by Anne Boileau
“Fräulein Katharina.” I turned, and there he was! He stood staring at me with an almost supplicant air; all the crowds and cheerful hullabaloo fell away as our eyes met. It was as if we two were all alone. He came towards me, hesitantly, and took both my hands in his.
“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” he said. “I saw you in church but could not get near you, then I got caught up in the procession, so I went to the Cranach House but no one was there. Then I met Barbara by the cattle ring and she said you were here somewhere but still I couldn’t find you.”
I felt tears welling up but did not want to show him how relieved I was at seeing him. I must maintain my composure. Also, I was hoping he had not seen me emerging from the soothsayer’s tent, because he thinks such superstition is wicked, and fortune-tellers have links with the Devil.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said, swallowing hard. We stood still, holding hands shyly, like children. I put my arm through his, smiled up at him and said:
“Have you seen the jugglers?” We wandered together through the fair, like a couple, amongst the sound of drums and singing and tambourines and laughter; the mingled odours of camels and cattle and sweaty bodies and fresh-trodden turf; people shouting: “Roll up, roll up, come and see the counting horse from Seville, the Indian Prince from New Spain, the tumbling Pygmy from Afric’s sandy shore! You won’t believe your eyes! Worth every penny, the wonders of the world!”
“Are you hungry? How about a grilled zander?” I realised I was, very hungry. We queued up to buy some grilled fish, bought two mugs of beer and carried our meal to the edge of the fairground; we found a tree trunk to sit on in the shade of a maple tree. It was quieter here and we could talk.
Martin blessed the food, said a short grace, then we tucked in. The fish was hot, crackly and greasy, quite delicious, served on a cabbage leaf with a dollop of mustard and a hunk of rye bread. We washed it down with the beer. Then, after wiping his fishy hands on the turf and his greasy chin with a tuft of grass, Dr Luther clasped both my hands in his big fists; as we sat there side by side on the trunk of a felled oak tree he looked at me again and said:
“I’m sorry, Fräulein Kathe. I was wrong. Will you forgive me?”
And I said: “Yes”.
Chapter 15
Carp Ponds
Der heilige Geist lobt die Weiber. Die Ehe kann ohne Weiber nicht sein, noch die Welt bestehen.
The Holy Spirit praises women. There is no such thing as marriage without women, nor can the world exist.
We were betrothed on June 13th, Saint Margaret’s Day, which was the Name Day of my stepmother and my new mother-in-law. The Marriage was arranged to take place on June 27th. It might have seemed hasty, but the Doctor disapproves of postponing marriage for too long after betrothal, for fear of gossip and slander.
Much later he said “If I had not held my own wedding quickly and with the foreknowledge of only a few people, they would all have tried to hinder me, for my best friends cried: ‘Not this one, but another!’”
On the day of our marriage the whole town decided to celebrate with us. It all began at ten o’clock. Barbara and little Uschi helped me do my hair; they braided honeysuckle into it. Then they dressed me. The staff in the printworks saw me walking into the courtyard, and they all began to clap, their applause rippling through the yard like a thousand pigeons’ wings. I felt like a queen and smiled at them.
The church bells began to ring and Dr Luther arrived at the door of the Cranach House, dressed in a fine new jacket and breeches, with a short cloak over his shoulder. He bowed gravely at me, offered his arm and led me out into the street and across the square to the church. Crowds were already gathered along our way, cheering and shouting good wishes. I was quite overwhelmed. The crowd were excited – some of the children threw flowers before us, or waved flags. When we reached the church the Pastor Bugenhagen was waiting for us in the porch; he married us there, for all the crowd to see, with the bright sun shining onto the flagstones at our feet.
Swifts were shrieking as they swooped overhead but the crowd were hushed, wanting to hear the words of the marriage ceremony. I was in a haze and wondered if this wasn’t just a dream? But no, it was real. Then, with my wedding ring on my hand, the two of us linked arms and led the procession back across town to the Black Cloister for the banquet.
