The Witch of Cologne (4 page)

Just at the moment she was terrified that the sensation might be death, a noxious odour swept through the room. It was the smell of sulphur and decay, and under it lay a sickly musk, piercingly sweet, that reminded Ruth of old roses. She opened her eyes.

At first, gazing transfixed into the misty glass, she thought she had imagined the slight movement in the shadows. But as she stared harder, a twitching bluish-white form came suddenly into focus.

It was hideous. The creature, twisted like a crippled thing, lay on its side covered in its own slimy ooze. About seven feet in length, it had the upper form of a woman. A blindingly beautiful maiden with pale blue skin and large silver nipples, she was utterly without hair, her scalp an immaculate shiny dome. But what was most terrifying was her limbs. They ran from her sex into three long tails that Ruth recognised as eels. The writhing, shimmering, marish lengths snaked blindly across the wooden floor.

Paralysed with horror the young girl could not move, could not utter a sound. Lilith, with a violent convulsion, lashed her whole length about the room so that she could lift her colossal face. Gleaming aquamarine in the candlelight,
she glared at her summoner through the looking glass. Her luminous eyes fastened unblinkingly upon Ruth, each pupil shining emerald from lid to lid.

‘Daughter! On what premise have you awoken me? I am not pleased. What desire hath called the great Unmaker?’ Lilith spoke without moving her vast soft mouth.

The demon’s voice filled the young girl’s head, its lascivious hiss making her simultaneously shudder with pleasure and retch with fear. All the commands she had learnt fled her as the abhorrent reality manifested. Shocked beyond thought she tried to scream but no sound emerged.

Disgust rippled through the demon’s body as she gazed at the terrified girl. ‘You should not have taken my name in vain, girl. From this moment onwards I have marked thy soul as mine.’

Her body shaking violently, Ruth’s voice returned and her cry of anguish filled the room.

A second later she woke in her own bed shivering, with Rosa standing over her.

‘’Twas a dream, a nightmare, my child,’ the woman whispered, rocking the weeping girl to her bosom.

She made her drink a glass of hot milk and cloves and left only when she was convinced Ruth had finally fallen asleep. As she crept across the bedroom floor, the nursemaid slipped on a piece of pungent reed still wet with river water. Puzzling over its origins, Rosa tucked it into her pocket, sensing that somehow it belonged to the phantasm her ward had refused to talk about and, if not disposed of, could be used against her in the future.

For weeks afterwards Ruth would not sleep alone and she swore to herself she would never again treat the Zohar or any of its sorcery disrespectfully, especially the magic of the she-demon Lilith. But the idea of harnessing and defeating the
evil spirit started to fester within her. She began to plague Rosa with questions about her mother’s death. Knowing that Lilith was the slayer of newborns and the stealer of the souls of labouring women, she wanted to find out whether the right precautions had been taken at her mother’s second birthing, whether her death could have been prevented.

The old nursemaid, torn between earthly pragmatism and a stoic respect for superstition, evaded the young girl’s questioning until, worn down, she blurted out that Elazar, fearing the mysticism of his Spanish wife’s
converso
family, had torn away the amulets Rosa herself had hung to ward off Lilith when she realised that Sara was struggling badly. Shocked, Ruth asked whether her father was then to blame for her mother’s death? Rosa hastily explained that Sara had been narrow in the hips and birthing was difficult for such women, and that privately she held responsible the quack whom Elazar, desperate to save both mother and child, had rushed in at the last minute. A real butcher who had used birthing hooks, she told Ruth, gesturing graphically with her hands.

The notion that she herself might become the saviour of such women started to haunt the young girl. She thought that, somehow, by becoming a midwife she might magically complete her own mother’s labour safely over and over, for the reward of seeing her mother live on, flushed with health, and her baby brother pink and fat at the breast.

After months of nagging, Rosa finally allowed Ruth to accompany her to the birthing of a good friend. The young woman was having a difficult labour and the community doctor, Isaac Schlam, had been called in to assist. Rosa, busy helping the frantic doctor, asked Ruth to comfort the terrified mother during the delivery. She had excelled at her task, displaying a precocious gift of authoritative calmness which was of immediate comfort to the patient.

