The Witch of Cologne (42 page)

‘A further ten on the badger, for my brother’s life.’

Ten minutes later the dogkeeper holds up the severed head of the badger amid cheering and booing. To the count it is as if he is holding up the head of Detlef himself, the neck still trailing purple arteries. Transfixed, the count sees the eyes suddenly fly open. Snarling, the head turns to gaze upon its brother.

The nightmarish fantasy is broken by a tap on his shoulder. Carlos, grinning, holds out his hand. ‘You owe me one hundred Reichstaler.’

The count looks down at the friar’s creased palm then spits into it. Furious, he pushes his way through the celebrating revellers. Heinrich follows.

‘Gerhard!’

The count pauses, dizzy with revulsion and anger. Heinrich, breathing heavily, catches up to him.

‘I promise you, your brother will keep his life.’

‘The word of a Wittelsbach?’

‘The word of a Wittelsbach.’

D
etlef’s body,
naked except for a grimy loincloth thrown over him for the sake of decency, is stretched to its absolute length. Each joint shines pale bone through the stretched mottled skin. Leather thongs are lashed around his wrists and ankles where they are fastened to the wooden cogs of the stretching rack, the skin chafed and bleeding. A wide iron band is strapped around his head, a screw bolted at each side of his eye sockets. His face is an ivory mask of anguish but his eyes are defiant.

Carlos, inches away from Detlef’s face, gazes along the length of the tortured limbs—as he had envisaged, still beautiful
in extremis.
There is a nobility to flesh under duress that cannot be mimicked, the inquisitor observes silently. It is as if the spirit rises to the very limit of the physical self and shines out before finally departing. This is how our Lord must have looked on the cross. Beauty, spirit and agony incarnate.

The inquisitor puts a finger to Detlef’s wrist. The German twitches at his touch.

‘Another turn of the screw and this bone will pop out of its socket. Then it will be your knees, then your ankles, then your thigh bones will tear out of the hip sockets. Unless, of course, I decide to destroy your eyesight first.’

Detlef licks his lips, trying to find the spittle to form speech.

‘What do you want from me, Monsignor Solitario? A confession? Penance?’

‘Tell me where the Jewish witch and her bastard are and you shall be freed, maybe even pardoned. Make a public declaration of the error of your ways and you could even be reinstated as canon. One word, Pastor von Tennen, and the pain will vanish magically. Freedom, respectability, how sweet that must sound…’

‘Never.’

Detlef’s whisper is barely audible.

Carlos nods and the torturer turns the wooden handle languidly, lovingly. The cogs creak as they rotate slowly. It is a sound Detlef has grown to loathe in the last four hours.

His sinews stretch tauter and tauter until there is a loud popping sound as his left wrist disengages from his hand.

‘Ahhh!’

‘She is a witch, a succubus, the whore of the devil! I have the evidence. Her mother was the same, as were the whole Hebrew brood that spawned her. She knows the ways of the kabbala, she has used them against the church, used them to bewitch you, my friend. The child is not your child, you have been deceived. He could be any man’s. She has lain with many—I know it!’

‘She is my wife!’

‘She is a child of Lilith!’

The cogs turn again, this time the other wrist cracks and a kneecap shatters. Detlef is close to fainting, he can no longer hear himself screaming. Instead he hears the haunting sound
of his son singing a nursery rhyme over and over, his clear young voice sweetly resonating around the stone walls of the dungeon.

The inquisitor’s seductive voice is an insidious whisper underneath.

‘Repeat after me: I have seen with my own eyes Ruth von Tennen of the Navarro family performing unnatural acts, rites of the black arts…’

Detlef shakes his head. The minute movement causes a huge ripple of pain across his bloody brow. Carlos, losing patience, taps the iron band bolted around Detlef’s head.

‘Canon, you will at least save your sight if you tell me where they are.’

Again Detlef refuses. Staring up at the vaulted ceiling which is blackened with smoke, as if the screams of the dying have burnt their way into the very stone, he thinks only of Ruth…her naked form stepping out of the river the first morning he knew she was pregnant, the sunlight catching her long hair, water gleaming on her pale skin, her womb rounded, and how then he knew she would be his salvation.

Salvation.
Save me, save me, my love.
The words float through his mind like a cooling balm. The image of her appears. Throwing back her black hair, her long white arms reaching out to pull him to her breast. She is smiling. The look in her eyes is so incredibly familiar that it is as if Detlef is looking at a reflection of himself, all his aspirations, dreams, hopes and joys encapsulated in that one glance, as if his soul already resides in her.

