“A fine day,” John said to her as the coach began to move.
“Yes.” He sat too close for her to look at him. Instead she looked at Mary, seated beside Thomas on the bench opposite. Mary had dressed in a pale yellow moiré with a petticoat of peach silk. Adhered to her cheek and bosom were several small black velvet patches—one in the shape of a galloping horse, another a boat with sails swelling, and a crescent moon on her breast. Seated together, she and Thomas were a pageant of color and fashion. But the expression on Mary’s face differed entirely from that on Thomas’s. Her lips were parted distractedly, her eyes shining and unfocused—Ester saw that she’d used belladonna drops to dilate them, sacrificing the day’s vision for the chance to seem to Thomas more melting, more womanly.
Yet who was Ester to judge Mary? She herself had yet to say more than a single word to John. She knew how to block the path to flirtation, but not how to open it.
Over the clatter of the coach’s wheels, Thomas addressed them. “I was of a mind that we might see the lunatics on show at Bedlam, or the puppets at Charing Cross. But those places are too thronged up, and Mary fears the plague.” He accepted a jumbal cake from the small sack Mary offered, chewed, then took a flask from his pocket and unstoppered it. “So I thought the India House, but Mary’s so afeared of serpents, she might faint to see the great one they have there. So this decided me: today we go up the river and down it.” He drank again.
John’s whisper brushed Ester’s ear. “The plan was ever the river, but he struts thus for Mary. Thomas’s London is made of theaters and alehouses.”
Grateful to have grist for speech, Ester whispered back in a rush. “Yes, though it’s Mary who’ll pay for the boat, I’m certain, and food and drink.”
John didn’t answer. She ventured a glance. He was watching intently out the window, his cheeks bloomed pink.
She hadn’t meant to shame him. It was absurd—what did it matter to her if he himself didn’t pay for their outing, but allowed the da Costa Mendes fortune to provide all?
She’d no understanding of his air of protected English decency. Propriety, the notion of a fair world with codes that must be upheld—it seemed absurd to her. The piercing practicality of a man like Manuel HaLevy, Ester had to acknowledge, felt to her more honest. Yet the thought that her words might have stung John’s pride made her frantic.
She wished to understand him—and it seemed to her that he was as hidden as she.
She turned, abruptly, to face him. Almost comically he started back from her.
“Why are you here?” she said.
His expression tipped between laughter and alarm. “On this bench?”
“In London,” she said.
“I respect my father’s calling,” he shot back—as though this defense had been spooling out in his mind even before she posed the question. “But he wished for me to align my studies to follow in his profession. He’s a virtuous man and held in much honor, but I told him I wished to study more widely. If I return to his profession, I wish it to be as a man with his eyes opened to the world.”
“And what do you study?”
“Poetry, history, art, a bit of natural philosophy.” He laughed a quick laugh, as though expecting her to demean these pursuits. “I completed my university studies months ago, but with the universities wholly concerned now with theology and law, a man who wishes broader learning must find tutors. I linger in London on the last of my allowance to attend lectures as long as I still may. Each week now I receive a letter calling me home to my father’s estate, yet I’ve no wish to return before I must.” He searched her face; what he saw there seemed to reassure him. “I hold my father’s wisdom in esteem, yet his thinking is like the gardens of his estate,” he said. “Each plant or tree is trimmed into stately form, yet each is rooted in only its place in the landscape and has touched no other.” He glanced at her once more, then out the window, a flush of a different sort spreading on his cheeks.
At a stair on the river, their driver called the horse to a halt. A brief conference; then Thomas and John stepped down from the coach and left them. Mary sat doll-like in the carriage, blinking.
“Shall we step out?” said Ester.
There was no response, save a small huff of air meaning no.
“What troubles you?”
Mary’s voice was tight. “Not a thing.” Her gaze was fixed out the window and she didn’t move—not even a few moments later when the coach swayed with Ester’s descent.
