The Witch of Cologne (3 page)

‘The buffoon implies stupidity whereas Herr von Fürstenberg is far more calculating.’ Detlef’s voice rings out and is joined by the cawing of a crow flying overhead.

The minister’s face floods with uncharacteristic confusion, uncertain whether Detlef has insulted him or complimented him. This time Heinrich breaks into a full belly laugh, shaking so vigorously that he further inflames his gout.

‘Wilhelm, the lad has the edge on you. He will run rings around this idiot zealot. Why, I am tempted to go myself, just to be witness to the Spanish humiliation.’

‘Your honour, I am happy to bow to Canon von Tennen’s superior wit but I doubt his diplomacy.’ Von Fürstenberg, unamused, turns his flushed face towards the prelate.

Wilhelm Egon von Fürstenberg’s ferocious ambition is legendary, intimidating even the archbishop. The minister has both close allies and enemies within the Gaffeln, but also secret
links directly to the French king himself. A portly man in his mid-forties whose Achilles heel is sensuality, von Fürstenberg’s one true ally is his younger brother Franz Egon von Fürstenberg, an individual Heinrich trusts even less since he embroiled him in the siege of Münster four years earlier. Despite Heinrich’s initial reservations, Franz Egon von Fürstenberg convinced Cologne to send artillery and troops. It was an expensive exercise that is still dragging on, and has left Heinrich compromised.

Not that Wilhelm is much better, Heinrich muses, with his constant fondling of King Louis’ toes. Sometimes Heinrich wonders where the risky courtship will lead him. And whom Wilhelm is actually working for—the archbishop or the ambitious French royal? Distracted, Heinrich twists a large cross he is wearing—a holy relic, it contains a desiccated piece of the tongue of Saint Ursula. Suddenly he realises the court is awaiting his response.

‘Even more reason to send Detlef, let him insult the Spanish!’

‘Your grace,’ von Fürstenberg steps forward, ‘let me remind you that the Inquisition, although now almost toothless, is not entirely without muscle. Remember, this man Carlos Vicente Solitario was too meticulous and enthusiastic a prosecutor even for the Grand Council itself. Of all the inquisitors, Solitario has executed the greatest number of heretics. An achievement the pope himself has recognised by bestowing upon the good friar the title of monsignor. I have heard this from the Inquisitor-General Pascual de Aragon. There must be a reason why the emperor has chosen Solitario as his ambassador. Is it possible that somehow we have fallen out of favour with both Rome and Vienna?’

‘If
we
have, I am sure you would be the first to know about it. And Wilhelm, let me remind
you
that muscle is easily cut by the sword. Detlef will go.’ Heinrich’s reply is frosty with anger.

Von Fürstenberg bows curtly to Detlef, his bulbous eyes full of sarcasm as he assesses his rival.

Heinrich stifles a yawn then dismisses the huddled assembly, who scatter like geese. Detlef waits while the archbishop watches the grey figures scurry across the icy grass, snow beginning to float down with gentle abandonment. Sighing loudly, Heinrich hauls himself to his feet and walks heavily over to Detlef. Inches away from the canon he breathes a heady concoction of cloves and garlic into his face. Then, grabbing his cassock, pulls him closer.

‘Cousin, fail me and I will make sure you immediately cease to take confession. I don’t care how much money Meisterin Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep donates.’

Detlef, scarcely daring to inhale the malodorous breath, nods imperceptibly. ‘What would you have me do?’

The archbishop’s hand remains gripped around Detlef’s robe while he pauses for thought.

‘I have heard rumour of whom Solitario is to arrest. Four individuals—two of our own merchants and two denizens of no consequence: one, a Dutchman, the other, a midwife. Curse the Inquisition and their meddling, can’t they stay within their own borders! I want you to milk the Spaniard for information and then I shall decide our response. But I promise you: if there is a head they want in Vienna they shall have it, but it will not be my own.’

He drops Detlef’s cassock and thrusts his left hand imperiously under the canon’s nose. The bishop’s ring, mark of his holy anointment—a huge ruby set in gold, a stolen trophy from the Crusades—sits upon Heinrich’s plump finger. Detlef lowers his head and kisses the glistening jewel, his eyes closed tightly.

