Back on Creechurch Lane, she labored hour after hour at the writing table as Rivka came and went from the room. Her quill, working under the rabbi’s unseeing gaze, answered his quiet words with a dry creaking of its own: the small noise of some lowly creature doing its delicate work, scratching to gain entry. To the Esteemed Yochanan Yisrael, she wrote. To the Honored Rabbi Abraham ben Porat. At the rabbi’s direction she sent a query to a kabbalist in Hameln concerning the numerology of a verse of B’reishit; pages of dictation addressed to obscure young scholars who had directly or indirectly requested the rabbi’s advice; a question to the Council of Four Lands in Jaroslaw regarding their ruling in a case in which Ashkenazic Passover dietary law had been violated—and through this she understood that the rabbi consulted even the Tudesco rabbis, and held no bias against them, unlike those Sephardic rabbis of Amsterdam who forbade any congress with the hordes of impoverished Ashkenazim.
The learning that spooled from Ester’s hand made her feverish—yet there was no fever in the rabbi, only a patient concentration that seemed not to dislike Ester’s presence but to welcome it. Inking his words, she felt the rabbi’s mind: clear, absorptive, and without pride—his reasoning featuring neither the brilliant rhetoric nor the sudden accusatory turnings that distinguished the speeches Ester recalled from Amsterdam’s celebrated rabbis, Aboab and Abendana. Instead, Rabbi HaCoen Mendes issued opinions in gentle terms that offered a humility so simple it seemed to Ester—the fresh ink trailing the progress of her hand across the paper—something like glory.
Though, of course—so the rabbi concluded his missives—those he advised could surely think of better arguments themselves, and must remember to reply to their aged friend in London and share their own wisdom with him.
When the rabbi’s letters were finished for the day, he requested that she read him commentary. She pronounced for him sentences of winding logic in Aramaic, puzzling out their meaning while the rabbi considered. “Do you hear the argument the other side makes?” he might ask, after a long silence. “Do you see why they debate such a preposterous conjecture, though the situation will never arise in this world?” She heard, and saw. And remembered: so young, her shoes hardly brushing the wooden floor of their house in Amsterdam, her breasts not yet budded, the spring air damp and riveting on her skin. “What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.”
The rabbi had smiled then, though with a furrowed brow. “You have a good mind,” he’d said after a moment.
Words that wisped about her and warmed her still, all these years later, as she and the rabbi labored together.
Only yesterday, he had instructed her to pull from the shelf a heavy volume, Augustine’s Confessiones. “Read,” said the rabbi. Slowly she’d spoken the Latin words aloud. The afternoon filled and brimmed with them; the afternoon was suspended like a great heaven-kissing bird that did not need to flap its wings. Noverim te, noverim me. The rabbi interrupting only to correct her pronunciation. When she’d closed the book, he said, “I dread their priests, yes, Ester. Yet I read such works in Lisbon in my youth, and though many think me in error in this, I fear neither such books nor the language in which they’re written. If Latin is the language in which the world arrays its beliefs, Jews may also speak it. Nor do I grant the irons that closed my eyes permission to close my mind. When any man of any nation cries out in his wish to know God, then his questions merit considering.”
She fingered the spine of the book before her. Whispers overheard on Amsterdam’s barges tickled her memory. She said, “Even the questions of one such as de Spinoza?”
The rabbi’s face tightened. But Ester continued, searching her mind for the wisps of scandalized conversation she’d overheard as she sewed mutely in a neighbor’s parlor after the fire. “People said he believed even a tree or a fight might be God.”
She’d but one recollection of Baruch de Spinoza from childhood—doubtless she’d seen him at later times, surely they’d passed on the street, surely he’d been in the synagogue gallery while she’d stood in the balcony. Yet her sole memory was from years before his exile. He’d been older than Ester, perhaps of age thirteen or fourteen, and that afternoon he had been tasked with escorting the rabbi from the synagogue to her family’s door. She remembered only dark, heavy-lidded eyes, quietly taking in all. And a figure that seemed, in retrospect, too slight, too timid, too gentle, to support such devilishness as she would later hear was burning in his spirit.
