The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  “My father is the magistrate,” John said. “I’m only his son.”

  Bescós was facing both his companions, and this time there was more flint in his words. “Yet any magistrate or man of reason might question the folly you both display,” Bescós said to them both, “in calling a Jewess a lady.” He turned then, and looked full on at Ester. His gaze was cold, and as it continued unrelenting, Ester felt her own stare waver. Only then did Bescós give a slight smile.

  She felt a thread of fear. Pulling Mary’s free elbow, she turned for the coach. This time Mary came. Behind them Ester heard the men follow, like a pack trailing a scent, but she didn’t turn. On the next street, their coach was waiting, the driver waking from his sleep as Ester rapped on the lacquered wood. Mary climbed in and Ester followed, closing the door firmly—yet by the time she’d latched it Thomas was at Mary’s window, speaking in a rapid banter that elicited a giggle. Ester turned away in vexation, only to find someone at her own window. John’s face was serious but his brows arched—poised, she thought, between humor and concern. He gestured with his head toward Thomas. “His tongue runs on pattens,” he said.

  In her confusion she tested the door and found it shut. Uneasily, she looked across the coach, where Mary leaned out her window, both elbows propped on the frame, the bustle of her dress shoved in Ester’s direction. Thomas was getting his display of Mary’s graces now if he hadn’t had his fill earlier.

  Ester glanced back at John, still at her window. His eyes were a flecked, filtered brown. Light in a sieve of tree branches.

  “Do you always speak thus?” he said. “Direct as an arrow, with no fear of judgment?”

  “Mary.” She tugged on Mary’s bustle. But Mary swatted her hand away without turning.

  “’Tis a rare thing,” John said.

  “Go,” Ester called to the driver.

  “A minute!” cried Mary, and Thomas joined her laughter.

  On her hand clutching the sill of the coach’s window, Ester felt a touch. John had set his hand on hers. Gently he began working one of her fingers loose of its grip on the wood.

  She stared as he released one white knuckle, then began patiently on the next. The purity of his focus so riveted her that for a moment she forgot to pull away—the light weight of his hand on hers was astonishing. Absurd.

  He released the third finger, and the fourth.

  A bitter laugh burst from her. “Should you wish some coins for your service in seeing us to our safe departure,” she said, “you may go to the other side of the coach, where the favors flow freely—or so your companion seems to think.”

  Her words didn’t dissuade him from his labor.

  “I’ve nothing for you,” she said weakly.

  He’d worked loose her last finger. Now he lifted her palm lightly, and set it down again on the polished wood of the coach’s window. For a moment he smoothed it, studying the long, thin fingers with their wash-roughened knuckles and bitten nails—as though her hand were a creature deserving of tender pity.

  “There,” he said. When he looked up at her, it was with an expression of quiet delight, as though his own daring had taken him by surprise. Raising his hand before her, he clenched it into a fist—then slowly spread his fingers wide, as though in demonstration: like so. A gesture of such untroubled simplicity, she could not comprehend it.

  Mary spoke some word to the driver, and the coach started along the street.

  Ester looked straight ahead. When at length she turned, Mary’s lips wore a ticklish smile.

  She knew she ought to say something to Mary. But her mind had been rinsed clean.

  “I believe,” said Mary, “that I’ll require your presence at my home. Tomorrow, noon.”

  “Why?” whispered Ester.

  Mary shrugged prettily.

  “Why?” repeated Ester, finding her voice.

  “I need a companion, as I’ll be receiving a visitor.” Mary had turned to face her. Her eyes, a rich brown, were wide with elation.

  “You told him where you live? Thomas Farrow?”

  Mary grinned with sudden abandon. “Yes!” she sang.

  Ester couldn’t hold back a laugh. Whether Diego da Costa Mendes would accept a Christian suitor for his daughter Ester couldn’t guess, but she’d little doubt as to how the man would respond to the prospect of his daughter being courted by an actor. “Your father will send him away without a word,” she said.

  “My father is gone these three days.”