Puddles from the recent rain edged the road. Beneath Ester’s shoes, brown water seeped between the cobblestones. Nearby, at the edge of the stair, John and Thomas conversed intently with a whiskered man, who stood with arms folded. They weren’t alone in bidding for the whiskered man’s services; two other men waited behind Thomas and John. Beside Ester, the driver of Mary’s coach stood on the street with one hand on the horse’s harness. He was picking his teeth and gazing at the river traffic.
Thomas looked displeased as he and John returned to the coach. Seeing Mary still lost in some reverie, Thomas rapped sharply on the side of the coach, startling her. “A hard time of it,” he said, “to find a boat to take upriver. The rich are leaving the city again as they love to, for fear of sickness, and in their petty panic claim all the boats. Our good man of the river insists we hire his horse to pull the skiff against the current, or he won’t let us have his boat—for he can earn more money by hiring both to us, and he knows well that his three-quarters-dead horse is no good for city use. He’s had his way with us too, for there were more looking to hire his boat should we have refused. Imagine, to hire a nag when we’ve got this one standing idle.” Thomas looked regretfully at Mary’s father’s fine horse. Cuffing Mary’s driver jovially on his shoulder, he said to the man, “You should hire this one out while we’re upriver. A bit of silver for your own pocket.”
The da Costa Mendeses’ driver shielded his eyes from the glare and said nothing. But Mary, who had climbed stiffly down to the wet street, signaled him to go. Accepting his dismissal, the driver mounted his seat and tched the horse slowly into the city streets and out of sight.
Mary watched him go. Then turned to Thomas and said in a pointed tone, “How much for the boat?”
Thomas hesitated. With a quick glance to John, he said, “Six shillings.”
Mary pulled an embroidered pocket from the placket of her skirt. She counted the coins deliberately into his hand.
Thomas gave the coins a high toss and caught them, a jaunty gesture. Now that he’d received them thus from the air—as though they were a gift from the fates, rather than from Mary—his mood seemed restored. He clapped John on the shoulder. “It’s fortunate the river only goes in two directions,” he said. “Our boatman is so drunk he can’t find his arse with two hands.”
“Thomas, man,” John protested.
“They’ve heard it before, John,” he said. “You need to stop being afraid of women.” Coming up alongside Mary, he smacked her bottom. She winced and said nothing, which seemed to irk him. Faced with her silence, he shrugged after a moment and turned to the river. “We’ll have a leisurely trip, then.”
John wore a sober expression. “So many fleeing for the country,” he murmured. “Has the sickness reached new parishes?”
“But they go for nothing, John,” Thomas laughed. “Flying off in little boats. They do it each time some new fear visits the city. And do you know who rejoices? The thieves. The richer a man gets, the richer he is in fear, so at the least shadow he abandons all his worldly goods except what he can carry. All those frightened gentlemen will have their lovely silver plate robbed out of their houses by the time they return. If I only had a skill for thievery I’d be running off this moment to start the plunder—and if I received a clap on the shoulder, I’d just split my wealth with the magistrate.” At a sound of protest from John, Thomas laughed. “No harm meant to your father, I believe you that he’s honest, but if so, then he’s the single honest one in all of Engla
nd.”
Only Ester saw the bitter twist that, for a moment, overtook Mary’s face: why steal when all is being given you?
They walked together to the muddy stair and down into the rocking skiff, Thomas first. In her simple dress Ester was able to climb in with ease, but in her stays and busk Mary struggled and nearly overbalanced, and John and Ester braced her on either side to settle her onto the seat, which she clung to with both hands, though the very wooden planks seemed distasteful to her.
The boatman untied the stout rope from the cleat, attached it to the halter of his nag, and began trudging along the stone path at the water’s edge, the nag following, skiff in tow. They started against the current.
The river was wide here, and slow. “Temple Gardens,” John said. Leaning forward, he named each sight as it came into Ester’s view. “Whitehall . . . Westminster.” Towering stone greeted her, a prospect unimagined: dreams of height and grace, invisible from the alleys she daily walked. What a city the birds must see, high above humanity, above all that hammered and smoked. As she watched the vista glide silently by, John laughed.
