“On the next fair Lord’s Day, then?” Thomas was saying over his shoulder to Mary, who sat moored on the couch. “And no fear, our combustible Bescós shan’t come, he’ll repair to wooing of his own.” With this he cuffed Bescós’s shoulder—but carefully, Ester noted. “And when you’ll see him next he’ll be in merry fettle.”
Mary hesitated, then nodded.
To John, Thomas said, “You’ll play companion to our companion?”
Her eyes found John’s. What excursion was being planned? She hadn’t been listening to Mary’s chatter earlier.
John smiled at her bewilderment. “If she’ll have me,” he said. To Ester he whispered, “The river.”
Ester felt herself pink.
Rising from the couch, Mary laughed loud. “Oh, she’ll have you, I believe!”
Ester straightened the tray of sweetmeats on the table.
“See how they shy to look at each other,” Thomas sang out.
Ester closed her eyes to the rain of laughter. She heard Mary kiss Thomas noisily on the lips, and his hum of satiety, and the light admonitions with which Mary accompanied Thomas to the door in Bescós’s wake.
The rain outside was easing; she could hear its faint spatter from the drainpipe outside, and the shuffle of boots on wet stone. Mary, lingering at the door, called her farewells to Thomas.
John had stayed. She could feel him standing a few paces from her. The house was quiet.
“I’m sorry for his words,” John said softly. “Bescós. I’ll speak reason to him.”
He was looking at her, his cheeks as pink as she felt her own to be. “I believe his grievance is with others, not with Jews, though today he seized on the subject.”
“Yet what does harm,” she said, “is not what truly merits a man’s anger, but what he seizes on instead.”
John hesitated. Then he nodded, once, as though pledging himself to something.
“The next fair Lord’s Day, then,” he said. He bowed and kissed his own hand and, stepping toward her, kissed her lips, lightly, as she’d seen Englishmen do with a woman who was their equal.
Mary shut the door behind him. Ester busied herself tidying the cushions.
“Perhaps now,” Mary lilted, “you won’t be so lonely.”
Gently, she set a cushion down. She ought to speak reason to Mary once more, she knew. Thomas could bring only danger. Mary’s virtue would become a shuttlecock batted about to the delight of all, if it were not so already—for if Mary thought the servants were fooled by the presence of a companion such as Ester, then Mary estimated her servants amiss.
Yet how to speak reason, when it seemed now to elude Ester herself?
She addressed Mary in Portuguese. “Loneliness . . .” she began. But how to say it—how to stem this thing in her with words—this warmth filling her so steadily it threatened to expand beyond the confines of her body? This wish to be saved from the path she’d chosen. “Loneliness”—she spoke each word of the lie like a hammer stroke—“doesn’t trouble me.”
With an agitated motion, Mary tugged a wall hanging into place. “I envy you then,” she said, “and pity you. I envy you that you won’t ever feel the pains that a woman with a heart feels. And I pity you that with such disdain for life you won’t marry.”
She hadn’t expected such words could sting. “I don’t disdain life,” she said quietly. “It’s only . . .”
Mary turned. “What?” she said softly.
“I don’t believe marriage will offer me what I desire.”
“Why?” countered Mary.
For an instant, impelled by no logic she could fathom, Ester wished Mary to understand all she would lose were she to become a man’s possession. “For one such as me, perhaps to marry is to disdain life.”
“There’s no sense in your words,” Mary said with a wave; yet she was still listening, as though keen for Ester to cast light on something Mary needed to see more clearly.
“There was a woman,” Ester began. “Her name was Julian of Norwich.”
But she trailed off; Mary would never understand. Instead, seeing in her mind John’s serious eyes as he stepped forward to kiss her farewell, Ester began afresh. “You wish to marry, I know,” she said. “And for you that’s well. But Mary, don’t entertain a man so besotted by your father’s fortune that he barely glimpses you amid the silver plate and hangings”—she gestured at the furnishings. “Should your fortune be considered by one of your suitors, it should not be the main, much less the only consideration—”
Mary broke in. “My father’s fortune isn’t why Thomas wants me! Are you so jealous that you can’t see love?”
