The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  She spread her palms on the writing table’s cool, smooth surface. Did these hands belong to her? The very words she’d once hurled at her brother accused her: You ask me to spit on the one man who’s helped us.

  Yet how easily she betrayed the rabbi now.

  Tears welled. She banished them.

  After a moment she set the rabbi’s letter to one side, drew a fresh piece of paper from the drawer, and picked up the quill. She wrote the words in a rush.

  To Franciscus van den Enden,

  I have read with much interest of your work with Plockhoy and of your notions of the ideal society. Yet while your political philosophy is a rich terrain, there are other matters I wish to discuss with you and the philosophes of your circle.

  I will speak plainly and ask that you judge such directness a mark of respect. Some say you go so far as atheistery, and that your association with Benedictus de Spinoza emboldened him to leave his people the Jews. If this is so, I will not judge it for ill, for the notion of the divine is to me a puzzle not yet answered and many are those who strive honestly to solve it. It is evident, by proofs I will gladly formulate should you choose to engage this discourse, that the twinned concepts of divine will and infallibility do not withstand study except where shrouded in obfuscating mystery by men whose imaginations insist on this comfort.

  These words alone are a heresy, yet my questions range beyond what I write here. Among my strong desires is the wish to understand the notion of determinism rumored to be held by de Spinoza. Are you in agreement with it? And in your thinking how far do its consequences reach—does man hold no remnant of free will? And might determinism limit even God, if one may still speak with you of God? Does God possess will, and the power to execute that will, or is God something other than what every manner of faith has conceived? I beg to enter into an exchange with you on these and other matters. I assure you that your reply will not stray from my hands, but will be seen only by myself. Well do I understand the perils of metaphysics, and the dangers to philosophers whose work too sharply interrogates faith. Yet I ask of you whether a thinker might join in your circles from a distance. For even though I respire the air of another clime, I gladly conspire with you, as all we men of philosophy breathe the same air of questions wheresoever we reside.

  Awaiting your reply,

  Thomas Farrow

  It was with a grim smile that she signed Thomas’s name as she imagined he might: with a swaggering flourish. At least, she told herself, she did that one goodness. She told no lie under the rabbi’s name.

  When Ester opened her eyes it was to a ripened day. Rivka, who must have been informed by the rabbi that Ester was again in his service, had left her abed, wordlessly hefting the load of housework upon her thick shoulders once more.

  The world was changed. She lingered to feel it. She sat at the edge of her pallet, legs crossed inside her shift, feeling the breathing warmth of her own body. Her palms and fingers flexed, and were miraculous. Her hands belonged, she thought, to her. The warm, smooth soles of her feet met absurdly, like clapping hands. She clapped them. Then rose, washed her face in the basin, and let the diamond-drops slide from her face down her neck. She dressed and descended the stair and stepped out of the house into the noon light like a creature emerged from a chrysalis long outgrown.

  A breeze pressed at her skirts, riffled the hair she’d carelessly pinned at her neck—she laughed in London’s sooty, braying face. And walked to Mary’s house in a cool blaze of words: a rebuttal she might compose to Solomon Sivani’s pompous assertions about the nature of time in the Torah, which she and the rabbi had discussed more than a year ago. And then perhaps a letter to Lodewijk Meijer—for months ago, standing at a bookseller’s stall outside St. Paul’s, she’d read a preface authored by Meijer, and still recalled some of its phrases. She’d return to that same stall tomorrow; perhaps that volume or another was still there; perhaps through serving as Mary’s companion she might dream of mustering the coins to purchase it: de Spinoza’s Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae. The passages she’d read had seemed to her cautious in the extreme, with no trace of the heretic’s rumored audacities—but perhaps upon closer inspection she’d find some hidden fire in those pages. The thought carried her through the grand carved doors of the da Costa Mendes home, where a maid held out a hand for Ester’s cloak. As Ester gave it over, her own work-roughened hand brushed the maid’s, and Ester looked up into the blunt fatigue on the maid’s doughy face. Swiftly, before pity could overtake her, Ester turned away. To feel guilt over her own escape would drown her. She’d found a spar of wood to cling to, a thin chance at life; she couldn’t falter at the sight of yet another drowning stranger.

