The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

“I know you, Ester,” he said, “though you think I don’t.” His arms were about her. “You’re honest. And I see that unlike most women and even some men, you’ve the strength to watch over yourself—though that strength must have come at great cost.”

  There was something in his admiration—something too rapid, even boyish—but she could get no purchase on it. She wished to tell him every road she’d stumbled down before alighting in this green field. She wished to explain to him that she was not a woman accustomed to crying.

  And she thought: don’t trust love unless you can see what it costs the lover.

  And she forgot the thought.

  At a shout from the riverbank they turned. Thomas was running toward the shore from a distance, cursing the boatman, who was making a great show of tugging the rope to turn the skiff downriver.

  “We come, man!” Thomas shouted. “You’ve sped the clock.”

  As they approached, the man untied the famished-looking horse, then threw the boat’s rope heavily to Thomas. His voice was slurred. “You’ll return’t to my man at the stair where you found me,” he said, “and you’ll go direct, or I’ll have twice my pay.”

  “You’ve been paid for an hour and we’re here not half that,” said Thomas.

  The boatman muttered something—all Ester heard of his complaint, as she reached the shore, was and through standing over this boat. He ambled away, leading his horse.

  Ester climbed into the boat, followed by Mary.

  “Take your near-dead nag,” shouted Thomas. He made a rude gesture behind the man. Then, stepping with one foot onto the boat, he seized an oar and mimed as though to use it as a club—a gesture lost on the boatman, whose back was already turned.

  “Thomas,” said Mary.

  He didn’t look at her, but set down the oar, steadying the boat long enough for Mary to settle onto the seat beside Ester. Then he climbed in, drank heavily from his flask, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, his gestures animated by some pent fury.

  Standing on the bank, John pushed them off and leapt the boat’s gunwales, then settled on the narrow seat at the front. The river carried them.

  Mary was staring at the current. Her eyes had regained a hard focus, the effects of the belladonna drops gone. A front lock of her hair had uncurled, and she chewed slowly on its end.

  The boat traffic traveling upriver had grown heavier during their outing, as though some unseen tap had opened and London begun to empty of its people even as Ester and her companions returned to it. Some of the barges and skiffs they passed were heavily laden with hastily packaged household possessions, even fine furnishings.

  “See the rolled tapestries stowed aboard!” John said, gesturing at one boat. “The river’s full of the uppermost sorts fleeing, and they’ll be sending back their servants to load up their households into wagons. I’ll guess the roads will be full of carts.”

  Ester didn’t know what made her speak thus, but she didn’t seem able to help herself—something pushed her to be sure of John. “Is your family of the uppermost sorts?” she asked.

  He laughed uncomfortably. “Yes,” he said.

  But Thomas hooted. “You are a little fury.”

  Mary continued to look toward the deep center of the river.

  Thomas hoisted his oars out of the water and rested them on the gunwales, letting the current carry the boat. “Little silver-haired fury with the great gray eyes,” he said. “You’re either a fairy or a witch, and John and I disagree as to the correct answer.” He drained his flask, then spoke again, a bite in his words that Ester had not heard before. “Your John is indeed the uppermost sort, Ester. As am I, if you wish to know. Perhaps Mary doesn’t know that as well—that I have prospects of my own, elsewhere.” He looked only at Ester as he spoke—she could make no sense of it. “Your John there was to be the third in the line of family judges. He might still—only John fancies himself a man of poetry and hasn’t yet settled his mind on whether to throw away his fortunes alongside the rest of us in London, or go safely back to his uppermost sort of people. Tell me, John, has your mother written yet to beg you return from dirty, diseased London?”

  From the seat where he watched the river, John turned. His cheeks were pink but his voice steady. “I’m my own master,” he said.

  For several minutes, they floated downriver in silence. As they neared the city, bits of wood and paper and offal appeared once more in the current, and here and there excrement. After a time Thomas resumed rowing.

  Without turning her gaze, Mary addressed Ester quietly enough so the men could not hear. “My father writes that he won’t return to London until after the sickness lifts.”

  “Doesn’t he ask you to join him?”

  “He asks,” said Mary. “But I won’t go. He has a new lady.”

