The Witch of Cologne
Page 1
For Eva and Esther.
In lebn zeinen wir ale helden.
In life we are all heroines.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Dedication
AUTHOR’S NOTE
MAIN PLAYERS
– KETER – The Infinite
Cologne, January 1665
The Holy City of Cologne
Ruth pours the boiling water
Dear Benedict
Ruth stands outside the narrow house
The horse’s velvet nostrils flare
Ruth squats next to her winter herbs
– CHOCHMA – Revelation
Das Grüntal, The Von Tennens’ Hunting Lodge February 1665
Dear Benedict
– BINAH – Reason
Detlef stares at the globe of
Dear Benedict
Dear Benedict
Burning
– CHESED – Mercy
Müller lies on his back
Fifteen miles away
Das GrüNtal
Das Wolkenhaus, Some Miles From The Von Tennens’ Country Estate
Carlos’s hand sweeps through the air
– GEVURAH – Justice
Ahhh!’
Maximilian Heinrich
The onlookers are gathered in
The swaying of the carriage
The heavy drapes are drawn against the cold afternoon
Maximilian Heinrich wakes
The handsome young musician
– TIPHERET – Equilibrium
Deutz, June 1665
The loaf of golden challah
Carlos bravely places the morsel of stuffed pig’s intestine
Ruth and Detlef lie on the straw
Rosa
Condensation drips down the grey-green stone walls
They shelter in a ditch
– NETZACH – Victory
Das Wolkenhaus, Late Winter, 1666
They say they will declare the scourge
Is there no end to the decrees
The small but ornate banquet hall
The acrid smell of amber
The only light seeps in
The point of light slowly grows
– HOD – glory
Nieuwendijk, Amsterdam, Spring 1670
Leopold bends over a tall pale pink orchid
My dear Brother
The coach rolls to a halt
A chill whistling through the crack
Gerhard, exasperated
There has to be a way!
The spy, Georges
Detlef’s body
The old woman carefully presses the gold coin
Jam waiting, my love
– YESOD – Truth-speaking
Rampjaar, The Hague, Winter, 1672
Twentieth of August, 1672
– MALCHUT – Kingdom
The Hague, Spring, 1683
The youth kneels
HISTORICAL BACKDROP
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tobsha Learner
Copyright
About the Publisher
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although I have chosen to include real historical figures within this story, it is a fictional narrative set against a backdrop of both accuracy and exaggeration, written with the utmost respect and affection for my characters and the cities and countries they live in. I ask readers to forgive any shortcomings as they are entirely unintentional.
MAIN PLAYERS
* Indicates real historical figures.
DEUTZ
RUTH BAS ELAZAR SAUL Midwife, 23, only child of Elazar ben Saul.
MIRIAM Ruth’s assistant, 15.
ELAZAR BEN SAUL Ruth’s father, chief rabbi of the Jewish quarter of Deutz.
SARA BEN SAUL née NAVARRO Ruth’s deceased mother.
ROSA Ruth’s old Spanish nursemaid.
TUVIA HOROWITZ Elazar’s assistant, Polish, 21, follower of the self-proclaimed Messiah, Shabbetai Zevi.*
COLOGNE
DETLEF VON TENNEN Canon to the cathedral, 33, cousin to Archbishop Maximilian Heinrich, a Wittelsbach aristocrat.
GROOT Priest, Detlef’s clerk.
CARLOS VICENTE SOLITARIO Spanish Dominican, inquisitor under the Inquisitor-General Pascual de Aragon.*
JUAN Carlos’s secretary.
ARCHBISHOP MAXIMILIAN HEINRICH* (b 1621) Archbishop of Cologne and Bonn, a Wittelsbach prince of the house of Bavaria.
WILHELM EGON VON FÜRSTENBERG* Minister to the cathedral, spy for the French. (Arrested by Leopold I in 1674.)
BIRGIT TER LAHN VON LENNEP Detlef’s mistress, wife to the merchant Ter Lahn von Lennep.
PETER TER LAHN VON LENNEP Birgits husband, cloth importer, powerful town councillor.