  In the da Costa Mendeses’ sitting room, fragrant steam wisped from a china pot on a low mahogany table.

  “You’re here at last.” Mary’s voice was bright with tension. The nervousness animating her powdered face made odd contrast with the dainty dress she wore: a rich blue threaded with pink silk ribbons at the bosom, cascading with lace below.

  Thomas, lounging on the broad velvet seat beside which Mary stood, turned and offered Ester a wide grin. Then his gaze slid across the room, where Ester saw the cause of Mary’s distress. Standing in the tall window’s sharp light were Thomas’s two companions from the day before. Bescós stood with a teacup in his palm, surveying the tableau of indolent Thomas and straight-backed Mary. Beside Bescós stood John, looking at Ester now with a query in his mild eyes, his cup cooling untouched on a side table.

  Thomas raised his cup. “To the beauty of our hostess,” he said. Ester sensed it wasn’t the first time he’d made this toast.

  Mary attempted a smile, and failed.

  Atop the virginal, beside a matched pair of celestial and terrestrial globes, lay a square of tent stitch—the needlework resting on the polished wood as though forgotten there by a casual hand. It was work of maddening delicacy, floss silk pulled through the thick white satin, with tiny silver spangles and seed pearls accenting the nearly finished design: a pattern of flowers, butterflies, caterpillars. Ester hadn’t known Mary’s restlessness could birth such elaborate handiwork.

  Thomas, oblivious to this display of fine feminine needlework laid out for his benefit, was engaged in dragging an embroidered stool near with the toe of his fashionable boot, an exertion that would have proved unnecessary, had he merely leaned forward to take hold of it with his hand. Succeeding at last in maneuvering it to his satisfaction, Thomas propped a heel on the stitched cushion. Ester could see the sole had been patched.

  Mary stepped forward, her eyes narrowing at Ester, her message clear. Turning to the pair at the window, her voice pretty yet each word a dagger, she said, “Ester and I didn’t expect your company as well as Thomas’s.”

  Bescós laughed full and long. “Neither did Thomas,” he said. Then, without budging from the window, he fell back to surveying the room’s rich tapestries and elegant decorations. Indeed, Ester herself was struck by the wealth of the household. Only once, meeting Mary for an excursion, had she entered the da Costa Mendes house, and even then she’d ventured no farther than the house’s threshold. At all other times, Mary had collected her at the rabbi’s doorstep. Now she couldn’t help but stare as well: silver and tapestry, mahogany, richly framed art.

  “We followed Thomas here,” said John, “so that we might fetch him back to the theater in time.” His speech sounded so softly in the room, it put Ester in mind of a Quaker preacher she’d once heard on a London street—a man who seemed to meditate before choosing each phrase, perched though he was on a crate amid the city’s traffic—as though he believed each utterance could do harm or good.

  As John spoke he shook his head apologetically at Mary. “He departed our company at the inn with his mind already bright with wine. And he’s needed on stage in little more than an hour. The players have had to proceed already once without his part. Should he be absent once more, his position at the theater will be forfeit. So, we followed.
”

  Thomas, listening with a sleepy half smile, bit his thumb at John. His cheeks pink with whatever he’d drunk at the tavern, he caressed his short beard and returned to a survey of the room’s tapestries. Now and again he glanced over at Mary, who stood beside the virginal—but whatever designs he had on her seemed, for the moment, second to his study of her father’s furnishings. Thomas watched wealth, it struck Ester, the way some men watched a sunset.

  There was a step in the hall: a matronly servant entering with a deliberate bustle. She crossed before the company to the teapot, lifted its lid, and said to Mary stiffly, “You’ll want more water, then?” Without awaiting an answer or bothering to shield her hand with a cloth, she took the hot pot to her bosom. “I suppose your father will be wondering, Mary, what guests stayed to enjoy his household’s hospitality, him being absent?”