I hardly recognised the Cloister as we progressed through the open gate: flowers, wild clematis and vine leaves adorned the doorways and windows; garlands had been strewn over the windowsills, bunches of fragrant flowers were in jugs on all the tables; three minstrels sat under the pear tree, playing cheerfully; a long table was decked out in the courtyard, bright with meadow flowers.
How they had worked, Dorothea, Agnes and Elsa and I don’t know who else! What a feast was laid on for us! Fish: an enormous pike in a caper sauce on a bed of wild garlic with a smoked eel in its mouth; jellied lampreys in a nest of watercress; roast guinea fowl, fattened capons and a stuffed goose decorated with sugared rose petals; followed by a bowl of summer berries with goats’ cheese and soured cream. The beer and wine flowed in generous measure and we sang songs and danced. I remember that day as if it were yesterday.
We invited only those people closest to me and my Bridegroom. The Cranachs, of course, with the three children, who have become like my own family. Dear Lucas has promised to paint both our portraits as a wedding present, but we haven’t found the time to sit for him yet.
Martin’s parents, Hans and Margarethe Luther, travelled all the way from Erfurt. Their arrival, two days before, was wonderful. Martin hugged his old mother like a bear, and they both wept. He embraced his father too, and they shook hands warmly, in a blessed moment of reconciliation. The old couple greeted me with polite reserve and curiosity.
His mother soon grew to trust me, however. That evening after they arrived, she and I were sitting alone together; she told me about Martin as a boy. The talent he had shown at a very early age for music, reading, languages; I listened intently, eager to hear more about the man I was soon to marry; then she turned to me, and put her gnarled old hand on mine. “Katharina, my new daughter! At last, our son has seen sense; how long have we waited for this! And what’s more, he’s chosen a fine woman to take care of him. Every man needs a strong woman to keep him in order.” We laughed together, until I realised that her laughter had turned to tears. Martin walked in on us as we were both weeping together.
“What’s this, then, two wailing women, on such a happy occasion!”
The estrangement between Martin and his parents had lasted for nineteen years. Now, at last, they are reconciled. Father and son write to each other regularly, and his mother writes to me about women’s matters. She sends me recipes, gives advice on running a kitchen, keeping accounts, looking out for bargains in the market.
Leonard Koppe and his wife came from Torgau; the haulier who risked his own life helping us to escape from the convent. I asked them if they had travelled with the same team and wagon he used for that journey. He laughs.
“Oh no, dear lady, for an occasion such as this we travel in style, with our best carriage and a pair of dappled greys. You must see them before we leave tomorrow.” So not the heavy old chestnuts I remember pulling us along the potholed road to Torgau on Easter Saturday two years before. Their wedding gift to us, appropriately, was a barrel of salt herrings! Martin laughed at this joke, and I was pleased to think of this good supply of fish for several Fridays to come! Herr Koppe broke the barrel open to show me something special inside: a beautiful, tropical sea-shell packed in with the fish. He demonstrated how, if you hold it to your ear, you can hear the sound of waves on the beach.
From the Town Council we received twenty Gulden and a barrel of the best beer. Prince Johann of Saxony (who has succeeded his good brother Friedrich) gave us a generous 100 Gulden to “to get us started.”
And a surprise gift arrived on the morning of the wedding: twenty Gulden from Cardinal Cajetan, Martin’s arch-enemy
from Worms.
My husband fulminated at his old enemy’s gesture of generosity.
“A gift from Cajetan? Never. Send it straight back, I’ll take no charity from Papist bullies.” But I had other ideas for the money, and it was my first quiet act of duplicity: I hid the coins in a brown jug on a high shelf in the kitchen. Surely it would have been churlish to return it? Instead, I wrote a friendly letter of thanks to the Cardinal. We cannot afford to turn down generous gifts, wherever they come from. Besides, I feel that such a gesture of reconciliation should be welcomed.