“London,” he said, gesturing as though introducing her.
And could it be that the London that had loomed over her all these years was small enough to be displayed in that single broad sweep of his hand—and to be left behind now in a matter of only moments? But it was: the city wall, an instant of cool shadowed stone, and they were past. Outside the wall, buildings soon thinned. Paltry streets, a few houses, taverns: rivulets of London spilling into the countryside. Then even these gave out. In the growing quiet, a passing boatman sang a verse; the hooves of the nag plodded on the tow path’s soft dirt. Gone were the haze and stench of the tanneries, replaced by air pure and wet.
That such air could exist, and so close to the city. It was an astonishment that refused to fit into any plane of Ester’s thinking. Her heart grieved, for a moment, for Catherine.
In the green distance, windmills worked, and on grassy hills the whitsters in their pinned-up skirts laid out blinding spangles of laundry. At water’s edge, where the tide must flood and recede, abundant weeds bent in the direction of the current. A silent, stunning freshness. Never had Ester felt a place to be so alive. Birds darted at the verge of the river, and the water was starred here and there with insects that seemed to walk on its very surface. All about them was green. Even the metal gates along the shore were overgrown, caked so thickly in moss one might have broken off pieces of it to eat. How absurd, that she could imagine eating it. A hunger such as she’d never felt took her. If she could unmake her entire life and remake it, she thought, she’d do so in an instant—she’d stand and dive from this boat, plunge into this slow-moving river, and find herself as alive as the water and the air. It seemed immaterial that she couldn’t swim. For the moment she felt persuaded that the water wouldn’t kill her, but would bear her easily beyond the scarred world she’d too long inhabited.
The horse stepped slowly, the breezes blew and settled, the rope creaked, the skiff swayed.
At Barn Elms, John took her arm and helped her to shore. Behind them, Mary said something indignant, calling Thomas back from where he’d stepped ahead of her up the bank.
“One fair hour,” the boatman called. Even from several paces away, Ester could smell the ale on his breath. “That’s all that’s paid, and that’s all I’ll stand guard over this boat, for I’ve got business on the river today and won’t lose it to your dalliances. This boat leaves in one hour, no matter if it’s empty.”
Thomas took Mary’s arm. “Kiss my parliament,” he muttered to the boatman. They hastened into the park.
But John knocked his forefinger once against his lips, then led Ester in a different direction.
The ground was marshy and her feet were soon soaked. She hadn’t worn pattens and neither had he, but neither turned back.
They reached an open field. Flitting over it, resting on branches, stilting amid the grasses, was a stunning array of birds: dun and white, speckled, gray-throated, and rust-winged. A breeze faintly combed small dark pools on the ground. Trees lined the field’s edges, with trunks mantled in pale green moss. A hushed, witnessing world.
On one side, a few paces from her, the field’s border was marked by a low fence of pleached saplings: a living thing, the young trees braided together by some human hand and grown about one another to an entirely new shape. She went to it and laid a hand on the twined wood to feel its springy resistance.
“I didn’t know England could be this,” she said.
John was grinning. “All England is this!” he said.
She laughed in his face.
“No, I meant real England,” he said, unhappy. “Not London. London is . . . brilliant and clattering and foul. It has the jewels of the world’s learning and also the world’s dirt, all in balance. But though I love the city, it’s a dream from which a man wakes. From which I’ll wake.” A shadow passed over his face, but then its bright ardor returned. “This is England, Ester.”
Farther down the field, a young deer appeared: velvet nose, flecked brown coat, watching them through one shining black eye.
“Walk straightly toward it,” John whispered, and they did, they stepped slowly toward it, his hand on her elbow, both of them tottering and catching each other as they crossed the mud, until they could see the deer’s eyelashes and hear its soft breath. Only then did it turn and move off slowly, as if it wished them to know it wasn’t frightened of them.