  Mary lay a finger along the etched metal surface of the terrestrial globe, rolled it slightly forward and back, then spun it, hard. The force of the motion set the stand’s metal legs rocking, raising an outsized din from the virginal, whose brass strings thrummed in a dire voice as though at some dreadful injury. The low notes died last.

  “My father courts his new love,” said Mary, “as you well know, Hannah. He won’t return this fortnight.”

  At these words the servant let out a small, pained sound. Whatever disapproval she might feel concerning the daughter’s behavior, it was clear her distress at the father’s exceeded it. She departed without another word.

  Mary stepped quickly to Ester. Grabbing her arm, Mary hissed, “Take them to the garden.”

  Ester glanced at Thomas. “Are you certain?”

  Mary’s face gave the answer. She pointed to a passageway to the left.

  Without fanfare Ester addressed the pair by the window. “To the garden,” she said.

  Bescós pushed off from the wall with a short, sharp laugh.

  She led the two men down a brief hallway and out a door that opened onto a tiered, well-kept patch of flowering shrubs, its merry pinks and winding ivies hemmed by thick walls. Exotic plants with delicate blossoms unfamiliar to Ester curved in modest rows; hedges of briar rose shaded the path. This must have been Catherine’s garden, abandoned by its maker during its winter sleep. Some invisible hand had kept up its faithful tending this spring. With a start, Ester realized whose. The pruning was inexpert: one hedge sheared too closely, another trimmed halfway up and then forsaken. Ragged, fitful weeding, the mute language of a daughter’s devotion.

  Beneath the damage done by Mary’s unsteady hand, Catherine’s stately design was still everywhere in evidence: a brief allée of trees, pleached into two walls and entwined to form an arch; urns of fragrant plants, an elegant illusion to distract the mind and senses from the fact that there was but a circular gravel path to tread, round a bit of greenery roofed by the drifting smell of the tanneries and the needling sounds of cart traffic from just beyond the wall.

  Ahead, along the perimeter of the garden, strode Bescós. John, Ester saw, had determined to walk with her. They stepped slowly along the path. After a moment she turned to him, found him watching her, and looked down again—but a moment later his soft, sudden laugh lifted her gaze.

  With a gesture he directed her attention toward a bush of silvery cotton lavender that had been trimmed into a neat globe. There, tucked in the shadow beneath the plant’s stout curve, lay a small embroidered pillow with a design Ester had seen not three minutes earlier. The pillow had been cut open and one panel carefully removed, the wool stuffing left exposed. Beside the pillow, in the dirt under the bush, lay a small silver scissor.

  How deliberately, how delicately Mary must have worked to unstitch just enough of that panel to make it appear to be her own handiwork—mounting the cut panel onto a tent frame, setting a needle upon the thread, and laying it atop the virginal as though she had only just paused in her work upon Thomas’s arrival. A labor of deceit to rival the labor of the embroidery itself.

  John was laughing with his mouth open and his shoulders gathered: a gentle mirth, his cheeks pinked, his eyes bright. Only when he fell silent, concern flooding his face, did she realize that she herself hadn’t been laughing, but rather staring at him.

  But now his consternation over her solemnity was absurd—she couldn’t control her face. As if striking a silent agreement, they laughed together: a soft conspiracy among the strict hedges and tamed herbs of the garden. Her voice sounded out above his, high and girlish.

  What was it that made him seem so unburdened? His eyes were clear of suffering, of grievance. She’d never seen such clear eyes, a rain-washed brown, with room to take in all that they saw.

  She bit down on her lip until she tasted iron. “You mustn’t try to know me,” she said.

  His brows arched high. “Why?” he said.

  How to explain that for just an instant he’d reminded her of carved wooden angels she’d seen here and there in London, set high in lofty arches or on the posts of grand entrances—creatures whose faces shone with a mesmerizing trust? And each time she glimpsed such angels she felt certain that, should she but touch them, their innocence would dissolve.

  She stood opposite John, wanting to turn away and wanting the feel of his hand on hers once more. “If you knew me,” she said, “you’d run from me.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, “you think so only because you don’t know me.”