DAS GRÜUNTAL (Green Valley)
COUNT GERHARD VON TENNEN Detlef’s elder brother who has inherited the family estate.
HERMANN WOLF Count von Tennen’s gamekeeper and lover.
PRINCE FERDINAND OF AUSTRIA Emperor Leopold’s errant nephew, 17.
ALPHONSO DE LORENZO Italian actor, 18, one of a travelling troupe patronised by the Hapsburgs.
DAS WOLKENHAUS (Cloud House)
HANNA Detlef’s housekeeper at his country residence.
HOLLAND
BENEDICT SPINOZA* (1632-77) Portuguese/Dutch philosopher who was excommunicated by the Sephardic Jewish community of Amsterdam. A humanist, Spinoza was an important expositor of Descartes’ work.
DIRK KERCKRINCK* (b 1639) Doctor and a close colleague of Spinoza. (Ruth apprentices herself to him in his early years as a medical student.)
FRANCISCUS VAN DEN ENDEN* (1602-74) Mentor to many. A radical who ran the Latin school where Spinoza taught and where Kerckrinck (and Ruth) studied.
JAN DE WITT* (1625-72) Councillor pensionary of Holland from 1653-72. Led the Dutch Republic after the end of its war of independence.
VIENNA
LEOPOLD I* Holy Roman Emperor of the Hapsburg Empire from 1658-1705.
SAMUEL OPPENHEIMER* (d 1703) Court Jew (Hofjude) and purveyor-general to Leopold I.
The structure of power in late seventeenth-century Cologne.
Etching of Cologne published in 1670 by Créspy in Paris, from a woodcut by H.R.M Deutsch (1548).
Etching of Cologne in the seventeenth century, showing the Holy Free Imperial City on the far bank of the Rhine and the area containing Deutz on the near bank.
– KETER –
The Infinite
‘The end is embedded in the beginning’
ZOHAR
Cologne, January 1665
Writhing in labour, the pregnant woman screams. Sweat beads her brow. In the flickering candlelight her contorted face bears a strong resemblance to the icon which hangs above the curtained bed: Saint Ursula, one of Cologne’s many saints, martyred for her virginity.
‘Breathe deeply.’
The midwife, Ruth bas Elazar Saul, daughter of the chief rabbi of Deutz, runs her fingers over the taut womb, her hands coated with a slippery ointment made of lily oil, birthwort and saffron.
‘Breathe, it will help ease the pain,’ she instructs. A strand of hair falls from under her twin-peaked damask cap, the telltale bonnet of the Jewess. The two points etch a silhouette of horns against the shadowy wall as she bends to examine the position of the baby.
Slipping her fingers into the groaning woman, the midwife feels how much the cervix has dilated. Her assistant, Miriam, a homely fifteen year old, wipes the patient’s brow and glances anxiously at Ruth. The woman has been labouring for over twenty hours and the baby should have descended by now. Only too aware of the implications for a Jewish midwife should
the birthing of a wealthy Catholic patient go wrong, Miriam discreetly nods towards the birthing hooks: three curved steel instruments by the hearth, sinister in the firelight. Used as a last resort, they are for looping around the head of the baby to force its emergence.
‘No, Miriam, not yet,’ Ruth answers the silent query.
The young woman twists suddenly. The purple veins of her huge belly strain as she grasps the bedposts behind her head. Beneath the greasy skin Ruth traces the geography of the baby, her long fingers searching for the bulge of the head, the tiny knots of the spine and the bones of the feet. Cupping her hands over the vast orb she locates the buttocks, which are pointing towards the cervix. Massaging gently, she tries to manipulate the child so that it will turn, but stubbornly it remains in position.
‘Breech,’ Ruth murmurs softly to Miriam, whose eyes widen in alarm.
The midwife steps away from her patient and opens a leather satchel. Curiously Oriental in design, it has a single letter in Hebrew embossed on the front. With her back turned deliberately away from the bed Ruth lifts out a smoky glass jar filled with a greenish-grey powder.