Ester went on, the words beating back the unfamiliar thing whispering in her. “He’s fond of you, Mary, yes. But while your eyes linger hungrily on him, his look happily to the damask hangings.”
“Do you claim to act as my mother then?” Mary cried.
“No—”
“No, because she’s dead.” There were tears on Mary’s face. Unwise, enviable tears. Ester wanted to touch them.
Instead she spoke softly. “As is mine,” she said. “There’s naught but us to advise each other.”
“Get out,” Mary managed through her weeping. “You may leave, just like that monster Bescós. But—here’s the truth, here it is, Ester! Both of you envy love such as we have.”
Ester felt her own eyes well. “Perhaps,” she said.
Through the rain-slicked streets she walked home, and her lips moved with words that sounded to her own ears like prayer. But if a prayer, then a prayer to a strange god: one who knew, as she did, the bitterness of the world, and lacked the power to alter it. Kill it. Kill the part in me that desires to be touched.
She couldn’t protect Mary. Not without bearing her bodily from Thomas as one would a child. Mary had chosen her own course. And if accepting Mary’s coins made Ester a proprietress at a brothel, what of it? She must steel herself. She must.
Yet even as she thought this, she remembered Mary’s hopeful eyes at the instant Thomas had entered the door this afternoon.
What obligation did one soul bear to another indeed, in such a world as this?
So often now she lay in her bed half a night, constructing thoughts she wished to test against the books on the rabbi’s shelves. And so often these thoughts—built with such care, the bricks with which she hoped to shape her understanding of the world—had dissolved by dawn. She could deceive the rabbi, but at night she could master the darkness no better than he. So she made what use she could of every moment of daylight she was permitted in his study. Just yesterday, in her desire to confirm the phrasing of Descartes’s notion of extension, a question she’d fretted over in the darkness until tears of vexation sprang to her eyes, she’d forgotten that the letter she was supposed to be copying—a fresh bit of advice the rabbi had composed aloud for his former student in Venice—was a brief one. After a long silence—five minutes? more?—the rabbi had lifted his head, his face turned in her direction as though to catch the rays of a weak sun. “How many pages you turn for my simple missive.”
Had she imagined a catch in his voice? But he continued in his usual mild tone. “Perhaps I overtax you?”
Closing Meditationes, she’d agreed it might be time to finish their work together for the day.
Sentiment would undo her—each of its ties was a tether that would hold her from her purpose. Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind; but for a woman there could be no such luxury. Had not Catherine drowned in the London air while practicing the virtues of love and obedience? How readily the rules of female behavior—gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness—turned to shackles.
So, she thought, there must be declared a new kind of virtue: one that made the throwing off of such rules, and even such deceit as this required, praiseworthy.
Or at least forgivable.
Of late, at moments when she looked up from her writing and saw the fatigue and hunger written on the rabbi’s face—a face
she’d known since girlhood—one small weakness flared keenly in her: the wish to be forgiven.
What obligation, in such a world?
The sips of wine she’d drunk at Mary’s had dizzied her. Since morning she’d eaten only a piece of bread and a sweetmeat. When she reached home, she’d give Rivka all she’d earned, though it hurt to set the coins down on the kitchen table. But how could Ester use Mary’s coins for candles and books, much though she craved them? Each week Rivka seemed to work harder, washing the laundry of strangers for extra coins—for Rivka wouldn’t beg support of Diego da Costa Mendes unless the rabbi’s next breath depended upon it. Instead she cooked patiently over the paltriest flame, using and reusing the last ashen bits of coal. She reserved the wheat loaves for the rabbi, and for herself and Ester prepared loaves of barley and rye of a poor grade, though even careful sifting left small stones lodged in the bread. Ester pressed each mouthful carefully with her tongue; already Rivka had cracked a front tooth.