R
uth pours the boiling water
into the small tin bath then tests the temperature with a finger. Perfect. She goes over to the wooden shutters and pauses, staring out at the barren field which lies beyond. The ploughed broken soil thrown up with the snow; the winter trees like gnarled dwarves against a huge sky. For a moment she watches the grey firmament, the sun a struggling pale disk, the clarity caused by her exhaustion stirring up myriad observations.

Here time moves only with the seasons, as it has always done, even before man, she concludes.

The noisy narrow lanes of Amsterdam appear in her mind: their placement alongside the mephitic canals, the ebullience of the Dutch merchants and their servants as they hurry through the markets, the frenetic shouts of the traders as they call out the latest figures from the East India Company. There man is finally conquering the seasons; he is swept up in the urgency of the future, stopping only for the wild storms on the North Sea and the English war.

In her tiny cottage on the edge of the town Ruth’s musings fill her mind, and with that meditation comes memory and questioning.

She had an unusual childhood. Not only had her father married an outsider—a Sephardic woman—but their union was one of the heart and not the customary arranged marriage of Deutz. The young rabbi’s choice was unpopular and both his Spanish wife and their young daughter had suffered the brunt of the community’s xenophobia. Sara ben Saul died in childbirth when Ruth was six and the small girl wore the solitary air of self-containment that marks bereaved children. She lived alone with her father until his own brother, Samuel, was widowed and with his only son Aaron moved into the large brick house adjacent to the cheder where Elazar ben Saul, as chief rabbi, was entitled to live. The two brothers found solace in their companionship. Elazar, the elder, provided a kernel of stability for Samuel, the more extroverted man, while their children—both motherless—grew to be de facto siblings.

Two years older, wild, defiant and dangerously intelligent, Aaron embodied everything the small girl longed to be. Ruth worshipped the thin boy whose passionate tantrums intimidated even his father. A dreamer, at night Aaron would keep the little girl awake while he whispered how when he grew up he would see countries his father had never seen. How he would travel as a Christian and be free to own land and trade with whomever he liked and employ more than two servants, the maximum allowed to a Jew. Both children knew these blasphemous fantasies could only be murmured in the shadows of the bedroom they shared tucked high into the rafters of the narrow house.

Often, frightened for Aaron and his audacity, the small girl would creep into his bed and fall asleep in his arms. Nevertheless, both children shared an intense intellectual curiosity, which their fathers encouraged, and the small girl
became infected by Aaron’s passion for free thought. A passion that was fully ignited by an encounter at a fair.

The fairs—huge metropolises of tents and wooden stalls that blossomed like mushrooms beside the medieval walls of the cities—were thriving hubs of bustling commerce where all manner of entrepreneurial denizens, from Jews to gypsies, offered an immense variety of services from moneylending to diamond trading to lacemaking. Here marriages were made, wars declared and secret financial deals brokered.

It was at the Naumburg fair that Ruth, having wandered from her father’s side, became transfixed by a Lutheran zealot standing on an old cart covered in straw. The little girl watched and listened, her green eyes dark with amazement as he held forth fearlessly, describing a free society, a place where all—Catholic, Lutheran, woman, Jew and Moor—were equal. The man, painfully thin, his beard pale with dust and a battered cap drawn low over his fiery eyes, spoke with a passion that captivated the young child. Even when pelted by rotten fruit, he continued unperturbed until he was finally hauled off the cart by the city guards.

When Aaron and Elazar eventually found her, Ruth was still standing gazing at the spot where the zealot had preached, her mind saturated with dreams of a universe where she would be allowed to read the Torah, would be free to stand like a man with her father at the holy ark and to choose her own husband—notions that hitherto were unthinkable.

The child was so quiet on the journey home that the rabbi was secretly frightened a dybbuk might have crept into the small girl’s soul. In a way it had: the world the zealot described haunted Ruth’s imagination. It was a vision that was to shape the course of her adult life.

When Aaron was twelve, Samuel, a small man famous for both his short temper and his sense of humour, was unlucky
enough to be caught by the Bund, a marauding band of anti-Semites who had crossed the Rhine seeking amusement.