  “But”—Ester shook her head, puzzled. “Your father’s new lady doesn’t wish you to join them?”

  Mary spoke haughtily. “I don’t go because I don’t wish it,” she said. But behind those words some other unvoiced reason seemed to hide.

  The wall of the city loomed, and they were within London once more. Ester twisted to look back at the green hills, but already they were vanishing, occluded by the river’s thick traffic. The heavy odor of smoke wafted over the water. She closed her eyes to hold the colors: the green of moss and grass and tree, the deer’s soft brown coat.

  “Thomas.” John’s voice roused her. “You’re passing the stair.” Ester opened her eyes to see John pointing—the set of stone steps where they’d acquired the boat was even now receding in their wake.

  Yet Thomas rowed as though he hadn’t heard. He kept them at the center of the river, in a current thick with paper rubbish and some soft floating black mounds whose origins Ester didn’t wish to know.

  “Thomas!” John called.

  Mary’s eyes were on Thomas now, and her upper teeth bit so firmly into her lip, Ester was surprised it didn’t bleed.

  They were approaching the bridge. Even from this distance, Ester could hear the water boiling under the starlings.

  John turned on his seat, his arms braced on the sides of the boat, and cried to Thomas over the din. “You don’t mean to shoot the bridge, man? Not with ladies on board.”

  Thomas did not answer.

  “It’s not done!”

  Thomas steered them to the center of the river. Ester felt the boat quicken as a swifter current took it.

  “Thomas.” John half-rose in the boat. His voice, lowered, took on an urgent note. “Take that hazard with your own life, not theirs. Take us to a stair.”

  The traffic of boats about them had thinned. Those heading downriver were docking to discharge passengers, leaving only the boatmen to brave the rapids that crashed between the bridge’s starlings. Some of the boatmen, rough-looking men, glanced curiously their way as they joined the queue of boats in the center of the river. On the Southwark bank, a small knot of people had stopped to watch them. Ester knew why. The bridges’ starlings were many and some of the passages between were blocked by mills, and the restriction of the water’s course so raised the river’s level on the bridge’s upriver side, and so lowered it on the downriver, that a waterfall coursed beneath the bridge. Boats attempting to pass beneath London Bridge smashed on the starlings; they smashed inside the bridge’s stone arches; those that made it through might capsize in the precipitous drop on the other side. It was a passage dared only by practiced boatmen.

  On shore, someone was pointing at Mary and Ester and shouting something unintelligible.

  “Thomas!” John yelled again. But Ester could see it was too late.

  Thomas was working the oars with a harsh smile. “Let’s see how this boat can dance, shall we?” Mary gripped Ester’s forearm so tightly that Ester cried out, as with a grunt Thomas gave another vicious pull at the oars. “Shall we put a few scratches in the man’s precious vessel?”

  “Thomas!” Mary screamed—but he was intent on the starlings ahead. Now the water was a blac
k glassy chute rushing them forward, and Thomas could not have turned them back if he’d wished to. Ester could see the opening he’d chosen: a dark, churning channel of wet rock and spume. Above them the bridge loomed with its tiered shops: a small city perched over the roiling river, yet its sounds were obliterated by the rushing of water. Ester had an instant to view the muted buildings, their glinting windows, their smoke-haze—a last glimpse of daylight. And Thomas’s face, a hot fury settled there. John, thrown forward in the boat. John, clinging to the boat’s gunwales at a strange angle as the bow dipped steeply, then the stern flung itself high, and they pitched into the dark—Ester’s chest slamming the boat’s floor and Mary’s weight a blow atop her. Water whipped, cuffing Ester’s cheek as the boat crashed, then jolted, one way then another, and she thought, Now is my death. The pang of regret she felt shocked her.

  A grinding, a reckoning with unseen stone, a cold flood. And then, they slipped.

  A long slide, into bright, bobbing light.

  The skiff half-turned and listed as the current shoved it onward. Then, improbably, it righted, low in the water.

  The world returned to her: color and foam and, last of all, sound. As the boat lurched in wave after wave of the bridge’s spew, Ester helped Mary raise her head to vomit over the side of the boat.

