Free The Witch of Cologne by Tobsha Learner

anger.
    Sighing heavily the priest walks over to the travelling chest and with a grunt swings open the lid. On top of several Bibles and bound manuscripts sits a small black wooden box with two Hebrew characters inscribed on the lid. The scent of cedar, almost overpowering, radiates out from the casket.
    Carlos breathes in deeply. It is as if the bouquet is the young Spanish woman herself, the object of his obsession. His Holy Grail that has sent him careering from one corner of the continent to another these past two decades. Reaching for the casket, he lets his hands rest upon its lid for a second, his eyes closed. He is so close, he thinks. It might be too late to destroy the mother, but it is not too late to obliterate the daughter and the whole demonic bloodline of the Navarros.
    The priest sits on a low stool—the only seat in the monastic cell—and opens the box with trembling hands. It is the third time in his life that he has unfastened the casket. An intense slow burning, not unlike approaching orgasm, infuses his whole body. With a high sweet note, barely audible, the carved lid falls open and the fragrance of cedar which already fills the room like an invisible cloud is joined by an underscent of something far less discernible, a lemony perfume with an overlay of orange blossom. The scentsmerge like a filigree of delicate lace flooding with blood. To the quivering friar the bouquet is his youth: the orange blossom still lingering at dusk in the long Aragon summer; the sweet faint sweat of a young woman’s armpit; crushed grass beneath soft leather.
    Moaning, Carlos throws back his head. This is the aroma that manifests the greatest joy and the greatest tragedy of his life.
    He looks back down and traces the empty interior of the box: the ribbed grain of the wood which he imagines to be her silken flesh, the heavy weight of her hair, the dry warm imprint of her hand. Slowly, with a great sense of ritual, he lifts the casket and holds it beneath his flaring nostrils.
    Inhaling, the inquisitor conjures up the very odour of the girl’s skin, the luminous intelligence of her huge black eyes, the cutting wit which shattered the hopeful soul of a young music tutor, leaving nothing but fixation and bitterness. Sara Navarro of Aragon, later known as Sara bas Elazar Saul, wife of Elazar ben Saul, rabbi of Deutz.
    Thirty years before, as a young friar, Carlos had taken to teaching his second great love, the viola da gamba, to supplement his dependency upon the common purse. He applied for a position as a music tutor with the Navarro family. The sumptuousness of their villa combined with their sophistication—all of them travelled regularly across Europe—had intimidated the young country boy. A shy stuttering individual, he was too deeply ashamed to admit that he came from a peasant family in the barren south.
    Isaac Navarro was one of the wealthiest diamond merchants in the city of Zaragoza in the province of Aragon. The family were conversos, one of the many Jewish families forced into Catholicism by the decree of King Philip andQueen Isabella several generations before. Although they had changed their name from the Jewish de Halevi to the Spanish Navarro, the patriarch Isaac had been shrewd enough to reinforce their assimilation by establishing close relations with the local aristocracy, supplying them with gifts of gemstones and loans of money. When the second wave of persecution hit and the Spanish authorities decided to pursue the conversos for being false Christians, Isaac was convinced that his family were untouchable. After all, he had donated a fortune to the Catholic church, his children were educated alongside the sons of princes and invitations to his banquets were the most sought after in all of the city.
    It was into this atmosphere that Carlos Vicente Solitario was employed as the music tutor for Sara Navarro. Isaac thought it would benefit his daughter to be seen in the company of an earnest young