The Witch of Cologne

They are interrupted by the sound of horses approaching. Before Ruth has a chance to stop the child, he is running to the small iron gate of the sloping cottage garden, his short sturdy legs determined to reach his father before anyone.

‘A donkey, Mama! A donkey and a funny little man with a tall man on a horse! But where is Papa?’

Ruth reaches the gate as Alphonso and La Grande ride into view. She waves at the actor but he does not wave back, continuing to ride towards them, face grimly set. Ruth, heart pounding, pulls Jacob off the gate.

‘Go inside, Jacob.’

‘But Mama…’

‘Go!’

The child, frightened by her tone, runs back towards the cottage and is ushered through the darkened doorway by the widow who waits in a panicky fluster of pale muslin.

Alphonso leaps from his horse and strides towards Ruth, his expression impenetrable. He does not speak and she does not ask. She already knows. Faltering in the bright sunlight she steadies herself against the hot stone wall. All switches into sharp relief. The blades of grass, birdsong, the buzzing of a passing bee.

This is it, she thinks, Paradise before the Fall, the moment of futile hope before knowledge. Detlef, my husband, my love, my life.

Catching her arm as she stumbles, Alphonso presses something into her palm. Ruth stares down, then curls her fingers so tightly around the lock of Detlef’s hair that Alphonso fears she will break her hand.

– YESOD –

Truth-speaking

Rampjaar, The Hague, Winter, 1672

Ruth pours water out of the jug on the washstand in the corner of the bare room and scrubs the grime of the streets from her hands, then splashes her neck with the fragrance of jasmine. The chamber is built into an attic. Sparsely furnished, it contains a three-legged table in another corner, the chest Detlef brought with them from the Rhineland and the glass cabinet he gave her on the eve of their marriage. Over the bare hearth hangs the one possession that has travelled with Ruth throughout her life: Aaron’s sword.

Exhausted, the midwife unlaces her long-waisted dark grey serge blouse and unhooks the full black muslin skirt. She hangs the clothes on the back of a chair then throws a woollen shawl around her shoulders. The room is cold, it is January. Outside, a light snow falls from the early morning sky. Ruth pokes at the dying embers of the fire then glances across at Jacob. He lies sleeping in the bed that they share.

Now almost six years of age, his features are those of a boy, the shape of his mouth and jaw so reminiscent of Detlef that it sometimes pains Ruth to look at him. She tiptoes over to the child, treading softly for she knows that her landlady, an older widow with four children of her own, rests lightly and will hear any creaking of the wooden floor above her. Ruth pulls another blanket over Jacob. His blond hair falls across his eyes, his fine features wistful in dreaming.

It is almost two years since Detlef’s death. Two summers, two autumns, two winters, during which she has lived a half-life, Ruth thinks, like the water creatures she examines through her lens, swimming slowly, blindly, through thick syrup. The midwife has survived only because of the generosity of friends who have put food in their mouths and the clothes on their backs. If she did not have her son, and if to take one’s life was not a mortal sin, she would have put an end to the Hell she has lived beyond Detlef.

Silently conjuring the image of her dead husband, Ruth rocks herself as she watches the child, remembering those first months of constant weeping, of Jacob coming to her each night crying for his papa, of the folding up of Detlef’s clothes and papers and laying them carefully in the chest that has become the memory-keeper of their lives together. How with every new day she would wake and think for a moment that he was with her, the warm naked length of him stretched out beside her, before the terrible remembering rushed in. Every day for a year.

With no body and no grave to mourn over—for to return to Cologne would have meant certain arrest—Ruth erected her own shrine. A memorial consisting of Detlef’s lock of hair, his wedding ring and a small portrait of his likeness she had painted. It was here that Ruth found herself praying, and when the praying stopped the talking started. Whispering, she would tell Detlef about the domestic things, the financial struggles, the failures and triumphs of her midwifery, Jacob’s first written words, and sometimes, late at night, of how she longed to touch him, to take his mouth, fingers and hands into her flesh and finally surrender her love in a way she now knew she never had during their time together.

Gradually, reasons for continuing her life crept back: the joy of a successful delivery, a letter from Spinoza urging her to further her work, her mounting research now consolidated into a paper she is trying to find a publisher for, and, most importantly, her son.

Tonight has been long. She has delivered twins, identical boys, but the second babe perished, partly damaged by the birthing hook she had to use to pull him out of the womb. With every inch of her body aching, she stands and goes into the adjoining room.

It is a small chamber with a single window set high, its curved iron casing framing a church spire and a parchment moon plastered onto the indigo night beyond. A wooden desk holding the lens and its mounting stands below the oval porthole.

Ruth pulls out a thick bound notebook and dips a quill into an inkpot. Carefully she sketches the womb with the twins contained, calculating how they must have been sitting for such a disaster to occur. There has to be a gentler way of extracting the baby, there has to be. Ruth sits meditating upon the quandary then, inspired, reaches for her sketchbook.

Later, as she curls up around Jacob, she is gripped by a coughing fit. Pulling the blanket around her, she curses the cold weather.

Benedict Spinoza pushes the shutters open. A warm humid breeze coming off the port enters the room immediately, bringing with it the scent of the city.

‘The air is foul in here, Ruth, you must allow the summer in.’

‘I fear for my lungs.’

‘We all fear for our lungs. Living is a hazardous profession. And in this current climate more so than ever, especially for Republicans.’

He places three oranges on the table. She notices how feminine his hands are, delicate and olive-skinned, unblemished by p

hysical labour.