  Ester drew in her breath. The foolishness. Had she the freedom Mary enjoyed, she felt certain she wouldn’t squander it on flirtation with such a man.

  Without thinking, she’d spread one hand on her skirt, and with the other now felt the skin of her knuckles. It was rough, cracked from laundering. She balled her fist tight. “Don’t act a fool,” she muttered.

  “I need you as my companion,” said Mary.

  “You want me to act the duenna to appease gossip—so you can flirt with a paltry man to spite your father.”

  Mary’s face darkened. She stared out the window. In a low, dispirited voice she said, “Didn’t my mother ask you to be my companion?”

  “Her aim was to save you from folly, not invite it.”

  Mary didn’t answer.

  Ester pressed on, her voice rising to a pitch she couldn’t justify. “To make my meaning clear,” she said, “I care nothing if you trollop yourself about with such as Thomas Farrow. But don’t imagine my presence will save you from gossip. As you yourself noted, I carry my mother’s dishonor. Not that I care for such a thing as reputation.” She said the last as bravely as any dolly on London’s streets—as though respectability were nothing to her. Yet she knew all too well how its public loss could be used against her. Mary knew too. An unblemished reputation was the key to what all sensible women aspired to: marriage, safety. A life like those masks lying forgotten in the theater, serene and unreadable.

  Was such female happiness real or feigned? No matter; Ester was barred from it by circumstance. By temperament.

  But perhaps a different sort of happiness might yet be hers, in the confines of the rabbi’s study.

  The coach had stopped abruptly. There was shouting outside, the noise of a small crowd. But Mary’s attention was fixed only on Ester. “I ask no charity,” she was saying. “I’ll pay you to serve as my protection against the gossips.”

  The tumult from outside rose, jeers and raucous cries; the driver was conferring with someone and laughing loud. But Mary kept her eyes on Ester. “Ten shillings for tomorrow,” she said.

  Ester almost laughed. Was it worth so much to Mary, this meeting with Thomas? A dalliance with a man whom any could see would make a ruinous mate? Did a woman’s desires so war with sense?

  All the more reason, then, to banish them from her heart.

  “I’ll meet Thomas even if you don’t come, you know,” Mary said. Then added more softly, “But it’s best for me, Ester, if you come. You know it is. I’ll pay you, and that makes it a simple employment, doesn’t it—one whose only requirement is your presence.” Her lips curved. “And this way, you see, my choices won’t be your responsibility. Or”—she added—“your business.”

  Ester’s heart beat once, twice—and on the third she knew she’d accept. Was it craven? But there was no stopping Mary. And surely the money could appear at no better time: coins for candles, and ink. For the plan forming in Ester’s mind.

  Mary nodded briskly: the agreement was sealed. She rapped on the divider. “Why are we stopped so near home?”

  The driver called back, his voice rich with amusement. “’Tis a second theater now.”

  “What sort of theater?” called Mary.

  But it was a white-haired, round-bodied woman standing outside her window who answered. “Two lads, miss, caught together in a dalliance at the Rose Inn. And one soon to find himself in great trouble, for his father comes and will have none of this new morality between men.” A fresh wave of noise arose from ahea
d of the coach. “See here how they pull the one out?” The woman’s merry laughter obscured whatever she said next.

  Ester spoke to the driver through the flap. “And you’ve stopped our coach to watch?”

  “Not I,” he said mildly. “Look yourself.”

  Ester hesitated, then crowded beside Mary at her window and understood the driver’s meaning. The narrow street was blocked with people craning as though at an entertainment. A jumble of dray-carts all pointed like a bristle of spears toward the doorway of an inn, where a slim, muscular young man had staggered out in a convulsion of laughter. He was naked save the sheet he held to his groin, but at the sight of the gathered crowd he made a ball of the sheet and threw it at them, his member bobbing half-mast like a flag in a brown thatch, and as Mary leaned against Ester to see better, he flung his arms wide and bowed so low, the men behind him roared with laughing disgust, and someone ran to restore him his sheet, but he refused it.

