His skin was pink and pale, warm against the gold of hers, his body thin as she’d imagined, and she closed her eyes and found once more the green daylight she’d remembered from that day beside the river, and of which she’d dreamt since. But not even in her dreams had she unfurled herself so alongside him, the two of them in silent tandem using every sense but sight. His touch on her skin like spider’s silk, so delicate a mere breeze could tear it beyond repair—for they were choosing not merely to love, but to love thus, and as he entered her the words were a piercing brightness in her mind: we two invented this. She opened her eyes to tell him, and his face was strange to her—wild and alive and beautiful as a storm crashing against every lit windowpane. John’s dear face, quickened with such sacred clarity that she thought: so would be the angels, fierce with desire and understanding.
This love has no endpoint, she wished to say. See how we’re borne within it, on and on and on? She called his name, and as she did she laughed aloud.
Yet even as she laughed, she saw his delight falter. She saw some stray thought tug at him, as though a voice had, for just an instant, called him—a tiny, flickering herald from a place beyond this bed: a world of iron-cast virtue and vice, where his own heart had never dared utter a sound, so its beating now was thunder and calamity. Unease fell over his eyes.
She lost his face, then. His body was flush with hers; he gripped her hard in his arms and his face burrowed into the cloud of her hair on the pillow. A hopeful confusion, his breath fast in her ear.
A wince of pleasure.
He lay quietly atop her. Then he separated from her. She felt his eyes on her, but when she looked at him he glanced at the window. They lay breathing on the bed. She tried again to meet his gaze; again it fled hers. As though she’d led him too far, too fast—as though a force had summoned him back from himself, and he’d fain be any other man now, so frightened was he to be John. The room was silent.
“You were a virgin?” he said.
The words were discordant, a script for the wrong play. Didn’t he understand what she’d just said to him—what she’d offered—with her body? What had her virginity, or his, to do with what had just taken place?
Yet the question demanded an answer, in the same foreign tongue he’d spoken. Reluctant, she nodded. Yes. Seeing that words were still required, she said, “I trust myself in your hands.”
She felt him nod. But something in his body had solidified. When he looked at her a moment later, it was as if from a distance—as if he feared something in himself, and her.
There was a bang—a door slamming in its frame. Thomas. At the sound John jumped to his feet and dressed, passing her things to her courteously but without looking at her. A moment later she was dressed—and John squeezed her shoulder with forced warmth, murmured something with a slight apologetic laugh, and then she was in the parlor and on her way to the door, with John out of sight behind her, Thomas greeting her with a bleary smirk as she passed.
She could not regret what she’d done. She could not.
She reached home with no recollection of what she’d passed on the street, or whether she’d encountered any, living or dead. She shut the door behind her, turned, and the sight of Manuel HaLevy, seated at her writing table with a cup of ale, stilled her.
Rivka was perched uneasily on the rabbi’s chair. It was plain she was restless to turn to her chores—yet the rabbi was asleep in his bedroom, and some unaccustomed impulse toward politeness seemed to have seized Rivka, preventing her from abandoning their visitor. As soon as Ester entered the room, Rivka turned to Manuel HaLevy, murmured “By your leave” in thickly accented English, and left with a quick curtsy—a gesture so foreign to Rivka’s usual demeanor that Ester simply stared.
Moving as in a dream, Ester turned to Manuel HaLevy. She saw, with a dull, distant shock, that she hadn’t put away her writing from yesterday. So distracted had she been by her conversation with the rabbi that she’d let the page she’d written for him remain in broad view on the table. But Manuel had pushed it aside, and did not seem interested in reading. He looked in good spirits, his robust figure fit, his color high.
“I came to check on my investment,” he said.
Her eyes could not seem to contract. There was too much light; the window was a white blur and his face hazed in her vision.
“My father sent me to attend to some small affairs of his here in London and make sure his servants take no advantage of his absence. But of course I was glad of the reason to visit—even with London in this state.” He looked closely at her. Concern furrowed his broad brow. “You’re not ill?”
Resisting the impulse to raise a hand to her flushed cheek, she shook her head.
He looked glad, then amused. “Has the pestilence tamed your famous tongue?”
She formed a small smile. “No,” she said.
He drank from his ale, set the cup on the table. “Did you note that Sasportas has gone—and not just to the countryside, but out of England altogether? Our esteemed new rabbi, it seems, chooses not to shepherd his congregation through such a visitation. The plague offers him divine signal to flee, as he’s wished to since first he arrived here. The man was too godly for a congregation of merchants.” Manuel’s full lips formed a wry rose. Then he turned serious. “There’s no plague in Richmond, Ester. Come there with me.”
She spoke flatly, with a mute gesture toward the rabbi’s room. “I won’t leave him now.”
He nodded. “I understand.”
She didn’t know whether to feel grateful or bitter.
“I wish you’d come with me,” he said, “but I respect you for the choice. When we marry, you’ll show me the same devotion.”
