks down at the friar’s creased palm then spits into it. Furious, he pushes his way through the celebrating revellers. Heinrich follows.

‘Gerhard!’

The count pauses, dizzy with revulsion and anger. Heinrich, breathing heavily, catches up to him.

‘I promise you, your brother will keep his life.’

‘The word of a Wittelsbach?’

‘The word of a Wittelsbach.’

Detlef’s body, naked except for a grimy loincloth thrown over him for the sake of decency, is stretched to its absolute length. Each joint shines pale bone through the stretched mottled skin. Leather thongs are lashed around his wrists and ankles where they are fastened to the wooden cogs of the stretching rack, the skin chafed and bleeding. A wide iron band is strapped around his head, a screw bolted at each side of his eye sockets. His face is an ivory mask of anguish but his eyes are defiant.

Carlos, inches away from Detlef’s face, gazes along the length of the tortured limbs—as he had envisaged, still beautiful in extremis. There is a nobility to flesh under duress that cannot be mimicked, the inquisitor observes silently. It is as if the spirit rises to the very limit of the physical self and shines out before finally departing. This is how our Lord must have looked on the cross. Beauty, spirit and agony incarnate.

The inquisitor puts a finger to Detlef’s wrist. The German twitches at his touch.

‘Another turn of the screw and this bone will pop out of its socket. Then it will be your knees, then your ankles, then your thigh bones will tear out of the hip sockets. Unless, of course, I decide to destroy your eyesight first.’

Detlef licks his lips, trying to find the spittle to form speech.

‘What do you want from me, Monsignor Solitario? A confession? Penance?’

‘Tell me where the Jewish witch and her bastard are and you shall be freed, maybe even pardoned. Make a public declaration of the error of your ways and you could even be reinstated as canon. One word, Pastor von Tennen, and the pain will vanish magically. Freedom, respectability, how sweet that must sound…’

‘Never.’

Detlef’s whisper is barely audible.

Carlos nods and the torturer turns the wooden handle languidly, lovingly. The cogs creak as they rotate slowly. It is a sound Detlef has grown to loathe in the last four hours.

His sinews stretch tauter and tauter until there is a loud popping sound as his left wrist disengages from his hand.

‘Ahhh!’

‘She is a witch, a succubus, the whore of the devil! I have the evidence. Her mother was the same, as were the whole Hebrew brood that spawned her. She knows the ways of the kabbala, she has used them against the church, used them to bewitch you, my friend. The child is not your child, you have been deceived. He could be any man’s. She has lain with many—I know it!’

‘She is my wife!’

‘She is a child of Lilith!’

The cogs turn again, this time the other wrist cracks and a kneecap shatters. Detlef is close to fainting, he can no longer hear himself screaming. Instead he hears the haunting sound of his son singing a nursery rhyme over and over, his clear young voice sweetly resonating around the stone walls of the dungeon.

The inquisitor’s seductive voice is an insidious whisper underneath.

‘Repeat after me: I have seen with my own eyes Ruth von Tennen of the Navarro family performing unnatural acts, rites of the black arts…’

Detlef shakes his head. The minute movement causes a huge ripple of pain across his bloody brow. Carlos, losing patience, taps the iron band bolted around Detlef’s head.

‘Canon, you will at least save your sight if you tell me where they are.’

Again Detlef refuses. Staring up at the vaulted ceiling which is blackened with smoke, as if the screams of the dying have burnt their way into the very stone, he thinks only of Ruth…her naked form steppin

g out of the river the first morning he knew she was pregnant, the sunlight catching her long hair, water gleaming on her pale skin, her womb rounded, and how then he knew she would be his salvation.

Salvation. Save me, save me, my love. The words float through his mind like a cooling balm. The image of her appears. Throwing back her black hair, her long white arms reaching out to pull him to her breast. She is smiling. The look in her eyes is so incredibly familiar that it is as if Detlef is looking at a reflection of himself, all his aspirations, dreams, hopes and joys encapsulated in that one glance, as if his soul already resides in her.

My teacher. My lover. My wife.