Ave and Basilius sent their apologies; Ave is expecting, and the five-day journey from Weimar would have been too risky. But their gift to us remains one of my most treasured possessions: a brand new publication entitled Otto Brunfels Book of Herbs; this book contains all one needs to know about herbs: how to grow them and how to use them for medicinal and culinary purposes. Ave gave us something else too, which made me laugh, though the joke was lost on Martin: a large hessian bag of cloves, tied with a blue ribbon. To us ex-nuns from Marienthron it meant the smell of the September Bible, smuggled into our convent, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
One of Martin’s former professors from Erfurt was at the wedding too, as well as two friends from his student days and a couple of old family friends from Mansfeld. Herr and Frau Reichenbach were invited, of course; from them we received a beautiful tapestry for the hall, depicting a deer in a forest. She gave me a big kiss, and was delighted to see me settled after what she called, with a complicit wink, my little vicissitudes.
Apart from them I had very few guests of my own; it’s not easy after years behind walls to build up a circle of friends. I wrote to my father at our Betrothal, inviting him and my Stepmother to the ceremony. I was hoping for some sort of rapprochement, as had happened with Martin and his parents. His reply was brief, but he did send me a gift: a small book wrapped in brown paper with the following short note: “Dear Daughter, This little book belonged to your Mother. I regret I cannot come to your Wedding. Good luck. Father.”
It’s a small yearbook. It is bound in calf-skin with gold rimmed parchment pages; it fastens with a metal hasp and key. It is about four inches by three inches, and within it are handwritten prayers appropriate for each season. Interspersed in the manuscript text are twelve tiny illustrations of farming in the different months. Ploughing, tilling, sowing, milking, hay making, fishing, reaping, picking fruit, threshing, and, in winter, hunting, skating and sitting by the fire sowing. I cherish this book. On the flyleaf is written in an old-fashioned hand the name of my mother’s mother and the date: August 12th 1473. So it belonged to my maternal grandmother, whom I never knew; she died of the plague before I was born.
I should have been grateful to my father, but his apparent indifference towards me still hurts. I know now that he and his wife disapprove of my marriage to the Doctor, because they are against the reforms and blame him for all the unrest and the split in the church. But still, I am his daughter. When I was little, after my mother died, he loved me and needed me. Then his new wife arrived in our home and he no longer noticed me. My mother’s little yearbook sits by my bed. I take care not to repeat what happened the first time I unwrapped the parcel and opened it. Smelling the old parchment, imagining my mother and her mother before her reading these pages, my eyes brimmed over and a big salty tear plopped onto one of the pages, smearing the brown ink; the text opposite May, Haymaking, a bright picture of six men and women scything and tossing the green grass, is now smudged and spoilt!
Philip and Catherine Melanchthon attended the wedding, though they had not been invited to our betrothal. Catherine and I do not always see eye to eye, but they are our next-door neighbours and it doesn’t pay to bear grudges. Like Philip she has red hair, but unlike Philip, who is mild-mannered and equable, she has a sharp tongue and a quick temper. She most probably says the same about me!
Philip was against our marriage to begin with. He wrote to a mutual friend (and this came back to Martin) saying the Doctor was making an appalling mistake marrying ‘the Bora’, and that this union, being entered into with such haste, would destroy the great man’s concentration, his daily routine, his prodigious output on the Old Testament. However, he has subsequently come to realize that the very opposite is true. I make sure my husband and our numerous guests are fed, his clothes and bed linen kept clean and repaired. I supervise the garden and dairy, the pigs, the poultry, the bees, the brewing. Far from hindering him, it soon became obvious that I helped him apply himself to his work.
I am fond of Philip; he is a kind, soft-spoken man, rather shy and absent-minded, so that he can appear vague, when in fact the opposite is true, as his brain whirrs on a higher plain, much of the time in ancient Greek.
So in the evening we all filed across to the Town Hall to join in more dancing and revelling with the townspeople. How tired I was, but how happy!
That night, Martin and I shared a bed for the first time. Four witnesses sat by our bed all night to confirm the consummation; but of course we did nothing, nor could we sleep, so the next day, when most of the guests were due to leave, we both felt exhausted.
