Patricia Starling-Haight called the lift and was gone.
Patricia Smith turned back to her table. She tugged close a soup-bowl-sized magnifying glass mounted on its own goose-necked stand. Peering through it, she tweezed nearly invisible fibers from a fragment of paper with precise flicks of her latex-gloved hands.
Minutes passed. The nut bar had restored Helen enough that she was increasingly conscious of the cold press of her damp stockings. As she sat watching Patricia work, her relief silted away, replaced by the beginnings of shame.
Without warning, Patricia Smith pushed back from her table. “Water?” she said, her blue eyes naked and blinking.
Helen nodded.
Patricia disappeared into a narrow hall, then returned with a glass. As Helen gulped the water, Patricia Smith resumed her work—a show of unconcern that Helen knew was meant to offer privacy as she struggled fruitlessly to quell the waving of the glass. By the time Helen had finished drinking, the front of her blouse was soaked.
Patricia Smith, standing now, poured a clear chemical from a large white bottle into a second tray, then, with tweezers, dropped several of the fragments in. A taut, disciplined woman whose labor was the stuff of sorcery: to undo the wreckage of neglect and time.
After a moment Patricia rose, shed her gloves, and disappeared into the lift.
For a long time, Helen sat in the silent laboratory. All around her, on shelves and tables, on metal trays and in glass chambers, lay a silent company of paper: centuries old, leaf after leaf, torn or faded or brittle. Pages inked by long-dead hands. Pages damaged by time and worse. But they—the pages—would live again.
And Helen would die.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins.
The wet front of her blouse clung to her chest.
She’d spent the last of her energies trying to redeem Ester Velasquez’s fate—believing fervently in some hidden truth that would upend the story of another woman’s life. But all the while, it seemed, she’d failed to look for the same in her own.
Memory, spiraling down and down until bedrock. She sat among shards. Once she’d felt the terror of love in her body. Once she’d loved Dror amid his losses, and fled him. She’d spent the decades barricading herself from life, setting the conditions for love so high no one else could ever meet them. Few, in fact, had made any effort. It was a simple thing, in the end, to hide in plain sight. The world did not prevent you from becoming what you were determined to become.
For far too long, she’d failed to understand this.
She’d loved only one man. Year after year, studying the news in her quiet flat, she’d reached for him in the spaces between every article about Israel, felt for his presence in the most mundane details. And, sipping tea as she turned the pages of newsprint, she’d understood she’d been saved from it all: from the murderous traps Dror had warned against, from the bruising bewilderment she’d have felt with such a man, from his protectiveness—so fierce it terrified her. And she’d understood too that she was damned.
All too willingly had she let herself be fooled by Dror’s severity. She’d told herself: my world and his are opposite and cannot coexist. But she was older now—and, looking back at that young man, she saw that all his warnings about the harshness of his history had been nothing but his fear that she’d step blithely into his world, then later feel its confines and flee. Of course he’d needed Helen to be certain: he’d loved her. And he’d understood, better than she, what love required.
Over the decades, she’d imagined him unchanged. Perhaps graying, perhaps sun-weathered, even stooped—but with his fist still raised, his anger intact, his heart still brimming with his dead. She saw now that she’d held to this image for her own comfort. She’d placed the portrait of Masada on her mantle to remind her of a man who hadn’t existed—a rigid man she could justify having left.
To imagine that he might have softened was unbearable. But she’d been wrong. There were men who put ideology above gentleness. Dror—who had followed her from his quarters, who had called her name despite the stares—had never been one of them.
The thought of herself as a mother in Israel—carrying bright plastic baskets at the market, calling for a child amid holiday bonfires in a smoky valley—was a torture she now forced herself to. Sounds and smells and colors assaulted her senses: the hush of palm fronds in a breeze. The brash laughter of university colleagues she might have taught alongside in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Cucumbers and tomatoes in the bins of the market vendors, guava and hyssop and cumin, and the sharp whistles of parents as distant singing rippled and bonfires burned like fuses across the darkened valley. And the sound of the bus drivers’ radios and the report of the bomb squad exploding something in the distance, and the sound of telephones ringing and ringing as women checked on husbands and daughters and sons. And the sound of her own voice, her own accented Hebrew, laboring to protect all that she could never fully protect—arguing, chuckling, weeping, soothing. Living.
