by June Trop
Looking back, I realized I’d been waiting years for this admission.
“I understand, Papa. I always have. I never thought you meant to hurt us, but I hope someday you’ll have the chance to explain this to Binyamin.”
Feeling now more like his parent than his child, I peeled his fingers from the glass and grasped his hand.
“No matter what I do, Papa, no matter where I go, the bond between us is secure. For now, I will continue to work with you, to assist you in your business and manage our home, but my goal is to study alchemy, whether or not I ever recover the scrolls. I want to learn how to perfect the spirit of metals and develop the recipes, procedures, and apparatus to work with them safely. And I want to learn how to perfect the human spirit as well.”
The flickering light of the tallow lamp caught the moisture in his eyes. He tried to blink back the tears, so I looked up at the ferns as if distracted by their baskets swaying in the sea breeze.
But then my focus returned to the immediate and the lie I’d been living as Noah’s betrothed. “I’ll go see Noah tomorrow to explain why he must free me from the marriage contract.” I had to see him before Shabbat. I could no longer go through the charade of another day as his betrothed, and once Shabbat arrives, the discussion of all disagreeable matters is forbidden.
So with that announcement, I drained my glass, set it firmly on its saucer, and bid him a good night. When I got up, I realized I was leaving behind the girl who would rather live a lie than risk a confrontation, that I was entering a new stage of life, that nothing would ever be the same. Even the moonlight had changed to a silvery, more luminous blue; the sea breeze, to a fresh-scented wash over my skin. And to my astonishment, I discovered a spring in my stride, as if I were bounding through the aether, no longer compelled to count the steps back to my suite.
Chapter 27
Early Friday Morning
WITH SO MUCH to do to prepare for Shabbat, I typically got up early every Friday morning. But on that particular Friday, my last day to recover the scrolls before having to face Judah empty-handed, I sprang out of bed before dawn. On any other Friday, I might have wriggled down between the sheets to listen to the last breath of the night wind and the chink and tinkle of crockery and cutlery as the cook prepared breakfast. But this morning, I was frantic. I had to speak with Aunt Hannah.
Besides, I couldn’t have slept anyway, with so many shrill images churning in my head. Of the matrons in the quarter, their eyebrows raised, nodding slyly, and exchanging knowing looks while their malicious tongues sprayed fresh gossip about me. Of Binyamin bolting from the litter and running toward the pier. Of the hunchback slipping the letter through the thicket. Of Phoebe’s seizure, Papa’s contrition, and most of all, the emergence of my newly assertive self.
As my thoughts spiraled out of that tangled wasteland, I focused once again on how the thief could have smuggled the scrolls out of this house and whether Aunt Hannah would be able to substantiate my latest theory. As I figured it, the theft must have occurred last Friday evening, the only time during the window of their disappearance that someone other than Papa or Binyamin was in the library with a motive to steal them.
Namely Noah.
I found Aunt Hannah on her chaise lounge in the courtyard, a burst of light from the rising sun edging her face with a pink glow. About to breakfast on the tray before her of cantaloupe chunks dipped in yogurt, a honey muffin with raisins and walnuts, and a cup of ginger tea, she was listening to the fast, nasal-like babbling of our summer warbler. But sensing my presence, she lifted her face and turned to greet me when I sat at the foot of the adjacent chaise lounge.
“Good morning, Miriam. You’re up early. Come have breakfast with me and tell me what our songbird is doing.”
“At the moment, Auntie, she’s perched in the thistle undergrowth on her little gray legs, about to skewer a cricket with her pointed bill. She, like you, is ready to enjoy a hardy breakfast.”
But, jittery with anticipation, my stomach queasy, and my eyes gritty from sleeplessness, I shrank from the thought of eating as if a cockroach had been swimming in her tea. So I changed the subject.