“De Spinoza,” said the rabbi, “flaunted his doubts.” He chose each word with care, as though reluctant to speak at all. “I failed to sway the other rabbis to a gentler course. And I failed to persuade him to hear reason.” The rabbi turned his face intently toward Ester. “De Spinoza chose exile and therefore death.”
Yet—Ester thought with a vexation that surprised her—had it not been whispered that the heretic, who’d spurned his Jewish name, now carried on his curious debates in alehouses and binderies as Bento—or even Benedictus—de Spinoza? Was it not whispered that he studied gladly with the former Jesuit Van den Enden, whose own thoughts were said to border on atheism? How then must de Spinoza be counted among the dead?
From the kitchen, Rivka’s call: the evening meal was prepared. Slowly the rabbi freed himself of what had troubled him. At length he turned to Ester with a peaceful countenance. “I believe it no danger to your faith to read the words of a Christian. Yet it would be wise not to reveal that I’ve introduced you to such books. Word that I have permitted a girl this knowledge might stir our good cousins in Amsterdam to force an end to your labors on my behalf, which they seem for the time to have forgotten.”
It was the first he’d spoken of her sex in all these years, and she received his speech in silence, afraid any word of hers might jar him from his indulgence, and at last make plain to him the impropriety of this new life he’d permitted her.
Now, in the glow of candlelight, the books lay before her: Augustine, Descartes. Atop these volumes rested her own hands, no longer chafed from constant housework: strange and delicate things with a fixed desire of their own. A desire to touch each page, each line of ink.
More than half the candle remained. She could read an hour before it guttered, longer if she took another candle from the drawer. How many had she burned already this month? Her hours of night reading seemed to grow ever more necessary, for each day’s study compelled her to explore these volumes further, and with a fierce attention impossible when others were about. On nights when she could rouse herself after her first sleep, she forced herself from bed and down the stairs to the rabbi’s room. Once there, she studied until she could read only by brushing tears of strain from her eyes. In vain were her most solemn determinations to burn only one candle; for when that candle guttered, she lit another—and after all, was the household’s allowance not abundant enough to pay for but one more? She’d use the rabbi’s coins to purchase replacements the next time she was sent abroad in the city. Praying Rivka wouldn’t discover the depleted drawer until Ester had filled it once more, she sighed a long, peaceful sigh, and opened Confessiones. The remaining half-candle spent itself as she puzzled over Augustine’s fervor. She sought something here that she couldn’t name, and felt it elude her narrowly. She turned to Descartes—a second and third candle, thin smoke wreathing and rising. And back to Augustine, until she knew long passages by rote—for if Latin was the language in which thinkers clasped hands, she’d study it until it opened its secrets to her. So she read on, a great and solemn feeling moving through her body: a scaling fatigue, a scaling curiosity. Only when the fourth candle went out—the room’s hollowness suddenly magnified a thousandfold by the dark—did she rise and shut the books, returning each to i
ts place by feel. Through the towering silence she slipped quietly toward her bed, her head light from exhaustion, the dimensions of the household seeming to grow and shrink about her.
At dawn she was a stone, unmoved by sunlight or the twitter of starlings on the roof, responding only to the slap of Rivka’s open hand on the wall beside her bed. In the kitchen she mixed Rivka’s pale batter, the upper limits of her vision darkening if she raised her head too quickly, as though curtains threatened to close on a stage. A question floated in her mind, knocking against the side of the wooden bowl with each turn of her spoon. Why, when the rabbis wished to understand God’s will or Augustine the construction of man’s soul, did they not reason as Descartes did, taking nothing as given? Must true inquiry proceed from texts and traditions already established, or could the mind on its own perceive all it needed to fathom the world? And which path of inquiry led more straightly to truth? The spoon knocked, the questions knocked, her lips shaped single words of Latin.
Rivka was before her. “What animal of the night,” she said in Portuguese, “has crept into the house and used every candle in the rabbi’s study?”