And Dror’s eyes, dark and bright, were even now fastened on her. Asking her to stay even as she slipped from him. Raising panic in her chest.
How fearsome a thing was love. She’d wasted her life fleeing it.
The fluorescent light vibrated quietly, flickering against Helen’s eyelids like a summons. She opened her eyes and slowly, carefully, stood. There, a few paces from where she’d been sitting, encased in its humidity chamber, was a document. Even as she took her first step toward it, she knew what it was.
The lift dinged and opened, and Patricia Smith emerged. “Oh,” she said, seeing Helen at the glass case—and it was the first time Helen had heard pleasure in her voice. “The ivy letter. I managed to remove the seal without so much as a hairline crack.” She gestured proudly toward a separate teacup-sized case on a side table, where a small circle of intricately patterned brown wax lay on a square of white cloth. “Would you like to see? The integrity of the wax is quite remarkable.”
Helen met her eyes and didn’t answer. Then she completed her final swaying steps toward the large case where the rose letter lay.
“Perhaps later,” said Patricia, her irony tempered by something like respect.
She could not have stopped her hands had she wished to. Behind her, Patricia let out a sound of disapproval but restrained herself as Helen’s palms rose and settled on the glass, and rested there. A tentative, fluttering embrace, like a lover made shy by years of rejection.
The handwriting was unmistakably different—rounder and less cramped, unrushed. Innocent. And when she reached the signature she understood at last.
“That’s how you did it,” she said aloud.
She read, and she reread, and the history that had refused for so long to speak to her now greeted her clearly. She listened with the flooding gratitude of a wanderer at last called home—her name sounding through the dusk in a voice raised up to remind her, finally, that she had been its child all along.
The lift doors pinged open once more, and Patricia Starling-Haight was back, bearing clothing from Helen’s apartment. And like two sisters in a fairy tale, the Patricias flanked her in silence, outspread arms laden, to gird her for her final battle.
26
September 7, 1665
27 Elul, 5425
London
Forty days and nights: a number even the Christians respected. Forty days and nights of flood to drown every stirring thing and wash the earth clean. Forty days and nights of Moses pleading forgiveness on the sun-beaten mountain; of Goliath’s thundering challenges in the valley, met only with terrified silence.
Their pantry ran low. Only due to the da Costa Mendeses’ servants’ practice of stocking quantities of firewood and oil, and the fact that Rivka had for some time made a habit of purchasing extra flour, were they able to sustain themselves. Some time during Ester’s sickness, Rivka had divided their stores into daily portions to last until their release from quarantine. Now every day she baked bread, which they dipped in oil with
thyme from the garden and ate for each meal.
Just once, when but a week remained until the guard would leave his post at their door, did Bescós appear. Standing beside the bedchamber’s window, Ester saw him enter the street. He walked like a man much aged. When he reached their house, he conferred with the guard in low tones. Straightening to squint upward, he saw her.
“You’re alive,” he said. Then he added, “Today.”
Shadows under his pale eyes, under his cheekbones. His face was cavernous. She’d never thought of Bescós as a hopeful man, but she understood that the thing that had been burned out of his face was hope. Something keen and unbending had taken its place.
“You Jewesses make it tiresome to get my money,” he said.
She stood rooted at the window.
On the street, Bescós made show of pausing a moment in thought. “I wonder much,” he called scornfully, “at the strange fate of the Jews. Always pouring out your lifeblood. You have an affinity for it.”
The guard let out an uncertain laugh.
“Every moral error in Christianity,” Bescós said, “can be traced—” But he stopped, then waved his hand dismissively—the recitation too tiresome to continue with only the guard for audience. He stepped back a few paces, and seemed to survey the entirety of the da Costa Mendes house with care. Then he nodded to the guard, and departed.