Crouching, she carefully begins to pour the ashes onto the floor, creating a wide circle which encompasses the writhing woman and the assistant. As she sprinkles with her left hand, she chants the Hebrew names of the three angels—Snwy, Snsnwy and Smnglf—under her breath.
Despite Ruth’s concentration, a fluttering panic begins to rise up in her. It is Lilith, she thinks, who is creeping into her fears. Lilith: the demon that strangles newborns and takes the lives of labouring mothers. The secret embodiment of all her uncertainties, all her desires; the nebulous phantom who has haunted her since she was a young girl and witnessed her own mother perish in childbirth. Ruth imagines she feels the air shift above her; she can almost sense the invisible presence of the fiend, almost smell the sulphurous breath drifting over her left shoulder.
This is not good reason, the midwife reminds herself, and summons the cold clarity of her medical training to expel the dread that is squeezing up through her muscles. But the image of the demon persists: the undulating seductress seems to be staring at her from every corner of the dark wood-panelled room, her misty outline hovering at the edge of Ruth’s vision.
From outside comes the eerie cry of a screech owl. Looming through the grey dawn its white wide-eyed face is suddenly at the window as it thuds blindly into the glass. It is Lilith’s totem, the creature she transforms into to suckle at the breasts of young children or the dugs of goats. Crouching by the bed Miriam gasps in fear, her hand reaching up for the Magen David lying hidden beneath her robe. Ruth, holding down her terror, doggedly continues the hex against the demon.
A second later a long shadow flits suddenly across the ceiling. Shrieking, the labouring woman curls up in agony. Miriam fights to pin down her resistant limbs. Determined, Ruth grits her teeth and completes the circle, her low mantra growing in volume. Soft grey ash meets soft grey ash as the circle of protection is sealed. Sitting back on her haunches, the midwife breathes a sigh of relief. She has taken all possible precautions now, spiritual as well as medical.
She stands and rinses her hands in the washbasin, then steps out to the small chamber that leads off the bedroom.
Meister Franz Brassant rises to his feet. A large man in his early fifties, he is at least twenty-five years older than his wife, nevertheless he wears the fashionable clothes of a younger man: an embroidered velvet waistcoat over a silk undershirt, breeches edged in lace; the uniform of an affluent bürger. Brassant sits on the town council, the Gaffeln, and is connected to the four most powerful merchant families of Cologne.
‘How is she?’ An odour of stale sweat and fear rises from his clothes, still damp from his earlier rush home through the rain.
Knowing there is no time for protocol Ruth decides to trust in the intelligence of the man standing before her. Fastening her gaze to his she pauses for a moment, reading the intensity of the flickering trepidation in his eyes.
‘I will have to cut,’ she answers bluntly.
Shocked, Meister Brassant breathes in deeply, his hands blindly searching for his wife’s coral and silver rosary which he has strung around his thick neck. ‘It is not my custom to allow a Jewess to touch my wife, or even to be permitted into my abode, but they say you are the best in the province.’
‘I am a trained midwife not a miracle-worker.’
‘To not believe in miracles is to blaspheme.’
‘I believe in scientia nova, Meister Brassant. Knowledge and nature. To me, these are the proven properties.’
‘Prayer and faith are the domain of man. All men.’
‘We are wasting time. If the matrix is not peeled back, the child will suffocate and your wife will perish.’
Brassant stares at the small, dark and strangely compelling figure standing before him. This is not a breed of woman he has met before and yet he is expected to surrender the life of his young wife and child to her. His eyes come to rest on a gold crescent pinned at Ruth’s neck—the mark of Spain. She must have Sephardic blood in her. Immediately his demeanour softens: he has traded with the Spanish Jews of Amsterdam and trusts them.
‘You have my permission. But if she or the child dies, you die with them.’
Ruth hardly pauses, her only concern for the patient she attends. She nods and, with a detachment that implies no servitude, curtsies.
‘I will pray anyway,’ Brassant adds as the midwife steps back through the darkened doorway. Just then the labouring woman cries out. Shuddering, the gold merchant crosses himself and kisses the rosary. He has already lost two wives and four children and he dreads the loss of another.