“You know, Auntie, I have yet to recover the scrolls, but I’ve been making progress. I can’t explain it fully yet, but I think Noah took them last Friday evening, and you can help me figure out how he could have done it. Remember, I wrapped him in his himation that night, escorted him to our door, and watched him turn the corner toward his house. So I know he didn’t have the scrolls then.”
My aunt drew in her lower lip and furrowed her brow in total concentration.
“Miriam, tell me why you think Noah took them.”
“He knew I was drawn to alchemy and at the same time pulling away from him, and he knew the theft of the scrolls would discredit me with the League. Perhaps he thought the humiliation would propel me toward marrying him. He might have also caught the rumor Binyamin heard in the quarter that I’d been dallying in the agora with a new sweetheart.
“Perhaps I should be grateful that he’d still want to marry me in the wake of such gossip, but instead I’m incensed that he’d use trickery to manipulate me.”
I didn’t mention to Aunt Hannah that I’d had enough manipulation from Papa to last me a lifetime.
First, I needed to know whether Noah could have taken the scrolls while Papa and Binyamin were arguing. Aunt Hannah recalled the three of them sitting around the cherry wood table. She said Noah was closest to but with his back to the cabinet. Papa was a quarter turn to Noah’s right and facing her. Having just finished playing the cithara, she was still sitting in her spindly-legged chair. And Binyamin was facing Noah and the Etruscan vases. So the scrolls were only an arm’s length from Noah while Papa and Binyamin were arguing.
Next, I needed to know whether Noah could have taken the scrolls into the courtyard.
“Auntie, did you happen to hear Noah wander into the courtyard during Papa and Binyamin’s quarrel?” No one would have found Noah’s absenting himself from a family squabble remarkable, but maybe Aunt Hannah noticed not only that he’d gotten up but where he’d gone.
Before answering, she nodded, found her cup, and took a sip of tea.
“I certainly heard him walking about. His gait is unmistakable and was especially awkward that evening, perhaps because he’d had too much wine while we were waiting for Amram. Which reminds me, Miriam, you seem to be favoring your left side this morning.”
I was too impatient to detail my nocturnal adventures in the Rhakotis Quarter, so I told her I’d tripped and let it go at that.
“But can you tell me, Auntie, whether he walked around during the argument, and if so, whether he wandered into the courtyard?”
Putting her cup back on the tray, she pursed her lips to think and then shook her head.
“No, Miriam. I can’t. I was riveted on the animosity between your Papa and Binyamin and the threat beyond Shabbat to the peace of this household.”
She didn’t say Noah entered the courtyard, but he could have. She wasn’t sure. But I was. So sure that, like a scene illuminated by lightning, I could picture him reaching back into my cubby, snatching the scrolls, hiding them behind his back, slinking behind Papa, slipping into the courtyard, weaving around the island of trees toward the side street, leaning over the bed of poppies, poking the scrolls one by one through the fence, listening for each to drop into the thicket, and then returning to the library just as Binyamin was decimating Papa’s Etruscan vase collection.
No wonder Noah looked feverish. But whether genuine or a sham, his headache was the perfect excuse to leave early without Amram. After rounding the corner of our side street, he would have only had to squat at the curb and reach into the thicket to retrieve the scrolls. And as he pulled each one from the undergrowth, he would have scratched his right forearm on the sharp thistle leaves just as the hunchb
ack had.
Not exactly an attack by a pack of ravenous hounds.
A combustible rage bubbled through me. Springing off the chaise lounge as if it were a bed of burning coals, I bolted out of the courtyard, dashed through the dining room, darted past the pool, bounded out the double doors, and charged down the steps.
The familiar landmarks streaked by as I raced toward Noah’s house like a runner in the pentathlon. I sprinted into the teeth of the sea breeze, its grit parching the inside of my mouth, my tunic whipping about my ankles, my hair splayed in all directions. I pleaded with myself to slow down so I could reach his house with some semblance of poise, but my legs had their own idea.