  Thomas and John were bailing with their hands. Two boatmen in nearby skiffs rode close. One was laughing. The other, grave, tossed a bucket for bailing. “’Sblood man, what provokes you to take ladies beneath the bridge?”

  Thomas stopped his work for a moment. “These,” he said, “aren’t ladies.”

  Ester’s eyes met John’s. John said to the boatman, “We need to get these ladies to shore, and our friend to a quiet bed to sleep until the drink leaves him.”

  The boatman moved close until he’d grabbed the side of their craft, then extended a hand to Mary. But she was clinging to the far edge and would not take his hand. Her dress was soaked and clung heavily, the patches on her cheeks were gone or askew. She heaved again over the side, her eyes shut against the rushing water.

  When she’d finished she spat quietly and said to Ester, “I’m with child.”

  The boatman was waiting.

  “A moment,” Ester called. “Please.” The man turned to give them privacy. Quickly, pushing Mary’s wet hair from her cheeks, Ester whispered, “Does Thomas know it?”

  Mary snorted, but her derision was cut short by a dry convulsion, which racked her body even though her stomach had already disgorged its contents. When this had passed, she sank against the ribs of the boat. “Of course he knows. Why do you think”—she gestured back at the bridge. “I told him at Barn Elms,” she whispered. Then she lifted her face and met Ester with a defiant stare. “He’d said it couldn’t happen if I didn’t”—she stopped, gestured emphatically, and waited for Ester to understand.

  After a moment Ester did. Take pleasure.

  “And I’d heard the same as well. So I took care not to.”

  A gull wheeled above them, arcing over the bridge before sweeping back downriver. They followed its flight until its gray body faded against the horizon.

  A last small spasm gripped Mary. When it had passed, she spoke as though to herself. “I told Thomas my father will disown me.” Her gaze had settled once more on the water. “So we’ll simply earn our own sustenance. Once Thomas accustoms himself to the idea.”

  Ester allowed the words to go unchallenged.

  With John’s assistance, they clambered out of the half-sunk skiff and onto the rocking craft of the solemn boatman—first Ester, then Mary, stiff in her ruined dress. Thomas, still in the skiff, paid as little mind as if they were strangers.

  So all Catherine’s effort to protect her daughter—and Ester’s paltry, stumbling attempts—were for naught. Mary would now need to become a different sort of creature from the petted girl Catherine had raised. A woman whose life Ester could not guess at.

  The man rowed them to shore, where they waited silently, Ester wrapped in the rough, smoke-smelling blanket that Mary had refused, despite her shivering. Ester could hear John’s voice over the water as he bailed. Thomas, now standing athwart the half-flooded boat while John worked, was singing aloud some bawdy lyric—and he hooted at John’s calls for him to join in the labor, until John gripped both gunwales and rocked the skiff, hard. Thomas splashed down in the center and set to work.

  At length both men reached shore with the bailed skiff, and at the stair they were able to tip it and drain the remaining water. The boatman who had rescued them agreed to have his son and nephew carry the skiff overland back to the stair above the bridge—this in exchange for more of the coins Mary counted, clutching her sodden skirts and speaking the numbers crisply aloud so that Thomas, standing a few paces away with his face toward the flowing river, could not but hear: three shillings, two pence.

  By the time she’d finished paying, it was raining. To warm themselves they entered a nearby inn, a low-ceilinged room heavy with the smells of candle wax and damp wool. Some whispered conversation had sprung up between Mary and Thomas on the brief walk there—Ester could not tell whether it was a fight or a reconciliation, but the two settled at their own end of the long wooden table.

  John, sitting beside her, ordered bread and beer and grouse soup.

  The candle on the table burned a bright yellow. John laid his hands on the scored wooden surface. “At heart,” he said, “Thomas is a good lad.”

  Ester sat straight on the hard bench. “Thomas is well past youth, yet you call him a lad.”

  John smiled. “I think he would like that.”

  “Perhaps. Yet his love of youth is all for himself, and doesn’t extend to a brat.”

  John looked uncomprehending. Then he turned to the far side of the table, where Thomas and Mary sat unspeaking—Thomas squinting into a tankard, Mary with an air of taut determination Ester had not seen before.