  Even through the rigid stays of Mary’s dress, Ester felt Mary’s shudder of laughter.

  “Here?” A man’s voice was shouting in the din. “Show me my son!”

  The crowd settled into a sharp hush as a man pushed his way to the front. Ester saw with a start that it was Benjamin HaLevy.

  A fringe of white hair showed beneath HaLevy’s dark wig, which rode askew above his dark, handsome face, so similar to his son Manuel’s. His nostrils were flared, his mouth dreadful in its severity. Two burly draymen in his path stepped back before his fury.

  Without thinking, Ester rocked back from the window and stumbled her way out of the coach and into the thicket of the crowd. Beside her a low voice sounded, a man chuckling to his companion. “See now the Jew. He’ll whip his son for sporting with another man, though the king’s court itself is reported to be full of such games.”

  “I’d whip the buggerers myself,” laughed the other.

  “I too! But even so the Jew is different—he hates all royal notions, for he hates the king.”

  Hastily Ester pushed forward, ignoring sounds of protest, aiming to where the crowd was thickest. As she broke through to the front, she saw Benjamin HaLevy pull Alvaro from the tavern. Alvaro’s doublet was askew and half-buttoned. His father’s fist was bunching the fabric of the son’s blouse so it tore. But it was Alvaro’s thin body, not the cloth, that seemed to rend—and when Benjamin HaLevy released his grip and strode away, Alvaro stumbled behind as though the cobbles beneath his feet were less than solid. Pausing an instant for balance, he gazed about in slow comprehension at the hooting, bucking crowd, and Ester wanted to take him in her own thin arms and race him to some imagined place of safety.

  Then his eyes found Ester’s and fastened on them in relief and desperation, confessing mutely to her, in a language she at last understood, that he was cursed.

  The rabbi sat by the fire.

  She thought: he hasn’t moved since I departed hours ago. She thought: he’s barely moved since he banished me from scribing; without any to help him study he might as well be in irons. She thought: even now, his imprisonment under the Inquisition continues. This time by his choice.

  Did she blame him? Would that make it easier to do what she was about to do?

  She entered the house and shut the heavy door behind her. The rabbi turned patiently toward the sound. She thought: his beloved face.

  His eyelids were pale parchment; his form thin, frailer even than she’d noted before. There was no restlessness in his expression, nor hope. Nor rage at the heavens for the life stolen from him.

  He was her friend—the only one in the Amsterdam congregation who’d understood her plight, and Isaac’s, and tried to save them. And he was her teacher—his mind like a sounding line probing the depths of each verse and text. But she could no longer lie to herself, so with a pang she let herself know what she’d felt in those last months of her studies with him: that she understood the texts they’d read more deeply than he.

  The thought that her abilities exceeded the rabbi’s made her wish to protect him all the more. To fortify herself, she summoned the image of Alvaro’s pleading face: a boy who would sink because he was not hard enough to deafen himself to jeers, turn, and strike his father’s hand from his collar.

  She addressed the rabbi. “A letter comes this day from Florence.” She spoke as though indifferent. “How shall I dispose of it?”

  The rabbi was silent. How many weeks, she wondered, since he’d received any letter? Without recourse to a scribe, his correspondence had withered.

  “Perhaps you prefer I don’t read it to you.”

  She felt his mind in its loneliness. She felt it turning her words, sounding the depth of her anger. “Read this letter to me,” he said softly. “Please.”

  She moved toward him, but stopped midway across the room. She withdrew from the pocket of her skirt a paper—the playbill from the theater. A pang of doubt took her. She unfolded it quietly. The Lovers’ Masque, the paper said. A Spectacle of the Foolish Hearte.

  “From whom is the letter?” said the rabbi.

  “From one Daniel Lusitano,” she said. A name she’d culled from memory during the last of the coach ride. The Lusitano sons, former pupils of the rabbi, had been some years older than Ester, but had left Amsterdam long ago when their father’s trade called him to Florence.

  “He says”—she was speaking more loudly than necessary, she realized. She lowered her voice—“he studied with you in Amsterdam.”