Sinking to his knees he prepares himself for a desperate bargain with God. After all, wasn’t it only last month that he’d paid a hundred Reichstaler for his sins, as much as he hates donating anything to Archbishop Maximilian Heinrich, whom he—like most of his fellow bürgers—regards as an untrustworthy political opponent rather than a spiritual guide. Times are complicated indeed, Brassant thinks, when you have to rely on a Jewish witch to save your wife and a trumped-up French sympathiser in a gilded vestment for redemption.
The copper surgical knife, fashioned by Ruth herself, floats in a cauldron of boiling water slung over the small fire. There is a strong smell of burning cloves. Meister Brassant’s personal medic has insisted on smoking the small bedchamber, holding fast to the Christian superstition that the aroma will ward off evil spirits who could steal the soul of the child as it enters the worldly domain. The midwife, having studied medicine in Amsterdam, a city renowned for its innovation in the new science, has her doubts. But her old mentor, Dirk Kerckrinck, has recently sent her a thesis suggesting that disease may be carried by the invisible aether that fills the air. Because of this hypothesis she tolerates the quack’s bunches of smouldering herbs that make the air nearly unbreathable. Besides, now that she has called on the old ways as a precaution, it would be a hypocrisy not to allow the medic his quirks.
Stepping into the circle of ashes Ruth again feels between the woman’s thighs. The baby has dropped further and the patient’s vulva is stretched paper-thin. If she does not cut, the woman will tear. Yet she will never survive the baby emerging buttocks first.
Ruth pauses. She has attended a breech birth like this before, in one of Amsterdam’s dockside slums with Dirk Kerckrinck. But then the patient was an unmarried housemaid, not the wife of a wealthy bürger. And while Kerckrinck, son of a nobleman from Hamburg, could afford an accident, for Ruth a mistake now means an instant death sentence.
The midwife recalls how Kerckrinck, having failed to turn the baby from the outside, decided to turn it from within. An audacious move for a student with only two years’ training. Ruth, dubious, had argued against it while both of them pored over Galen’s definitive anatomy manual, De usu partium. Ignoring her qualms, the young medical student had cut the skin of the vulva then slipped enough of his fingers inside to manipulate th
e unborn child while she assisted from outside the womb. Both the maid and her child lived. In acknowledgment of its miraculous survival, Kerckrinck had christened the baby Moses.
Abigail Brassant groans again, pleading with Ruth to end her agony. Even in extreme pain the young woman radiates a luminosity which reminds Ruth of the Nordic princesses described in Herodotus’ History. The young girl must have been a prize for the old man waiting anxiously in the next room. Chaucer would have called it the marriage of January and May: a transaction in which romantic love is traded for security. The thought depresses her. For all her fierce practicality and intellectual rigour, she has not been able to exorcise the tantalising possibility of the existence of a soulmate: a man who would match her in both ideals and vision. Rather than face the inevitable disappointment she believes an arranged marriage would bring, Ruth has secretly wedded herself to a vow of celibacy.
She reaches for a crystal bottle containing an elixir of pure alcohol mixed with thorn apple and tinctured with laburnum, a concoction she has invented herself. She pours a few drops onto a handkerchief and places it over the young woman’s nose and mouth. A second later Abigail Brassant calms. With pupils large and dilated she stares up at the fresco painted on the ceiling while Miriam supports her weight. A fresco which depicts the honourable Meister Franz Brassant as a rather overweight and decrepit Perseus slaying the gorgon, the midwife notes wryly.
Remembering the diagram she studied in Soranus’ book on midwifery, Ruth takes up the scalpel and carefully makes one diagonal cut at the side of the vagina to open the vulva further. Opiated, her patient barely flinches as blood splashes her white thighs.
Midwife and assistant work together until finally the purple pasty curve of the head appears, pushing the vaginal lips out until they are almost transparent. As the baby begins to emerge Ruth realises that the pulsating birth cord is wrapped around its neck.