My teacher. My lover. My wife.

And then, over the stench of shit and blood and burning tar, comes Ruth herself, the fragrance of her hair, her skin, the music of her laughter scattering like dew over the screaming.

The inquisitor, seeing that Detlef’s spirit has begun to
withdraw, looses the screw at his temple. Panicking he leans over him, spittle flying.

‘Listen to me, you cannot leave now! I am so close to destroying the last of the Navarros, of holding within my grasp Sara herself, that witch! Detlef von Tennen! Are you listening? You cannot die now!’

But Detlef, his cold flesh twisting with the acrid smoke, no longer hears him.

My pain. My lover. My wife. The taste of her, the love of her I fought for, the life within her I gave.

Carlos, watching Detlef’s eyes roll back into his head, grabs a bucket of water and throws it over the prostrate figure.

‘Wait! You must tell me where she is! For your faith alone!’

But Detlef has already left to be with his family.

There they are in the kitchen
, he thinks, seeing them clearly in his mind’s eye.
I am standing beside the linen cabinet. I can see Jacob, he is on the ground by the stove playing with his tin soldiers. She has her back to me, she has not seen me yet. I gesture to Jacob to be quiet. ‘We are playing a trick on your mother,’ I whisper then I step up behind her and put my hands over her eyes.

At a signal from Carlos, the man in the black hood tightens the iron band. Detlef’s eyeballs bulge like reddened hen’s eggs then burst out of his head.

‘This is your last chance. All you need do is whisper the name of the village, and then freedom!’ Carlos, out of his mind with frustration, shouts into the dying man’s ear.

I turn her face towards me, she is smiling that mysterious crooked smile of hers. I kiss her, and as she softens in my arms I realise that this is the moment I have been living for. Contentment. In trust. In joy. In peace. For I have come home.

My Lord, I have not failed you in this moment of darkness and you have not failed me. For in love I surrender my life, and in love I am everything and nothing. For ever and ever. Amen.

His body starts to shake violently as it goes into its final throes.

‘No! No! You cannot do this to me. Give me the witch! Give me Sara!’

Carlos thuds his fists onto Detlef’s shuddering chest over and over until the body stops twitching. Only then does the inquisitor come to his senses, staring at his hands which are covered with the dead man’s blood.

He swings around to the guard. ‘Get a priest! Now! Don’t you understand? He needs the last rites!’

‘But Monsignor, you are a priest!’

‘No. Not me, you idiot! It cannot be me!’

The guard glances at the contorted body on the rack, the prisoner is obviously dead. Confused, he looks back at the inquisitor.

‘Go! You fool! Now!’

Carlos pushes the guard towards the door but Heinrich, flanked by two clerics, stands blocking the entrance.

‘What have you done? He was cousin to a prince! A Wittelsbach!’

‘He was a heretic!’

‘Heretic or no, I made a promise. He did not deserve this death!’

‘The Grand Inquisitional Council—’

‘Out! Out of my sight!’

After the inquisitor has gone, Heinrich tenderly lays the two feet together. Taking Detlef’s broken hands into his own, he strokes them, muttering softly as if to a child, and crosses them over the bruised and bloody chest. To the amazement of the guards, the archbishop takes off his own purple cloak and covers the body with it carefully, meticulously tucking the folds around the lifeless flesh. Then and only then, on his knees in his pale undergarments, his face close to Detlef’s
battered features, does Heinrich perform the last rites, his silent tears falling onto the torn flesh.

Behind the kneeling archbishop there is a sudden splash from the dunking vat. Unable to suppress his curiosity, a guard tiptoes over. He looks in, then jerks his head back in horror as three huge eels writhe up out of the water.

T
he old woman carefully presses the gold coin
into the eye socket. The eyes have gone, but now that she has sponged the blood and broken flesh from the face she can see that this was once a handsome man, grace still visible in the creased flesh. He looks familiar but she knows better than to search her memory, for she is the corpse-dresser brought in to put to rest the secretly murdered, the tortured, those the authorities wish to forget.

She works swiftly, without thought, winding the shroud around the narrow hips, binding the arms against the collapsed rib cage. After stepping back to view her handiwork in its entirety, she pulls the pale cotton cloth low over the dead man’s forehead, covering his broken sight. The mouth and the patrician nose jutting out like a sliver of white marble are the only visible remnants of his humanity.

The sound of approaching footsteps makes the old woman pause. She is in an arched vault of a crypt below the cathedral, a hidden place where for centuries the church has
brought its renegades to be laid out before the anonymity of a pauper’s grave.