Ruth was captivated by the whole experience; she was astounded that from agony such joy emerged. It was at that moment her ambition was cemented: she would become a midwife. Not a butcher, but one who used herbs and craft.

Slowly her grieving over her cousin’s death subsided. But to keep Aaron’s memory alive, on the anniversary of his death she would take his sword and talk to it as if it were the boy himself, whispering all the dark adolescent secrets that had begun to crowd her heart, unaware that one day she would wear the weapon openly.

For some time Elazar had been preparing his daughter for an arranged marriage with the son of a scholar who lived in Hamburg. Having covertly indulged Ruth’s intellectual curiosity by allowing her access to his vast collection of religious and philosophical works, the bewildered father suddenly found himself confronted with the task of transforming a rebellious spirit—whom he privately thought too masculine—into a traditional Jewish wife. This meant Ruth had to learn to weave, embroider, cook the traditional high holiday dishes, as well as master some accountancy to manage household expenditure. Worst of all, she had to abandon her secret readings of the Torah. It was a rude shock for the strongwilled adolescent who found the tedium of weaving mind-numbing and often got sidetracked by the mystical meaning behind the numbers of her accountancy, forgetting the notion of balancing the books. Frustrated and secretly anxious that his daughter would be discovered to be unmarriageable, Elazar took extreme measures, caning Ruth with rushes and locking her in her bedroom until she finished her tasks.

The date for the marriage drew near. Despite Elazar’s praise for the young man and the painted miniature sent from Hamburg which hung over her bed, Ruth felt nothing but
dread. She had the overwhelming sense that her life—as she had envisaged it—was about to end.

The harbour and its promise of escape was always visible through her bedroom window, and that was how the fifteen-year-old Ruth saw the Dutch ship with its tricolour of red, white and blue flying from the mast. As a cloud passed over the sun, its shadow fell across her haunted face and her plan of escape suddenly became manifest.

Dressed in Aaron’s clothes, the young girl crept out that night with the little money she had saved, her cousin’s sword and the kabbalistic word for strength inscribed on an amulet she wore hidden under her shirt.

She bribed the ferryman to take her across to the sleeping port and refusing to give any name other than Aaron, she offered herself as a cabin boy aboard the Dutch ship. The old merchant seaman only agreed to take her when she said she would cook in exchange for a free passage. On board she was befriended by a German chevalier who had fought for both the Dutch and the Spanish and would fight for anyone who would pay him enough. Cynical and bitter, he regaled the young boy with battle stories of famine and rape, of pillage and power.

‘Power is a whore and religion her pimp,’ he proclaimed, wondering why the boy had such smooth skin. ‘Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise, boy.’

On the third night, lying beside her on a narrow wooden bunk, he reached for her and was so shocked to find breasts on the struggling youth that he failed to complete the rape. Ruth, exercising all her wits, managed to hide from him until they docked in Amsterdam the next morning.

Using the little Dutch she had acquired from relatives who had visited from Amsterdam, she made her way to the student quarters attached to the new school of medicine in the Heiligeweg. With rain slanting down behind her,
shivering with cold and hunger, she had bashed against the thick wooden doors until a tall lad with a humorous intelligence about the eyes finally lifted the latch. He gazed in amazement as Ruth uttered three words in Latin:
‘Knowledge search I.’

Dirk Kerckrinck, only eighteen himself, laughed out loud at the youth’s clumsy pronunciation before Ruth dropped like a sack of rags to the pavement in a dead faint. The medical student, recognising the German insignia embroidered on the breast of the muddy military jacket Ruth wore, carried the insensible young stranger up to his humble quarters. He laid her down by the hearth and as he watched her struggle into consciousness decided that such determination deserved a position. Without even asking, he appointed her his valet.

Later, when Ruth revealed her identity as both female and Jewish, Dirk Kerckrinck was delighted. He risked prosecution by sheltering a Jew, but the young radical’s addiction to risk was matched only by his intellectual curiosity. An attribute he soon discovered he shared with his new valet, whom he teasingly reconstructed as Felix van Jos, a shy Calvinist from the city of Utrecht.