In that heartbeat she felt she understood Mary’s desire to give a man all.
She turned to face John.
He looked startled. Then, as she prepared to speak, he set his lips on hers. A quick kiss.
“You meant to say?” he whispered.
His face was absurd, full of happiness and longing. She raised her hands to her own face, feeling the same expression mirrored there.
But she wasn’t the kind of woman he thought she was. He had to know.
“With you, I feel set loose,” he said. His countenance was alive—it seemed to sift light like the river water, shining with hidden currents. Blinding her. “I like to be in your company,” he said. “I like it very much.”
Why? What could he desire in her? She stood on her toes and set her hands on his shoulders, and she kissed him to find out. He answered more softly than she’d expected, a kiss that tugged inside her. To push it away, she said, “You don’t know who I am.”
“But I do! I know your soul. Ester, am I too bold to think that you and I are people who understand such things?”
Her speech stumbled. “If you knew my soul—if you knew it, John, you’d know it’s lived so great a time without light, it no longer believes in what can be seen by it.”
But he was laughing, as though her very stumbling delighted him. “Ester, you damn yourself as though you’re the very devil. But I’m not Bescós.” He spoke slowly to be sure she heard him. “You are no less pure for being a Jewess.”
She felt ages older than he—centuries. She felt her own words turn her to dust. Yet she made herself say them anyway, to rip that veil of trust from his face. She said, “I’m not at peace with this world. I—I find what freedom I have here.” She tapped her temple.
“Tell me.”
Her voice wandered. “I think . . . about the world. About . . . God, and questions.”
His brow furrowed; he seemed on the point of asking her something. Then his expression lightened. “I understand,” he said softly. “I understand enough, Ester, to know that anything you’ll tell me cannot trouble me, because I see your spirit.” He laughed, startling her. “Ester, if you believe I’ve spoken thus to other women, it’s not so. I felt something the day I first saw you. I felt liberty, such as I never felt before. A premonition of a new sort of joy.”
She didn’t know what such words cost him. Or whether he understood their power to save or destroy. All she knew was that against such dizzying gentleness she was a cribbed, fearful creature. She
hardly realized she spoke aloud. “Yet will you love a woman, if she prizes truth over softness?”
“If you love a truth, Ester, I’ll love you the more for it. And if I know not this truth, I’ll learn it. And if I can’t learn it, then Ester, I’ll tolerate it. That’s the love I bear you! But what manner of truth is it that gives you such misery? Speak it and share its weight.”
Silently she sifted words. “A truth,” she began at length, “for which I’ve traded my honor.”
His face flooded with color. It took him a moment to speak. “You’re not a virgin?”
“You misunderstand.”
A woeful expression took him. “Then I owe you an apology. Ester, I’ve insulted you.”
“You haven’t!” she cried, impatient. “What I say to you, John, is that I’ve lied about what I am.”
He was silent. Then, slowly and with an expression of relief, he nodded. “Yet to be a Jew in this world, I understand, is a danger. If a Jew speak the truth of his faith in the wrong moment, though that faith harms none, he brings down untold wrath. It’s an argument I’ve tried to engage with my father in matters of the law, for it seems to me that the penalties for untruth ought not be enforced on those whose very nature puts them in jeopardy, should they speak true. Ester, hear me. If a Jew tell a lie because the truth of his faith cannot be tolerated by those around him, shouldn’t one then prosecute the world rather than the Jew?”
Meadow and tree and ivy—the lushness surrounding him as he spoke was impossible. If he forgave her, thinking she spoke of hiding her Jewishness, would he forgive when he learned that what she hid was her sex?
She would later rue her cowardice at not pressing on until she’d spoken all. But it was too late—she had succumbed to hope, and with it, timidity.
“Will you remember,” she said quietly, “that you spoke thus?”
He said, “I won’t forget.”
Her vision starred with tears.
The Weight of Ink Page 41