Chapter 28
Late Friday Morning
I RACED TOWARD Noah’s house propelled by raw rage, my fists clenched, my arms pumping, my heart hammering, my mind whirling, my body awash in a cold sweat despite the molten sun burning through my tunic. At the same time, I sensed the three white-robed Fates nodding in satisfaction as they watched my head bobbing above the hedges, as if they’d long been drawing me to this time and place.
After a stumble and a spill—the ribbon lacing one of my sandals had snapped—I scrambled to my feet, brushed off the dust, and tossed my shoes. Still, my run was hardly slower now as my legs scissored past stables and groves, synagogues and villas, inns and restaurants, cookshops and kapeleia. Scores of grasshoppers snapped their wings to flee from my thunder, while the soles of my feet felt the sting of every nettle, the edge of every stone, the scratch of every briar, the prick of every splinter, and the puncture of every thorn as they pounded against the scorching sand and the razor-sharp spikes of dry yellow grass. My head throbbing, my chest heaving, my stomach twisting, my lungs screaming, my throat constricted, my legs thick, my feet bleeding, I panted toward Noah’s house, all the while repeating to myself that I had nothing to be afraid of. Nothing.
Until I approached the mansion.
Its symmetry more daunting than ever.
My courage curdled when I saw its brooding, wasp-infested plane trees huddled against the outside world. With their gnarled trunks groaning, their boughs twitching, their limbs moaning, their twigs nodding, and their leaves whispering, I knew they were conspiring to block my claim to the scrolls and deny me relief from the marriage contract. As I advanced toward the grand entryway, its pilasters sneered at me. Dread consumed me. What if Noah refuses to give me the scrolls? What if he’s destroyed them? What if he just folds his arms and purses his lips in mock patience when I ask him for a divorce?
I heard myself hollering for Noah, hardly believing I was that madwoman, uncombed and unkempt, banging her fists against the door, smashing her knuckles on its metal studs. But Myron opened the door promptly. If he was startled by my appearance, his wooden face hid any sign, so much so that I might have wondered whether I’d often gone there so disheveled.
Still, he must have hesitated, because I found myself hurtling past him toward Noah’s suite—his sitting room, cubiculum, and peristyle—Myron lagging behind, hustling to keep up with me rather than the other way around. I cut around the atrium’s pool and statues, charging through its cloud of aromatic oils, its onyx tiles cool against the raw soles of my feet. Which way to go? I rushed past a bank of tall, arched, unglazed windows, their shutters open to a thick grove of roses, their blossoms fusing into a single red blanket while the breeze buffeted the slippery drapes and fanned the rich floral scent. I darted down one corridor, its ceiling vaulted, its white travertine walls lined with cages of parrots and talking crows, planters of clipped boxwood, and rosewood tables bearing basins of lavender incense.
And then, recognizing the entrance to Noah’s suite, I hammered on his door while shouting in a voice too hoarse for even me to recognize, “Noah! Noah, let me in!”
Breaking every rule of modesty and restraint, I barged into what used to be his sitting room but now appeared to be something quite different.
The arched ceiling was still embellished with gilded motifs of animals in light relief but was now stained yellow and shadowed with soot. Frescoes of the Great Harbor, the Pharos Lighthouse, and the gardens of Point Lochias still decorated the walls, but his furnishings—the leather-cushioned couches and occasional chairs, the gold-handled, burled mahogany desk stacked with his own made-to-order sheets of center-cut papyrus, and the freestanding brass candelabra and terracotta statues—had been jammed in front of them.
I must have noticed these changes the moment I opened the door, because once I entered, I had to choke my way through the noxious haze. The smoke burned my eyes, blistered my skin, and settled on my lips with a nasty sting. The room had been sealed against the light of day, its long windows shut and shrouded by their deeply folded drapes. But through the lurid light of a single oil lamp, I saw that his long, narrow ebony table, once flanked by padded benches but still dominating the center of the room, was now equipped as a makeshift laboratory.