If the growing need of their household was invisible to their former patron, it had been noted by at least one other. Tuesday, when Rivka was out, Manuel HaLevy had come to the house to offer what he termed a small gift of sustenance. Handing a bag of coins to Ester with a smile, he’d swiftly turned the conversation to the qualities of the breeze—which, he said, was damp that day but augured well for the trade vessels. So Ester understood that this new Manuel HaLevy wished to spare her shame. Ester had passed the bag back to his hands, inviting him stiffly to return another day and make this generous offer to Rivka, who managed the household. With an undaunted smile, he’d promised to do so.
She feared the debt that would come with Manuel HaLevy’s charity, should need someday constrain Rivka to accept it.
Early this morning, watching Rivka labor in silence, upper lip curling reflexively about the broken tooth, Ester had paused for a moment over her own kitchen work to imagine Rivka’s existence. No access to reading or writing. No escape to other worlds, nor refuge from the endless river of days. No dream of throwing her thoughts high into the thick-smoked sky in the hope that they might land somewhere brighter.
But how to help Rivka, when the threat of being herself plunged into such darkness struck Ester with dread bordering panic?
She’d reached home. She entered, hung her damp cloak, and stopped midway across the empty room.
There, on the writing table, was a letter, its seal of red wax intact.
Cautiously she stepped toward it. The hand was unfamiliar, but the wax seal told her all: a small thorned rose and the Latin word Caute. A rose, she guessed, to signify both the meaning of the de Spinoza family name—“thorned”—and then the need to be cautious—sub rosa. Her hands fumbled as she lifted the letter. It was addressed to this household, but the name on the letter was Thomas Farrow.
She broke the seal.
She’d been rebuked before. She had tried writing to Mersenne about Descartes’s notion of extension, not knowing the man was years dead; the reply from his housekeeper had been a piece of incredulous fury. But the Latin words inked on this page stung beyond any rebuke she’d yet received.
May 7, 1665
To Mr. Thos. Farrow,
I have received both of your missives, and this reply shall need to serve for both. Your persistence is admirable, but you will permit me to question its purpose.
You express no admiration of my philosophy, yet you pretend to perceive its implications more deeply than I have confessed to, basing such claim on rumor of unnamed source. I am by now familiar with those who wish for their own purposes to distort my arguments, extending them into domains of atheism I do not claim. Should this be your intent, I must warn you to cease. My peace is lately harassed by the persistence of one called Van Blijenburgh, who first claimed as you do to seek truth—yet the man has consumed my hours and days in an exchange whose ultimate purpose, it seems, be to hunt amid my thoughts for what he might vilify.
If your purpose like his be to entrap me in my statements, then know that I do not fear my own thoughts, though the world may. Should you wish to understand my philosophy, you may one day read the works I compose even now and will some day bring to light, wherein I write in clearest logic what I profess. All the satisfaction I shall grant you now shall be but to say this: I do not refute the divine, but only its false depiction, and my thinking is maligned by any who say otherwise.
And this: your argument leaps without method.
I wonder that you know of my connection to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes. I’ve not written of him, and he remains, I believe, unknown to any outside the Portuguese community of Amsterdam. Nor would he have the ability, given his infirmity, to make his learning known to Christians in England. I wonder then whence you came by your admiration for him.
If it be so that you admire him—if your letter speaks the truth—then we share at least this one sentiment. Rabbi HaCoen Mendes was a man of great heart, though his thinking could not vault the walls within which it was prisoned. If he still lives, I would wish him know I think of him with respect, though the ban against me must mean he will not acknowledge me. It is for his sake alone that I write you this letter, for I wish no other conversation.
If my tone here has offended, I beg you understand that I must respond in this manner, for you wield my logic in such a way as seems intended to accuse me of being what I am not. As what I am brings me already to great difficulty, I wish no further calumny. If atheism be in your own thoughts, then write it under your name, but leave mine unscorched.