He leaned across the table and picked up the page he’d pushed aside. Quickly he read it. She knew what was there: the rabbi’s dictation—words she’d committed to paper without ever understanding they were addressed to her. For I speak to you as a father to a son, and though your endeavor be beyond my reach, still I wish to gird you with all the understanding and love of God that I harbor in my heart. It is for this that I labor, for I believe it will be my last good deed in this world.
With a tolerant smile, Manuel HaLevy set down the page, patted it, and set his used cup atop it. “Remember the choice that’s offered you,” he said.
A night torqued by dreams. In long wakeful hours, in a black silence broken only by the rabbi’s faint moans, she rehearsed the day’s events, as though trying to solve an equation with aching heart and flesh for its components.
Near dawn, carriage wheels below her window.
She descended the stair and opened the door before John had lifted his hand to knock. She stood, one hand on the doorknob for strength.
Behind John, set against the dark street and white sky, was a coach piled with baggage. The coachman hunched in his seat, his face shuttered against the city; framed in the half-closed window, silently facing forward, was Thomas. Before addressing her John glanced back at them, as though drawing strength from their impatience.
When he turned to her, she saw that he looked diminished, apprehensive.
Something had gone wrong, something whose name was still just outside her reach. All the world would have told her that her error had been in giving herself to him—that he abhorred her now because she’d so easily surrendered her virtue—yet she felt certain that wasn’t right. Something had slipped between them, and in slipping had started a dreadful wordless tumble she didn’t know how to stop. She’d given her body because it was the only way she knew to speak the truth—to make John understand what she pledged, lay it out plainly alongside the love he’d offered. Yet their joining had carried him too far, to a territory where he didn’t recognize himself, or her.
If she could have curled herself up in his pocket as he stood there on the street, she’d have done it. She would even, in that instant, have abandoned the rabbi. She’d have forsaken her writing as a barren folly, climbed shivering into the carriage to warm hers
elf beside him. Take me with you.
But it was too late. His face bore the marks of his own suffering. She read there his struggle to think well of himself, and his panic to flee all the sudden scourges of this city, herself among them.
“You’ll come to join me,” he said. “Perhaps. After.” He essayed each word carefully.
She forced herself to walk the steps of his logic. “After the rabbi’s death?”
He offered an uncertain nod.
She opened her mouth to insist: But what of our love? What of all you swore? And as John glanced yet again toward the safety of the coach, another, more desperate impulse rose in her: to speak words she knew would corral him in an instant.
I gave you my honor; now you know your duty to me.
But she could not comprehend a love that must be purchased with pity. Nor would she force John to her side through a language of honor in which she did not believe. Honor and love were no kin—all who claimed so did ill in the world. At last, now, she understood her own grandmother’s pained choice. A heart is a free thing, Lizabeta had said, and once enslaved will mutiny.
She thought, Let me not enslave that heart that so wishes for liberty. Let him come to me in freedom, or not at all.
She said to John, “I’ll await word from you, then.”
He appeared relieved. Then, as all she’d left unspoken rang in the silence, unhappy.
He mustered himself. Then looked directly at her. “I haven’t your strength of heart,” he said.
You would, she thought, if you had my life.
“I shall see you, then.” A halting kiss on her cheek.
In her confusion she allowed it. Piercing words rose to her lips—but speaking them would squander a silence she needed, now, to absorb every detail of him. Had Ester once thought it frivolous for a woman to don breeches in order to learn the mind of her lover? She’d have done far more now, as John turned for his carriage. She’d have bent herself wholly to a new shape, if only she might understand. Enchant. Be other than what she was.
He’d loved her. To doubt this would be to doubt her very sanity.
His carriage receded down the street.
The days narrowed, dimmed, piled one upon the next. They muffled one another, indistinguishable—save for the flare of the match on Sabbath as Rivka lit the candles, then placed a drop of wine on the rabbi’s pale tongue. Ester and Rivka waited, together, as he labored to swallow it. Outside the windows, London had reshaped itself. The sound of hooves had all but left the streets and what remained of all London’s throngs was a populace of extremes: those too poor to flee, and those whose love of their possessions made them unwilling to leave them; those too ill for the journey, and those who trusted firmly in their good health; those who would plunder, and those few unselfish souls who still wished to tend the sick, in the watchful hush that had overtaken the city.
In the distance Ester at times heard bells, strange poundings, flurries of noise followed by dreadful quiet. Now and then, muted cries from beyond their door broke the silence. Ester ventured out when they needed supplies, offering herself for their errands and household labors so Rivka could remain at the rabbi’s side. There was no more laudanum to be had in the city, and the apothecary had doubled the price for willow bark. The man would no longer take the coin from her hand, but with a wordless shake of his head bade her set it on his table—as though not only touch but even speech might prove deadly.