  John shook his head slowly, understanding. He opened his mouth—she saw him ready himself to say Thomas will do what he ought. But he hesitated.

  “Let us not lie to ourselves,” she said.

  He conceded.

  She shook her head to clear it; she hadn’t intended to argue. For once, she’d no desire to reason or muster evidence. She wanted, instead, to say something to him. Yet she’d no words.

  She tried again. “Let us not lie.”

  “I’ll not lie to you,” he said. “Your honesty is a . . .” He drank his ale, set it down. “Your honesty is a beacon.” He regarded Thomas and Mary for a moment, and shook his head slowly. Then—as though shedding the events of their return down the river—he smiled softly at her. His hand patted the table. Once, twice. Three times. “I want to show you all the still places and the lakes, Ester. I want to show you England.” And there was something fervent in his expression, as though she were an ideal of such purity it was a fearsome joy to pledge himself to it.

  A woman brought the soup. Closing her eyes, Ester warmed her hands on the bowl. She understood she ought to remind him of the obstacles to a love such as theirs—between a Jewess and a Gentile. But she’d no more words to dissuade John from his determination to love her—nor did she wish any longer to turn him from it. She no longer wanted to be the aching, watchful person she’d become. For the first time she thought, I understand why we sleep. To slip the knot of the world. Sitting beside John, with her palms braced on the hot bowl of soup, she wished for forgetfulness—and for a moment she let herself slide into a dream. A falling, sickening feeling; a feeling of great and dangerous liberty. Her body remained on the hard bench—she felt John’s knee against the damp fabric of her dress—yet in her mind they were in a boat. Sailing, somehow, back upriver—away from all that fastened her to the city of London, away from duty and hardship, to where the water was bright and sun-teased. The rocking ribs of the boat. Her own ribs, cradled by the sparkling current; a cradle of rushing sound, John’s voice rocking her, and a rain of light behind her eyes. And the worl
d, green and green and green.

  A wildness took her. She opened her eyes.

  “If,” she began. Then she stopped. His right hand was on the table. She slid her left hand toward his until they touched. With her right, she lifted the candle in its holder and raised it high. As the first of the hot wax hit his hand, he startled—but he obeyed her stillness and kept his hand beside hers as she traced the wax over his hand and her own, his and her own: a searing drizzle that left no burn, but cooled to a fine tracery that would seal them together until they broke it apart.

  21

  March 18, 2001

  London

  At two o’clock, Librarian Patricia had assured him that her colleague from the conservation laboratory would be downstairs soon. At two-thirty she’d repeated the assertion. After that, she’d refused Aaron’s increasingly pointed queries. Even Helen’s polite prompting failed to persuade Librarian Patricia to lift the telephone once more to muster her colleague from her roost in the conservation lab.

  At nearly half past three, Conservation Patricia, with her faded red-brown hair and narrow, severe-looking face, approached their table. She had the air of someone who had reached the limits of her patience—had reached it, plainly, before cracking an eyelid that morning. In comparison Librarian Patricia looked downright kindly.

  “I’m told you have some need of me?” she said, surveying both of them.

  “We’re wondering,” began Helen, “whether there are any remaining documents—anything that hasn’t yet been released for viewing—dated after July 8 of the first plague summer. That would be 1665.”

  “Do you honestly imagine,” said Conservation Patricia, “that I need to be told the dates of the plague?”

  Helen tipped her head. “My apologies. I’m accustomed to dealing with people who do.”

  Mollified, Conservation Patricia opened the folder that was tucked under her arm, and consulted a page. “We’re still processing the final documents. However, none is dated later than July 8, 1665, with only one potential exception. There’s a document that we haven’t yet opened, for the simple reason that no one ever has—the wax seal, which we believe to be the original, is still intact. The humidifying chamber is currently in use, but when it’s next available we’ll use it to facilitate removing the letter’s seal, and then gradually soften the paper to prevent it breaking at the creases when unfolded. It’s a slow process. I’ve no idea what the date of that document will be. Otherwise there’s nothing left in the laboratory after that date.”