Benedictus de Spinoza
She read, and reread. Then she took a quill and, still in her outdoor cloak, wrote swiftly on a fresh page.
Your caution is sensible, and if I erred in leaping too swiftly into debate, I offer apology. That my intent is good you have my word—this I swear not on my own good name (for in this world a name may be easily taken and shed), but on my regard for the rabbi, whose honor I hold inviolable. If you but understood my own need for caution, which I may be bold to say might match even your own, your apprehensions would dissolve. I write my words in secrecy, my thoughts being unacceptable to man. Thus when I write I can bear to write naught but what I perceive as truth. I wish not to lure you to untoward opinions, but to discover together what truths we may.
You fear, still, that I wish to expose your thoughts while risking nothing? So I shall give you my credo on this very paper: such a God as the theologians would have us pray to—a God who in a world of suffering aids some but not others—cannot contain the mercy ascribed to him. Therefore, I say: such God as we pray to does not exist. And to this I add: there is no divine intervention. There is no divine judge. So we must supply for ourselves notions of good and ill. This is the purview and millstone of the philosophe.
So be my fate, now, in your hands. Should you wish to cry my name to the heavens as atheist you may. You may publish this address where I live, and if it is your will you may make my life a hellishness or perhaps end it altogether. Such questions as I explore, spoken in whispers, are not deadly in London today, so I believe—yet should I be known in plain daylight to propound the views I have just stated, they might swiftly prove so.
Now that I have placed such trust in your hands, may our two minds be honest with one another about the shape of the universe?
The rumors of your thought that have reached me, along with your work in Principia, prove a gift, as they assure my spirit it is not alone in questing after truth. Yet I say again: these words must necessarily be but a part of all your philosophy: a fence girding and holding back the mountain of your true thought.
Writing the long lines of Latin, she did not hear the rabbi enter. Only when he’d made his way to the fire did she hear the creak of the wooden chair.
“What do you labor at this hour?” he asked quietly.
Her hand was poised above the paper. “I’m copying,” she said. “I spilled ink on the work we did yesterday.”
The rabbi said nothing, but frowned.
“I’ll finish later,” she said.
He nodded slowly. He looked as though his afternoon sleep hadn’t rested him. He wasn’t well. She had glimpsed it now and again lately, but never so clearly as she saw it now: the too-faint breaths he drew, the translucence of his skin, the seed of death already sown in him.
Yet he spent his strength, now, on a labor he believed the world had asked of him. She did not know if she’d cursed him or given him a reason to live. Perhaps these were one and the same.
He spoke. “Your mind is occupied with some troubling thought today.”
She didn’t answer.
“You cannot study the holy words, Ester, or even scribe them properly, while your spirit is vexed. If you but untie the knot of vexation, the words of the text will enter your spirit, where they may ease all. This is how I have found it all the years of my life.” He raised a hand gently to his temple, as though trying to share with her what was within. “When God created the world, He created first of all light. It was a great blow, Ester, to lose it. For a time I felt a darkness greater even than the loss of light. Perhaps you too have felt something like it. But these words—this learning—is my light. I believe it’s yours as well.”
She saw that he was distressed for her, was searching her spirit for entry. A gift she didn’t deserve. The words flew from her lips—a bitter plea. “Baruch de Spinoza was beloved by you, was he not?”
The rabbi inhaled sharply. After a moment, he spoke. “De Spinoza was my great sorrow.” He paused. “The Mahamad issued its decree with the approval of the rabbis of Talmud Torah, despite my efforts to persuade all of them. But I believe the severity of their herem banished an honest soul irrevocably from the light.”
She bit her lip—then spoke softly. “And set him free. To write and think as he wished.”
The rabbi stiffened as though smelling something foul. “Understand this, Ester,” he said. “De Spinoza was in grave error.”
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