Ester stared, dumb, Rivka’s square face a senseless blur.
“Or has the rabbi found himself fond of lighting the night, though he lives in darkness even so?” Rivka’s voice brimmed with strange anger. Ester could focus only on the vein-webbed nose, the large dark pores—she could absorb only details, not the whole of Rivka’s tired face. “Is it he who’s left wax drippings on the table for others to clean?”
Ester clutched the bowl to her chest. And then at once, as Rivka continued, Ester saw the face before her in its entirety, and everything writ on it: a fury and anguish she’d never before seen in Rivka. “We live in this terrible city,” Rivka said, “in this terrible cold house that worsens his health, so that he can teach. Yet you spend the house’s money on candles for your passing whim for study.”
She’d no answer.
“If he wishes to have you scribe in place of a man”—Rivka drew breath—“then I will honor his choice. I won’t deny him your labor. But I won’t have you steal from the only one”—Rivka’s voice turned dangerous—“the only one among your precious Sephardic lords and ladies kind enough to take in orphans.”
“Rivka, I’m not like those—”
“You will be!” The harshness of the words seemed to surprise even Rivka. When she spoke again her voice was steadier. “You will be,” she said again. “It’s your due, Ester. You’re Portuguese. When life opens a door you’ll marry. Any would. And you’ll forget the rabbi, as the rest of them do already.”
At a soft shuffling on the stone floor, they both turned.
The rabbi had emerged from his room. He stood in his thin robe, the bones at his throat painfully sharp, a tuft of white emerging from the collar of his undergarment. Softly he addressed Rivka. “It’s for the furthering of my wishes that she reads at night.”
Rivka looked stricken.
“Ester studies at night,” the rabbi continued, “that in the day she might better fulfill my needs for a learned scribe. So great is her devotion to my unworthy house of learning.” He turned his face toward Ester now, and it seemed to her that it was as innocent as a child’s. “But, Ester, I owe my apology. I was careless, and failed to make plain that you must not do this. Read only during the day, please, for not only does candlelight burn the household’s income, but too-prolonged study withers the bloom of health.”
Rivka’s voice had thickened. “You’ve known of her night reading?” she said slowly.
The rabbi’s smile was weightless. “A man of my age sleeps little, even when cared for as though he were a king.” At Rivka’s silence, he continued. “I have not merited such care as you offer me, Rivka. I’m grateful.”
Rivka closed her eyes for a long moment as she stood opposite the rabbi. Then she opened them and, without a word to Ester, retreated softly to the kitchen.
That morning the rabbi tutored pupils, and when alone he sat in his chair, seeming to sleep. Often Ester was on the verge of thanking him for what he’d done. But what words could express her gratitude? Instead she sat by his feet, stoking the fire that warmed him as he slept, rearranging the blanket when it slipped from his shoulders, replenishing the water in his cup, though he barely sipped it. So absorbed was she in these tasks that she nearly forgot Mary’s summons, and was still tugging the laces of her dress with one hand when she opened the door to Mary’s knock.
Mary, black curls carefully arrayed over powdered white shoulders, frowned at Ester’s drab dress. “That one again?” she said. “Well, all the better that we go to the dressmaker!” Turning back to squint at the street, she added, lightly, “Mother accompanied me to two gatherings this week, but says to tell you that you’ll now need a dress suitable for more than errands.”
Ester hesitated. Was this Mary’s way of telling her Catherine’s health was declining? She opened her mouth to ask—but Mary left no space for inquiry. Already she was leading Ester into the absurd coach—for who, in truth, required a coach to traverse the narrow cobbled streets of the city, when a person on foot could weave through a crowd in half the time? Yet Mary adored the conveyance.