In the months following, Dirk Kerckrinck took Ruth to his Latin classes at the house of his teacher, Franciscus van den Enden, on the Singel canal. Van den Enden was a Flemish radical who funded the publication of his own revolutionary ideas by teaching Latin to the children of wealthy and fashionable bürgers. He also had daughters of his own, girls whom he had educated so they were able to hold their side in debate with the outspoken young intellectuals who sought shelter under his roof. If van den Enden suspected the true gender of the awkward youth Kerckrinck insisted on bringing to his tutorials, he never spoke out. The charismatic teacher, mentor to many, could not help noticing that the young man did not shave and his voice was of suspiciously high timbre.
But the boy was bright and his enthusiasm for learning phenomenal. Almost as phenomenal as another of van den Enden’s prodigies, Benedict Spinoza.

The slight, dark young man with the handsome face was already famous for his very public excommunication from the Sephardic community. Now, bereft of family and friends, Spinoza had not only abandoned his Hebrew name of Baruch for the Latin equivalent, Benedict, but had actively carved out for himself a new family of like-minded intellectuals. The sons of merchants who, like him, sensed there was a greater meaning beyond the commerce and banality of prosperity that was making the Dutch
nouveau riche
flabby and self-regarding. Suspecting that the youth also had a Hebrew background, Spinoza warmed to Felix van Jos immediately.

Oblivious to Ruth’s true sex, Spinoza took to instructing the young valet himself, perceiving the youth’s precociousness as a mirror of his own. After the Latin classes when Kerckrinck and Spinoza retired to the beer halls to drink and discuss politics, Spinoza always insisted that the shy youth accompany them. There Spinoza held court, arguing his theory of a God that encompassed all of nature, all of the universe and, even more controversially, that this God’s power was not the power of a king, but of nature, of life.

Fascinated, Ruth would watch as Spinoza, holding up an empty beer glass so that the light shone through it like a prism, continued his soliloquy, oblivious to the rowdy revellers around him.

‘Everything flows from God, but we are limited by imposing our human perceptions upon him. Man designs God according to his own image and the image man has of himself is flawed. It is not our so-called free will which makes us want or desire something, but the disposition of our mind
and body at any given time. Our only freedom lies in exercising reason to such a degree that we transform the passive emotions and the confused ideas which enslave us into a clear awareness of what motivates us. Reason knows exactly and precisely what must be done. Never forget that, young Felix.’

As Spinoza spoke, Ruth felt as if the air itself had suddenly congealed then broken into shards of shining clarity. She saw a way she could apply his philosophies to her own life and the choices she had made so far to pursue her intellect.

It was there in the smoky tavern, between the rowdy students and the whores, that Felix van Jos alias Ruth bas Elazar Saul decided that she would consciously rein in her passions and serve God through a vigorous and rational pursuit of knowledge at the expense of all else.

Often when Spinoza looked at the youth with his soft cheek and luminous green eyes, he found himself wondering why the boy always refused to drink beer and fell into an uneasy silence when the subject inevitably turned to women and the latest sexual conquests. The philosopher assumed he must be virgin and was on the brink of suggesting to Kerckrinck that they pool their money to take him to a brothel when, drunk and morose one night, Dirk confessed that his young valet was female and a Jewess. Worse, that he had begun to lust after her.

Deeply shocked, Spinoza—who regarded women as inherently inferior beings—found that he could only accept Ruth as a freak of nature, an abnormal creature with the intellect of a man trapped in the feeble shell of a woman. He told Dirk never to mention the true sex of his apprentice again. Only when Dirk’s handsome face collapsed into trembling confusion did the philosopher take pity and, smiling, advised the lovelorn medical student to find a less endangering obsession.

Nevertheless, struggling one night over a translation from the Dutch to the Latin, Ruth leant over Dirk only to find his lips on her neck. Groaning, the student continued to kiss his way up to her mouth despite her protests.

Amazed by the ripples of pleasure that burst from deep within her body, Ruth was unable to push him off. Tasting his tongue, she searched his face in tender amazement. Months of living together, of knowing each other intimately, flowed over and ran like spilt quicksilver across the bare floorboards, fusing their limbs, their skin, their mouths. Until Dirk, bursting at his hose, hoisted her up onto his hips and was about to carry her across to his bed, at which moment Ruth pleaded with him not to destroy both her ambitions and her maidenhood.