In recognition of our wedding and the new life we were beginning together, Martin decided to take a few days away from his studies and translation work. He wanted to spend time with me and I was grateful for that. It was during these early days of our marriage, when each of us still had so much to learn about the other, that he suggested I go with him to the carp ponds. He is Official-Town-Carp-Pond and Production-Inspector, and so is expected to pay occasional, unannounced visits to the ponds to ensure everything is in order: make sure the sluices are well-greased and maintained, the ponds cleaned out at the appropriate time, the breeding programme being properly managed, fish well fed and so on.
It was a perfect summer afternoon. The sky was a deep blue with a few puffy white clouds, the air clear with a hint of a breeze. We rode through the Elster Gate onto the common. Pale marks from the stalls and tents of the sheep shearing fair the week before still showed on the grass. We greeted Gert the town goatherd sitting on a tree trunk, playing tunelessly on a pipe as he watched his motley flock. The boy raised his hat as we passed, and I recognised our own two nanny goats and even the Cranach nannies, which were of a larger type.
“Martin, I want to ask the Council to allow us one more nanny-goat. Two is simply not enough with the amount of mouths we have to feed. Would they allow us to keep three, as an exception?”
“You can certainly ask them, Kathe. If you want something badly enough, you usually manage to get it.”
We laughed and our eyes met. He rode his horse up closer to mine and fondled the mane of my hired bay mare, then we began to trot.
Beyond the fairground strips of land are allocated to different households; we are lucky in having a large vegetable plot within the town walls, while most households have allotments outside the gates. Women, many with babies on their backs, were working the land, hoeing between rows of carrots, tying up beanstalks, weeding lettuces and spinach, transplanting little leeks, watering the onions. Small children played in the culverts, or toddled about near their mothers as they worked. Beside the plots runs a stream, which feeds a series of small conduits in grid lines, providing irrigation for all the strips. The women straightened their backs and shaded their eyes to watch us as we rode by. We raised our hands and they waved back. They all knew who we were, and would gossip about our marriage when they turned back to their work.
We trotted across the causeway, reed beds on either side. New green reed shoots were sprouting up beneath the old ones. The marsh was alive with croaking frogs and rasping crickets; dragonflies glinted like jewels in the bright sun. I caught a glimpse of a beaver’s rump as it slipped quietly into the water; a heron flapped slowly up and away from us, an eel writhing in its beak.
After crossing the marsh, you come out into the open meadows. Some of this land is for arable crops: barley, rye, wheat, oats. Most of it, though, i
s down to grass; the grass had been cut, dried and piled into haycocks, waiting to be brought closer to town and built into larger stacks. The cornfields were already green and lush, and a few cattle were grazing in groups. Between the haycocks flocks of white storks were strolling gracefully about on their long red legs inspecting the grass, occasionally pouncing on a frog or worm. Sometimes they did little hops into the air, or took a short flight up and round, before lowering themselves again gently, vertically, onto the ground.
“Do you think one of those storks is ours?” I asked him as we rode by.
“Could well be. Our chicks are doing well, they’ll be ready for flying lessons soon.”
We have a pair nesting on our roof; they chose the highest chimney, which is no longer in use. It’s supposed to be good luck to have a storks’ nest on your house. Does this mean we’ll be brought a baby next year? I was glad our pair at the Cloister was doing so well. It’s curious, how fond one can get of birds. The way we all love the tame crane which lives with the Cranachs. She is as much a part of the family as the dogs and cats and can no longer migrate in the autumn, so spends the winters here.
At length we reached the carp ponds. They lie about four miles north of the town, half a mile beyond the Leper House, near the ruins of an old monastery. There are three ponds, quite large, but never more than three feet deep. They are on different levels, each connected by a sluice gate to the one below. To one side of them, following the levels, but separate, are three small square ponds for breeding and juvenile fish, with their own dedicated sluice system.