The young widower was driving back from the kosher slaughterer’s with a bag of headless chickens prepared for the Sabbath dinner when the rabble came across him. They made Samuel run like a cockerel himself, then hanged him from a tree. Aaron, hiding in his father’s cart, witnessed the whole event. The young boy would never forget the sound of his father’s voice cursing the edict which decreed that no Jew could bear arms as he saw the youths with their swords and knives bearing down on him. Nor would he ever forget the terrible powerlessness he felt as he remained hidden under the sackcloth while they strung his father up, legs kicking wildly, from the old linden tree in the centre of the town square while everyone else hid behind closed doors.

A year later, just after his bar mitzvah, Aaron secretly joined a gang of Jewish youths dedicated to avenging the tragedies caused by the edict. One night, dressed in dark clothes, their faces smeared with soot, the boys travelled far beyond Deutz. They ambushed and killed a Catholic farmer who had recently slaughtered a Jewish family for squatting on his land.

Ruth was in the small parlour helping Rosa, her nursemaid, to spin when Aaron ran in covered with dust, his hands bloody, a sword strapped defiantly to his waist. While Rosa ran for help, Ruth hid the weapon in her dowry chest and promised her cousin that she would never betray him.

When the soldiers from Cologne finally raided the house they found the thirteen-year-old boy draped in his father’s prayer shawl, sitting stiffly in Samuel’s place of honour at the dining table. The dignity of the youth momentarily stunned them before they pulled the silent boy from the table and clapped irons on him.

A week later, all six youths were found guilty, some of them aged as young as ten. It was then that Elazar, as chief rabbi, and the community leader, Hirz Überrhein, donned black hats and made their way across the river to plead with the city mayors for leniency. Despite their supplications, the boys were tried and executed. Their bodies hung on the city gates as a warning to all those who might harbour similar ambitions.

Elazar ben Saul’s hair turned white overnight. He covered his windows, blocking out the sight of the Catholic city for a full six months in protest. Ruth’s childhood innocence was lost for ever, the security of the small world that surrounded her irredeemably destroyed.

While her father buried himself in his grief, Ruth transformed from an outgoing optimistic child to a darkly serious young woman. It was as if some of Aaron’s spirit had seeped into her own. She started sleeping with the boy’s sword hidden under her pallet and slowly the dangerous dream of revenge began to ferment in her adolescent mind.

A year later, when Ruth was approaching womanhood, Rosa decided that after all this turmoil the child was mature enough to receive her mother’s inheritance, hoping to give the girl back some faith after the trauma of Aaron’s execution. The Tikkunei Zohar was a collection of mystical texts that specialised in practical magic, both black and white—it would provide the young girl with guidance and, most importantly, personal and cultural self-esteem.

As she lay dying Ruth’s mother had asked the nursemaid to become the guardian of the Zohar and to hand it secretly to Ruth when she was of age. The tome was the only heirloom Sara had been able to save from the annihilation of her family. The Navarros’ edition of the Zohar was signed by the greatest kabbalistic scholar of them all, Moses
de Leon. Priceless, it was a magnificent leatherbound book sealed with an ornate lock encrusted with jewels that dated back to the fourteenth century.

The Zohar was considered the bible for any aspiring kabbalist. But unlike their Sephardic cousins, the Ashkenazi Jews had determined that the only people allowed to study its teachings had to be over forty years of age and male. As a rabbi’s daughter Ruth was painfully aware of this strict law. Even Elazar himself, who had secretly taught his daughter how to read the Torah, risking religious condemnation and possible excommunication, was deeply shocked when the precocious young girl demanded that she also be allowed to study the Zohar. What Elazar did not realise was that Rosa had already begun Ruth’s education, narrating its contents to her in allegorical bedtime stories in Spanish, a tongue the rabbi had no knowledge of.

On the occasion of Ruth’s first bleeding, Rosa took her into the synagogue in the middle of the night. They stood in the women’s section, a sealed-off balcony from which women were allowed to peer down into the main area of worship. From there they could stare at the altar with its brass gates where the scrolls of the Torah were kept beside the everlasting light, the small bronze oil lantern that was kept burning always. There below was the domain of the men, the anointed keepers of the rarefied spiritual world of Judaism. A domain which Ruth wanted desperately to be a part of. Her nursemaid knew this and so, with trembling hands, conscious that she was breaking every religious law, Rosa handed over the ancient Zohar.