Avidly, the guard watched Bescós’s retreat—the only sport to come his way in weeks. Ester too watched him go, her knuckles striated white where they gripped the windowsill, her heart banging. The temerity of her body stunned her: no matter how she counseled it to accept its own inevitable defeat, it refused, insisting on each next breath, and the next.
And didn’t an equally insistent force animate Bescós? Dread shadowed him—yet stubbornly he refused dread’s claim. He would hack at it with all he possessed, she saw, until it was eviscerated.
So when the fortieth day dawned and their doorstep at last was vacant, she wasn’t surprised to see Esteban Bescós on the street. But he stood with his back to their house, as though awaiting someone.
Rivka joined Ester at the upstairs window. For a long time they watched Bescós. As though he might possibly overhear through the closed window, Rivka spoke in a whisper. “If he wants us out so he can have Mary’s things, we’ll go.” There was a note in her voice Ester hadn’t heard before. She turned. Rivka’s eyes were intent on the street, her nostrils wide, her breaths now coming rapid and suppressed. “I won’t,” Rivka murmured, as though counseling herself. “I won’t step out the door until he assures safe passage.”
Voices in the street. Below, three men had joined Bescós. They were followed by two women entering from the direction of Bury Street, one stooped, the other young. The group stood in conversation. Then, at some remark from Bescós, they looked up in unison, at the window where Ester and Rivka stood.
Bescós’s words were louder than necessary, meant for Ester’s and Rivka’s ears too. “Two Jewesses hiding behind a painted cross. Why didn’t they die, if the sickness was here? If you wish to see sorcery, look in that window.”
The ring of faces peered anxiously. Rivka stepped back swiftly from the window; Ester shrouded herself in a curtain, hoping to see without being seen.
“The younger one,” Bescós continued with a gallant gesture, “believes herself to have powers of thought. She reads books that in the hands of a woman—let alone a Jewess—lead to heresy and worse.”
The men and women blinked in the bright daylight. They looked, at present, too sleepy to be moved by Bescós’s words. But the ugliness of their upturned countenances told Ester what she needed to know of Bescós’s purpose in summoning them. Squinting to catch a glimpse of Ester were faces that told of poverty and ill health steadier and more clawing than the plague. One of the men had an inflammation of the skin that gave his nose the appearance of raw flesh. The young woman had one good eye, its companion so grossly swollen and crusted with pus that Ester’s mind at first couldn’t properly make sense of the woman’s distorted features. Ester knew she herself must look unearthly as well: her complexion hollowed to ash by the distemper, her eyes emptied by all they’d witnessed—this much she’d glimpsed on the one occasion when she’d been tempted to lift a corner of one of the cloths with which Rivka had covered the house’s mirrors. But the condition of those below her window was of a different order.
The woman with the diseased eye addressed Bescós quietly, her soft smile revealing broken teeth. As she spoke she lifted a hand toward him in emphasis—and he stepped back from her hand so swiftly he lost his footing and stumbled, catching himself on the low masonry wall. A slight stumble, surely not enough to hurt him—yet it was a moment before he stirred again. As he leaned on the wall, his face turned away from the others, Ester glimpsed his turbid expression. He seemed near weeping.
He righted himself slowly; when he straightened, his face bore only a trace of distaste. He resumed speaking with the woman, as though her near-touch hadn’t undone him. But the woman had stiffened. When they’d finished speaking she turned away, her shoulders bunched.
“Jewish sorcery,” one of the men called—the words still tentative.
Bescós wore a look of exasperation. “Jewish sorcery,” he affirmed, impatient. “Yes. There they stand.”
“The vicar’s spoken of that,” said the older woman.
Church of England, then. Bescós didn’t even share their faith.