One evening near dusk, returning from the apothecary, she strayed to the park where she’d once encountered Catherine. A foolish thing to do, yet she no longer feared for her own safety. Grass had overgrown the paths, and the dim air was rich with birdcalls—for by the mayor’s authority all London’s cats, blamed for spreading the pestilence, had been killed. She stood beneath the fresh rills of song, amid cool waves of grass, until stars pricked overhead. From a deserted street nearby came the dim light of a single lantern, carried by an invisible stranger hastening through the streets toward home, its faint, aching glow careening from window to window.
Words she’d once read in another world, in a lamp-lit bookbinder’s shop, floated through her mind: What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.
The soft English sod beneath her shoes.
She found Rivka red-eyed. Setting her cloak on the peg, she heard the rabbi breathing shallowly on the bed Rivka had made for him by the fire. His voice was a dry whisper. Hesitant, she stepped closer to hear. She hadn’t allowed herself to be so near to him in weeks, choosing instead to make herself useful from a distance, for she felt certain her presence must burden him.
“Vidui,” he said.
Were the world not so altered, Sasportas or some other respected man of the synagogue would receive the rabbi’s confession. And wouldn’t it be better for the rabbi not to confess at all, rather than have one who had betrayed him hear his vidui?
Yet the communication he must make now was with heaven—and she, with prayer book in hand, would be his necessary conduit. Closing her eyes, she pledged to purge all other thoughts from her mind, so that she might do at least this one task for him without fault.
She found the worn volume and read out the words slowly, allowing each phrase time to reach him. Modeh ani lefanecha. He repeated some of the words after her, and let others fall unvoiced from his moving lips. Te’he mitati kapara.
Some time after she’d finished, a parched sound came from his throat. With effort, he spoke again. “I speak now my own confession.”
He swallowed, a long and labored process.
“The distances between things,” he whispered, “are vast.”
His hand rose, wavered in the air, then settled on the blanket covering his chest. “It is my consolation,” he said, “to come safe to death, without being tested a second time. For I’ve known I would fail. Just as I failed in boyhood, when my soul was tested by the inquisitors.
“I have little memory of how I answered their terrible questions, though they asked again and again. I recall only trying to erase from my mind names I knew, names that would cause other Jews to suffer. Yet this I confess: had they asked me to deny my God, I would have done so—for in that dreadful place, my body felt only its own pain, and my weak spirit could not believe the suffering I witnessed to be the birth pangs of the Messiah.”
He’d spent his strength. He rested, then gathered himself once more.
“After my eyes were taken, I felt my way through each room, each passageway and alley of Lisbon, and then Amsterdam, with my fingers outstretched. And do you know what I felt, Ester?”
She swallowed.
“That the distances between things were vast, vaster than I had known when I had sight. Everywhere I felt a void. Everywhere was hollow, God’s presence withdrawn. I walked with fingers outstretched and felt the brokenness of God’s world.
“God blesses me now,” he whispered, “and spares me a second torment. It is the only thing I have feared in this world . . . that should the Inquisition take me once more, my soul would fail a second time. I have feared, Ester, to die without a psalm on my tongue.” He raised a quaking hand and slowly, lightly, touched his sealed eyelids, first one and then the other. “As was Zedekiah punished,” he said, “so have I been. For all my life, all these weary years, the last vision I saw has remained before me. My mother,” he whispered, his hand hovering before his eyelids. “Upon the rack. Her body broken, but her eyes yet open, shining as the life drained from her. She had asserted her faith. She could not raise a hand to cover her nakedness.” There was a long silence. He lowered his hand. “She has remained before my sightless eyes, every morning, every day and night, as I saw her then. I have walked through a hollow world, carrying her.”
His breath was uneven, coming soft and then loud.
“I have worked to restore some of God’s presence to the hollowness. For repairing the world through His words is the work for which God has intended us.” He paused a long while. “Only,” he said, “I have wished eac
h day that I could stop seeing her. Even if it meant forgetting her beloved face forever.”
After a moment he continued, his voice strengthened. “My sin that I confess now is to have wanted death. In secret I have longed for it, for blindness can never suffice to extinguish the sight of the terrors of this broken world.”
Once more he fell silent. A moment later, he nodded slowly, his thin, stained beard rising and falling on the blanket that covered his concave chest. He said, “This I confess.”
He said no more to her. Gradually he fell into some sort of sleep.
Rivka, bringing a chair, sat beside Ester and commenced whispering psalms from memory. Some time in the night, Ester joined Rivka in her recitations. Their words flowed in the silence. Beneath the current of whispers, by the light of the fire, Ester watched the transformation as the rabbi sank into himself. And as though he were even now continuing his gentle tutelage—instructing her, even as he slipped beyond her reach, to study him as carefully and minutely as any phrase they’d learned together—she felt that she saw a circlet surrounding his head and then his laboring chest, made wholly of pain. Yet the circlet, even as it was his torment, shed a soft reminder of something he’d known all his life—as though a voice within it or above it whispered: you always knew so, did you not? And she saw the rabbi heed it, and she saw him agree at last. For death—so it seemed to Ester now—awaits agreement, even where it must persuade and threaten and insist without mercy until agreement is granted.
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