In the dim candlelight, in the middle of the night in the silent temple—a venue so outrageous that Rosa knew it was safe—the young girl carefully turned the minute ornate gold key and lifted the ancient embossed leather cover. Immediately the secrets of the kabbala lifted from the open
pages, flying dizzily around the closed balcony like a cloud of swarming butterflies, filling the air like a hailstorm of fluttering jewels to settle on the young girl’s trembling lips and eyelids:
How to turn water into wine, how to bring a clay man to life, how to ascend to Heaven and consult with the angels, how to bring the dead back to life, how to exorcise a dybbuk, how to ward off the demon Lilith in times of childbirth…

It was magic rooted in the ethics of living, but more importantly for Ruth, the book was a direct link with her own ancient Sephardic roots, a touchstone for her mother’s family and the relatives she had never known.

From then on the girl devoted herself to her studies. She learnt that the Zohar contained a description of the essence of God, known in the kabbalistic text as Ein Sof—‘without end’—an explanation which deliberately encompassed God’s lack of boundaries in both time and space. She read how the kabbalists believed that Ein Sof interacted with the universe through ten emanations from this essence known as the ten Sefirot. The Zohar itself was divided into ten parts, one on each Sefirot, each section opening with a gilded representation of the emanation. The book began with the highest and worked down to the lowest, although the Sefirot themselves were not considered to be separate deities but intimately a part of God. Their configuration formed an illustration of the Divine connected in an instant with everything in the universe, including humanity. This idea captivated the young girl and, eager for more knowledge, she studied the manuscript late into each night, learning how all the good and all the evil man did resonated through the Sefirot and affected the entire universe up to and including God himself. She memorised the entire text, then began to introduce kabbalistic talismans into her own life—to protect her father, to make rain, to end a storm. On each occasion she recorded the cause and effect in a small diary she kept
hidden with the tome. This journal was the forerunner of her scientific discipline, the training for later research.

Ruth decided that she would draw on magical powers to avenge her cousin’s execution. If the Jewish elders of Prague could summon up a golem—a giant made from the river mud of the Moldau—she could do something similar. Inspired by the lingering heat of her dead cousin’s fury, the bond by which she kept Aaron’s memory alive, she started to make a plan. A witness herself to the terrible power of the she-demon Lilith, she had hidden behind a curtain and watched her mother bleed to death after giving birth to a tiny but perfectly formed dead baby boy. If Lilith could strike down two lives so easily, who knew what else she could do if summoned? The young girl decided to inflict the evil spirit upon the authorities of Cologne.

To prepare, Ruth fasted for several days to ensure her body was pure enough to evoke the spirits. Feigning an optimistic disposition, she tricked Rosa into believing that her lack of appetite and strangely pale complexion were the result of an unnamed, unrequited infatuation. It was a notion the nursemaid found perfectly acceptable but one which the young girl found absurd.

Ruth’s plan was to wear an amulet for warding off Lilith but to reflect the lettering backwards through a looking glass to cause the reverse effect: the amulet would summon Lilith instead of repulsing her. She also decided to write the incantation in her own menstrual blood, believing this to be so profane it could not but attract the female demon.

The night of the waxing moon came. Ruth waited until the rest of the household was sleeping, then, after lighting four black candles placed at the points of the compass around her bedroom, she sat naked before a large curved looking glass and began to chant the kabbalistic incantations she had memorised to put herself into a trance.

At the stroke of midnight Ruth found herself staring at her reflection in the dim looking glass. Her dark hair was loose over her shoulders, the amulet—a handmade card with the three angels, Snwy, Snsnwy and Smnglf, drawn on it—hung between her budding breasts. Closing her eyes she repeated over and over the different names she knew for the demon: Lilith, Karina, Tabi’a, the harlot, the wicked, the false, the grandmother of Satan—until, her head spinning, she began to feel as if her body was lifting from the ground and she had started to float. Her soul streamed out from the top of her head, beyond the ceiling, up into the night sky like light from a thousand candles.