A noblewoman in fine lace and a silk veil appears at the door of the chamber, lamp in hand. Without a word she hands the old woman a small purse heavy with gold. The corpse-dresser curtsies and moves to stand discreetly outside the door for a few moments. It is a ritual she has performed many times for many dead men who were once loved.

Birgit Ter Lahn von Lennep pushes back her veil. Her face, now older and fuller, has traces of its former sensuality but a new heaviness born of grief and discontent has worked a web of fine lines across the forehead and around the mouth.

Birgit crosses herself then, trembling, walks up to the corpse laid out on the marble slab. With the lightness of a butterfly descending upon a leaf, she places her fingertips on the cold mouth.

‘Once, Detlef, I would have wept to see you thus. Once I would have died for you. Now there are no tears, for there is no time left, my nobleman. Know this: I loved you honestly for all the art between us, but in a moment of weakness it was I who was your betrayer.’

In the stillness that follows, a terrible loneliness sweeps through her as she realises that all that ever mattered in her life were the moments she had loved with this man.

The shovel bites into the icy mud, cutting a sod seven inches deep. Hurled out of the deep hole, the sod lands on a pile of soil beside the grave. The grave-digger, drunk, sings a ditty in guttural Bavarian as he cheerfully continues to work in the rain.

Detlef’s body, stiff in its shroud, lies on the grass beside the open grave. Face and hands now entirely covered, the body
less than a broken shell. Alphonso, kneeling, pushes back the hood of his short cloak. Allowing the rain to wet his cheeks he looks up at the leaden sky. An ordinary evening like any other, except that he is at the gravesite of a man who is about to be buried with no mourners but himself.

The actor pulls out a short dagger and carefully cuts the sodden fabric away from the corpse’s face. The visage is exposed, an ashen death mask of surprising tranquillity. Alphonso, barely pausing, cuts a lock of hair away from the scalp, then makes a rent in the stained cotton through which he takes out the lifeless hand. The silver wedding band is loose on the shrunken white finger. He pulls it off then covers up the corpse again.

He turns to leave, then hesitates. The grave-digger is still singing, a bawdy refrain the actor recognises from the brothels of Munich. Alphonso tosses a coin into the open grave and, as the grave-digger scrambles for the money, kneels again and in perfect Hebrew begins to recite Kaddish for the dead.

Carlos bangs shut the heavy door of his chamber. Leaning against it, he listens to the sound of his pounding heart.

If only this was all the world he had to deal with, he thinks, weary beyond belief.

A Basque folk song he used to play floats faintly into his mind, as absurd and meaningless as a hummingbird above a battlefield. Is this sorrow or relief, he wonders, suddenly aware that the great construction of his quest has evaporated into nothing but aching regret and the terrible devastation of unrequited love. There is no redemption, he thinks, except death and the peace it will bring.

Feeling every minute of his sixty-four years, he walks
slowly over to his travelling chest and, kneeling, painfully brings out the casket that a young girl of twelve once gave him in innocent affection.

Slowly he opens the carved lid and is immediately struck by the absence of scent. There is nothing, no aroma of cedarwood, of oranges, of musk, of the sweet pungency of his youth’s passion, nothing but the bitter smell of smoke. He looks closer: the inside of the casket is mysteriously burnt, black with charcoal, as if the spirit of Sara’s anger has manifested and scorched away the last memory her young music tutor has carried with him all these years.

With great deliberation, Carlos breaks the wooden box against the marble floor. Reaching down to pick up a large splinter, he runs the jagged edge down his unblemished cheek. Bent over the shattered casket, one hand covering the old scar, the other the new wound, he weeps into his own blood.

As the stained tears splash upon the floor, a woman’s finger, long and gnarled, the nail resembling the tip of an owl’s talon, creeps unnoticed from the broken pieces of the casket. It is followed by a second finger, a third and fourth, then a crooked thumb, until the whole hand, deep purple in skin-tone, rests for an instant, still unnoticed, against the priest’s heaving chest.

Suddenly the hand springs open like the steel jaws of a hunter’s trap, the long nails pierce the grey cassock and punch a hole in the priest’s breast. Too shocked to scream, the inquisitor watches in horror as the hand fastens itself around his pumping heart and tears it out of his chest so that he is staring down at his own pulsating organ as the hand squeezes.

The bloody pulp pushes up between the skeletal fingers until the thudding organ shudders to a stop and Carlos falls, his lips still echoing Lilith’s name.