  Slowly the rabbi nodded. “I remember,” he said.

  Her throat was dry. She continued. “To the esteemed Rabbi HaCoen Mendes,” she said. “I write with my soul torn by the folly of the people I dwell among: this congregation of our people in Florence, which has served as a beacon of learning to those in darkness, yet now welcomes its own destruction. I turn to you now in respect and admiration.” She looked at the rabbi as she spoke—she looked directly at his closed eyes and willed him to see her. “For your learning is great,” she added. “Greater than many rabbis whose fame exceeds your own.”

  The rabbi listened, his brow furrowed.

  She continued. “Florence’s Jewry approaches a schism, I fear. Here the multitudes of our people turn their hearts to the imposter Sabbatai Zevi. They follow his claim to be the Messiah, whom we have awaited with such patience and through every trial and persecution. Even the rabbis of our community begin to turn their hearts to him. I have spoken with those I hoped I might persuade, but my reasoning makes little mark on them, for they still stand ready to join the multitudes in following Sabbatai Zevi.

  “Though I was never the wisest pupil, still I recall fondly the steady light of your teachings in Amsterdam, and I feel certain you would deem this man Sabbatai Zevi an imposter. I beg you, please, to send some words that might help me persuade the people against this folly. There are those who sell their belongings to prepare for their removal to the Holy Land on the day he will declare himself the Messiah. There are those who speak of unearthing the graves of beloved ones so their bodies may be revived to life at the approaching end of days. I fear for the Jews of this city and”—she faltered—“this city and all the lands this false leader touches. I fear the people will not be able to return whole, once they lean their weight on false faith.

  “Your respectful servant, Daniel Lusitano.”

  She waited. Had it not been enough?

  “I’ve heard much rumor of Sabbatai Zevi’s claims,” the rabbi said slowly, “and the madness of some of his followers. I did not know it had reached Florence, nor that the wiser minds of that community were susceptible to it. But why does he not turn for aid to one of the great rabbis of Amsterdam? Or to Sasportas, whose authority exceeds mine?”

  She kept her voice even. “Perhaps your student trusts only in his teacher.”

  The rabbi stirred in his chair. “Let it be known,” he said, “that I oppose the following of Sabbatai Zevi as dangerous.”

  He was asking her to begin a letter. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to
move.

  He waved at her, his face taut, distracted. “I wish you to write a reply for me.”

  She stepped to the writing table. She let herself down onto the chair as though sinking from a great, vertiginous distance.

  The rabbi had lowered his face into his hands and remained in that posture for a long moment. Then he raised his head and spoke. Quill in hand, she took down his words in a hasty scrawl. My dear Daniel, You may be assured I will attempt to do as you have asked. With full heart, I offer the arguments that seem to me most true. You have my blessing to improve upon or alter my words as you see fit, trusting your own wisdom as to how best to use them, for it is G-d’s work that you do and you will know better than I what will sway the Jews of Florence. She struggled to keep pace with his words, ink staining her fingers. The argument against the claims of Sabbatai Zevi may be divided into three portions, which I will attempt to set out for you now.

  When the rabbi had finished, he had her read his words back and take his corrections. When he was satisfied he rose, his hand reaching to the wall for support.

  Once she would have stood to help him. But the set of his face told her the rabbi did not welcome her help.

  “I’m troubled by this news,” he said. “I’ll sleep now. Copy the letter, and send it.”

  “I will,” she said.

  He felt his way toward the doorway, a long, labored process. Near the door he turned to her, his face heavy and unreadable. “Tomorrow you will take down a further letter to the rabbis of Amsterdam, alerting them to the danger of Sabbatai Zevi’s rise. You will scribe for me until this matter is resolved, and only until that day.” He paused. “I will not ask you to write to Amsterdam and send for a scribe to do this work in your place. I will not ask you to do this thing, because I know you will not do it. And as the only remaining guardian of your soul, I do not wish to be responsible for your lie.” His face was tight with vexation, though whether at her or at himself or at the congregation of Florence she didn’t know. He left.