Now three more joined the group, most strikingly a young able-bodied man with a close-shaven head and puglike features. His gait was stiff, as though his very limbs were tight with rage. Ester watched him traverse the short space of cobblestones. Looking to the window the gazes of the others were trained on, he gave an impatient shudder that made her belly tighten. He barked something to Bescós.
How improbable it seemed—even tawdry—that a mob should gather. That she, along with Rivka, would die this way. Yet she was no better, and surely worse, than many who had died at the hands of mobs.
“Ester,” Rivka said.
A thump on the upper window. Ester looked in time to see the manure sliding down the pane. Another thump—two streaks on the glass. Her body clenched, but she couldn’t keep from staring down through the streaks at the pug-faced man, whose eyes were squeezed nearly shut with a wild hunger. He bent to scoop more from the street, took aim at the window, missed; she heard the muck hit the wall of the house.
The others watched, shifting uneasily, as though awaiting some decision. There ought to be more noise, Ester thought. Why isn’t there more noise? But there was only the man’s hard grunts as he worked, hurling one clod after another; now and again a sharp shout of encouragement from those watching.
Then with a nauseated, heartsick glance at Bescós, the woman with the diseased eye pierced the quiet with a scream. “Heralds of sickness!” And she lurched forward, bent to take up a rock, and hurled it with a cry.
Commotion. Bodies stooping, rising, jolting. Rocks against the edifice. Wild hoots, a cry of rage, the slam of something heavy—stone on wood. The air above the street seemed to shudder—Ester stared, but Rivka was pulling on Ester’s sleeve, forcing her away from the sight. Something hard hit the window, leaving a long crack in a pane. Outside, an old woman’s desiccated voice: “Shake the Jews loose from this house in the name of the Lord.” And Bescós calling, in a voice too calm for the thought to be spontaneous: “They’ll leave or be burned out.”
A moment later, an insistent rapping below, on the front door.
Pushing past Rivka, Ester descended the stairs so fast it felt like tumbling. At the bottom she caught her balance on a wooden post. Trying to quiet her own breathing, she stood listening in the shadowed entryway, poised between the front door and the kitchen, from which she could flee to the walled garden—and then where?
“You might save everyone the trouble of a fire.” Bescós’s voice was intimate even through the window, rich with astonishment at his own easy success.<
br />
“You’d burn this house for its silver?” she said.
“Even melted, the silver will satisfy me,” said Bescós. “But perhaps not these good neighbors of yours, whom I found begging on the streets of their parish. Perhaps you ought to save them the exertion and do the knifework yourself, as your people did at York.” He laughed. “None will mourn two Jewesses dead in a house they stole from a dead girl’s family.”
Beside Ester, Rivka’s soft breathing.
“Take the house,” Ester called to the door. “And the silver. Give us safe passage.”
A low laugh. “That might or might not be mine to give.”
One of her sleeves was pushed up past the elbow—she touched the soft skin at the crease of her arm, the faint blue trail of her own vein, pulsing.
“Ester.” A plea like a child’s.
She turned. Rivka’s cheeks shone with tears, a thin line of mucus from each nostril. Her head wagged slowly, side to side. “They’ll do it,” she whispered. “Before they kill us.”
“Rivka—”
“Or worse”—Rivka squeezed her eyes shut—“they’ll do it and leave us alive.” She wrenched back from Ester’s outstretched hand and brushed roughly past, knocking Ester off balance. Stumbling, Ester followed, the sudden exertion dimming her vision, so she had to cling to the wall all the way to the kitchen.
When her sight cleared, she could not at first comprehend what she saw. Rivka, whispering psalms with her back to the oven. Rivka with a knife, its tip to her bosom—the metal piercing the fabric between her breasts. The look on Rivka’s face had narrowed, as though she were peering down a tunnel to glimpse some invisible horizon. Her lips moved in recitation and her cheeks were flushed pink as with shame. She wore a strange expression of submission, like a child asking forgiveness. Ester cried out and threw herself forward—but the lunge she made for the knife was feeble, and Rivka knocked her back easily with one arm. Ester fell hard to the floor, where she struggled to catch her breath.
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