  He stood before her, arms loose at his sides. It seemed to her that he’d just issued a challenge, though whether to her or to himself she didn’t know. She felt there was something she ought say in response. Then she saw that what was required was that she say nothing.

  A moment passed. Another. Something between them turned.

  Bescós was coming. She broke her gaze from John and walked.

  “Tell me,” she said, as though they’d been discussing the matter all along. “Did your friend Thomas truly learn nothing at Oxford?”

  John fell into step beside her. “During the siege of Oxford, he was among the students who studied with Harvey.”

  “The anatomist? The author of De Motu Cordis?”

  “Yes,” said John, surprised. “Harvey had a great following among the students moored there during the war.”

  “Yet your friend shows few traces of cherishing his education.”

  “I fear that’s true,” said John, as Bescós reached them. “I believe the only lesson Thomas took from Oxford was that he detested schooling. And the only lesson he drew from Harvey was after Harvey’s most brilliant work had been damned for contradicting Galen. Harvey declared, then, that humankind was but a collection of mischievous baboons.” He grimaced. “I believe Thomas has lived since then to prove Harvey correct.”

  Bescós was smiling a small, satisfied smile. “Thomas and I are united in one thing, at least,” he said. “We believe Harvey was correct about humankind.” He looked past Ester, and fixed his gaze on John. “You, on the other hand, take a daintier view of the human spirit.”

  “A kinder one,” John said.

  “No,” said Bescós, a sudden edge in his voice. “’Tis kind to tell the truth rather than pretty falsehood. ’Tis kind to wring a runt’s neck, put the weak and deformed out of their misery, recognize that some of humanity is lesser and dispatch with it. You think you have a tender heart, John, but you lie to yourself. Those who hold your precious view of humanity only lengthen the suffering of those ill-fitted for this world. Harvey was too generous in his estimation—the baboon at least demonstrates some sense regarding its fellow creatures. It cannot be said of mankind.” He turned, and disappeared into the house.

  Only when he was gone did Ester realize she’d risen to the balls of her feet while he spoke, as though to flee.

  An unhappy expression passed across John’s face. “He and I spoke earlier of my opinion that soldiers who turn deserter amid hopeless-seeming battles should be spared execution. I argued that many are pressed into service yet not of a temperament to be heroes. Y
ou may guess Bescós’s response. I try to forgive him his ferocities.”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “I’m sorry,” John said. “He’s a creature of blunt thoughts and no courtesy.”

  “Then why do you name him a friend?”

  He looked surprised. “Bescós is Thomas’s friend, not mine.”

  “Yet you keep his company.”

  “When I must. And in truth Bescós does no harm despite his bluster, and at the inn where we board I’ve seen him buy supper for poor students while men of more seeming-refined manners and greater means turned their backs. His generosity is of a rough sort, as are the opinions he holds. But I know him to be guilty of nothing more than restlessness—and in that, I fear, he’s no different than most who come to this city in pursuit of their future.” He thought a moment. “Do you keep Mary’s company out of true friendship? You seem little alike.”

  From the house, the faint sound of Mary’s giddy laughter.

  Surprising herself, she looked directly at John. “Mary pays me for my presence here today.”

  John laughed his surprise. Then he said, “Allow me to try to make your hours of employment pass lightly.”

  But she wasn’t ready to join his laughter. “Mary, unlike your companion”—she indicated the door where Bescós had disappeared—“doesn’t disdain any for the faith he was born to.”

  John absorbed this. Quietly he nodded.

  She led him back into the house, in time to see Thomas and Mary tumbling like children from some back passage—Thomas’s lips cherry-red, Mary giggling in a merry register. Thomas, his face flushed from more than wine, bowed his way cheerily out the door before turning to the street with a sated expression. There Bescós awaited him. As soon as Thomas appeared, Bescós turned his back and began to walk away.

  “A moment for farewell,” John called.

  Bescós stopped midstep. Slowly he turned back. “John, my friend,” he said. But his expression had nothing in it of friendship. He stared for a moment at Mary, then at Ester. “Surely you know I give courtesy where it’s necessary. None is necessary here.”