As Ester settled on her usual bench, Mary launched into gossip. “Did you hear that Isabella Rodriguez said Pierre Alvarez is courting Rebecca Nones?” Having chosen the forward-facing bench as always, Mary spoke with eyes fixed on the traffic outside the coach’s window. “And did you hear, Pierre Alvarez wore perfumed gloves that made Rebecca sneeze, and because Rebecca hadn’t a kerchief on which to wipe her nose, when no one was minding her she dried her nose on a red-pollened flower he’d given? And after, Rebecca walked about with a red stain upon her nose—and none liked her well enough to brave her temper and tell her of it, not even her gallant Pierre—did you hear of it?”
So Mary spoke always, posing each declaration as a question, soliloquy in guise of conversation. Ester found it simplest to make no answer.
Now with a sudden glad cry, Mary rapped for the driver to stop. On the street were two girls from the synagogue—both well-dressed, though neither so expensively as Mary. Leaning from the window, Mary beckoned them into the coach. As they climbed up, they glanced with surprise at Ester seated opposite—then settled on either side of Mary in poses of eager attention. As the coach resumed its rolling, one of them—a round-faced girl called Emilia, with pretty, lush brown curls—complimented Mary’s gown and hair so thoroughly that even Mary began to look restless. Then, turning to Mary at such close quarters that Mary blinked, the girl said, “How is it, Mary, that you refused Joseph Levita? Isn’t it true his family brought him to visit in the hope of a match with you?”
Mary, recovered, smiled airily. “He was a pimple.”
On either side of Mary, the two girls’ eyebrows rose in disbelief. Levita and his family had made an appearance in synagogue a few weeks earlier. Ester herself had seen the young man in question, and he wasn’t ill-favored.
“Is it that he’s Venetian?” The other girl, sallow and thinner than Emilia, cut in. “My father would let me marry a Venetian Jew if he liked the man. Why didn’t yours?”
“Perhaps my father thought he wasn’t good enough,” Mary lilted. She was enjoying the game, but what lay beneath her coy words was murkier. If Rivka’s account of synagogue gossip last week was correct, the Levitas, under closer inspection, hadn’t proved as wealthy as the da Costa Mendeses had first believed. Mary’s father had dismissed the suit immediately, against Catherine’s wishes.
Emilia was staring at Mary. “Then who catches your fancy, if not Levita?” The coach rolled a moment in silence. “Not Maria Olivera’s cousin? Rebecca Cancio saw you speaking to him and his sister last time they came to London.”
Mary busily looked out the window, but the small, involuntary smile on her lips said she considered this one something other than a pimple.
“But he’s already promised to someone in Amsterdam!” Emilia exclaim
ed—not, Ester noted, without satisfaction. “Didn’t you know?”
Mary laughed lightly. But after they’d deposited the two girls at their destination some few streets beyond the synagogue, she sat back at her window with a loose sigh.
Later, while the dressmaker draped fabrics around Mary in her well-lit workroom, Mary gazed languorously at the nearest window, making only distracted answers to questions about pleating and the positioning of lace. Leaning to reach for her purse, she dragged it across the table by its strings—then put the purse to her lips and slowly bit the smooth wooden clasp open with her small even teeth in a gesture of such drowsy amorousness that even the dressmaker, her sealed lips bristling with pins, averted her eyes.
When it was Ester’s turn to mount the pedestal in her shift and be fitted for a busk and a dress, Mary sat on a cushioned stool and stared at Ester’s body with a childlike curiosity, a wishfulness set loose on her face as though she were a girl too timid to ask a question of an elder sister.
Finally, reaching to finger the linen at Ester’s knees, she said, “Do you think love real?”
It was the first true question Mary had asked her, and so surprising that Ester couldn’t help laugh.
“I mean,” Mary continued slowly, ignoring Ester’s laughter, “do you think love can be made to happen with whichever man our minds choose—so it’s a thing a lady may direct as she pleases? Or is it a thing outside control?”
The dressmaker, a neat and weathered woman with a silver-shot coiffure, had paused. But Mary disregarded her, all her attention now on Ester.
Quietly, the dressmaker resumed lacing a fencework of stays about Ester’s waist.
“Outside control,” Ester said slowly. “And so folly to seek.”
The Weight of Ink Page 21