And I saw the scrolls, all three of them at the head of the table, two in the very basket I’d filled with food and given him last Shabbat. Mine and the League’s notes from Aristotle’s Meteorologica were rolled up, each tied with its silk sash, but the scroll with Judah and Saul’s recipe for extracting mercury and perfecting copper lay unfurled across the table.
The source of the toxic fumes was in the center of the table, an open vessel of crushed cinnabar roasting over the twisting flame of the oil lamp. The inverted cup Noah had mounted above the reaction vessel to collect and condense the mercury vapors was too high to prevent the poison from seeping into the room.
Noah! Where was he?
I heard his gasps for the little air left in the room before I saw him stooped behind one of the couches, gagging and retching into a chamber pot.
In what order I cannot say, but I spun around.
Screamed for Myron.
Extinguished the oil lamp.
Smashed a statue.
Jammed its base into the mouth of the reaction vessel.
And tore down the drapes.
An explosion of sunlight bleached the room.
I shattered countless panes with the head of the statue until I could spot the door to the peristyle and fling it open. Then I ran to Noah. Leaning into his back, threading my hands under his armpits and locking them across his chest, I started to drag him outside. But with his spasms and my own shortness of breath, my balance grew untrustworthy. My arms gave out and my legs buckled just as Myron materialized at my side. He lifted Noah, and carrying him like a rag doll into the fresh air, he spread him out on a chaise lounge.
“Myron! Get a physician! Hurry!”
Poised on the edge of Noah’s chaise lounge, I crouched to embrace him, looking now so skeletal, his bones protruding from his body as if they were about to pierce his skin. Reaching up, he hung his arms around my neck, and clinging, he sobbed into my shoulder, dribbling a frothy pink sputum that trickled down my chest. His shallow, irregular breaths whistled in his chest as though the air were trapped in a cage and pressing to escape, but each pant only triggered another round of loud, productive coughs. Then, wincing as he lay back, his nostrils flared, his eyes filmy, his teeth rimmed in red, his mushroom-colored face hollow, he clawed the air to bring my ear to his lips. He whispered haltingly, releasing his words with a gurgle as if he were underwater, but his mind seemed clear.
“Mimi, I took your scrolls. Please, my darling, forgive me. I’ve caused you so much worry. I wanted to be like Judah—I know who he is, Mimi, that you’ve been spending time with him. I wanted to learn about his experiments, to study alchemy so you would forget about him and love me again. I’ve felt the coolness between us. I know I’ve been too busy with work. My father’s been too distraught to carry his share of the partnership. I’ve neglected you so. Oh, Mimi, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.”
His voice was thick with remorse.
For a few moments he drifted into a distant reality, but after another round of wet coughs, he stifled the pain and gulping between sobs, managed to murmur, “I planned to surprise you with what I’ve learned, but I never imagined the disappearance of the scrolls would distress you so. When you came to me so upset, I was too afraid to confess, too afraid of losing you. I could never survive losing you, Mimi. Never.”
A rush of bile scorched my innards. Why in G-d’s name couldn’t I have just married him?
“So I figured I’d return the scrolls this evening when I came for Shabbat. Maybe I’d bring them in a different basket hidden under some flasks of wine from Palestine, as though I were bringing you a gift and at the same time, replacing the basket you gave me last Shabbat. Or maybe I’d walk over alone, and with a fresh bandage to protect my forearm, I’d plant the scrolls at the base of the thicket. Then, excusing myself for a few minutes during dinner, I’d reach through the fence, retrieve them, and put them back in your cubby.”
His confession brought him some relief. His body relaxed, and his breathing eased.
“But Noah, my scroll has the directions for collecting the mercury vapors safely. Why didn’t you follow them? And why were your windows and drapes closed? The smoke could have suffocated you.”
“I tried to follow them, but they were confusing, incomplete, even cryptic, as if you’d written them that way deliberately”—
How could Noah have known that we protect our experimental secrets that way?
“—Quite unlike you, Mimi. Besides, who’d have thought the fumes would be so vile?”