She patted the folio, snugged now against her slender waist—and with a pang Aaron thought of Marisa. In his utter stupidity, he realized, he hadn’t yet changed the picture of her he held in his mind. It came to him now how Marisa must look: the curve of her belly like a taut half-moon, her keen gray-green eyes crinkled at the edges with laughter and strain, her strong back bowed against the weight. Her feet, shoeless, resting on a pillow at day’s end. He imagined her like a goddess of certainty, and his own unchanged body seemed pitiful in comparison. He was grateful she couldn’t see him here, obfuscating, in a building whose very walls were more soulful than he’d ever be.
Even as he thought this, Bridgette let out a soft laugh. Startled, he looked up to find her eyeing him with an unmistakably flirtatious expression. “Or maybe,” she said, “that’s going about it all wrong. Maybe we should evaluate the documents.”
The wind had shifted, and he had no idea why. She raised the folio, weighed it softly in the air, as though daring him.
He was at a loss as to what kind of game Bridgette was playing.
“You and I don’t have to be cowed by Helen’s type, do we?” she said.
His mouth was dry. But this was no time for him to forget how to play the game. “Careful, now,” he said lightly.
“Why?” Bridgette countered coyly, but she stopped waving the folio. “You’re afraid I’ll damage Helen Watt’s papers?”
It was the way she pronounced the name—each syllable a slash of fury. Aaron understood that he wasn’t the focus of Bridgette’s interest after all. Something about Helen had stung Bridgette—and Bridgette wasn’t going to rest until she’d repudiated it. Flirting was merely Bridgette’s way of getting things done.
Opening the folio, Bridgette made a show of choosing between several pages, peeled out one with a flourish, and passed it to him.
He accepted it casually, with a smile that hurt.
The letter was addressed to Thomas Farrow, and signed Isaac Vossius. A man, if Aaron was remembering right, known in Europe for his large personal library. Vossius seemed to be responding to a query about several texts—the letter was written in Latin in a cramped hand, and Aaron struggled to make out the titles. A find, yes, but nothing on the level of Spinoza. It might show some later development of Ester’s interests, though.
“So was she right?” Bridgette prompted. “Is this some rare discovery?” She leaned over Aaron’s shoulder, her bright hair brushing the side of his neck.
He shrugged. “It’s a note from a man with a famous library, answering a question about some books.”
“Fascinating,” said Bridgette drily. She pulled another sheet from the folio and dangled it before him. “Bet you can’t resist one more.”
He produced an unconcerned laugh. “How about if we leave the research work for Helen?”
“Don’t think you fool me,” she lilted. “You know you want it.” She tilted her head at him. “I’m referring to the papers, of course.”
How had it ever felt natural, to dance this dance with this woman?
“You were all right, you know,” she said.
“You were more than all right,” he countered.
A brief, grateful smile broke on Bridgette’s face—a smile that seemed, for an instant, genuine. He hated himself then as he’d never hated himself. Whatever sort of person Bridgette was, he was doing wrong against her right now by flirting to gain time.
She handed him the paper, but held on a moment before letting go. “You’re sure you don’t only think of me as provenance?”
He didn’t answer. He dipped his eyes and scanned the Latin.
There, at the base of the letter, in the thick defiant script of a man whose beliefs had damned and sustained him, was the signature. Benedictus de Spinoza.
What he did next, he did for Helen. Because what did it matter if he no longer liked himself, if he could save this one thing for her? With difficulty he raised his heavy head, looked at Bridgette, and forced a shrug. He handed the paper back to her as if it were nothing. Letting his voice convey all the irritability he could muster, he said, “Let Helen spend her retirement money on these. I don’t care anymore. She’s been a regal bitch to me.”
Bridgette took the page, but instead of looking at it, she gazed in the direction of the balcony. She seemed to be thinking.
“Are you going to leave Ian?” he said, surprising himself.
She turned. “What’s it to you?”
“Nothing,” he said simply. Only for some reason he couldn’t explain, he wanted them to be truthful with each other. “I’m spoken for. I was just wondering.”
She cut her eyes at him. “What makes you wonder?”
“Well, you taking me up to your bedroom, for one.”
She laughed but said nothing.
“Should I assume you do that sort of thing often?”
“You certainly should not,” she shot back. “Just because I flirt doesn’t mean I go further.”
He didn’t believe her. Then, a heartbeat later, he did. “Sorry,” he said.
“I made an exception for you.” Her voice was fierce—but it was something in herself, not in him, that she was trying to govern.
“Why?”
“I was curious.”
“Bullshit,” he said.
“What, you don’t think there’s anything intriguing about a stranger who comes to my house to exhume some history no one else cares about?”
“No, actually I don’t.”
“Well,” she said, “you’re right. There’s nothing so special about you.”
He let his gaze fall on several canvases propped against a wall—more of Bridgette’s art, wrapped in a clear plastic packing material thick enough to render the bold images impressionistic. He stared at the vague forms: hints and evocations, shimmering with the possibility of some elusive wisdom beyond what might be visible in the ordinary light of day. He liked them that way. “You know,” he said quietly, “pissed-off women have been telling me that for a long time. It’s finally sunk in.”
When he looked up, Bridgette’s face wore a scrim of confusion, as though she’d been counting on him to be someone more mockable.
“The thing about you,” she said, “is that you’re so damned focused on history.” She toed a box. “You love it.” It was an accusation.
“So what if I do? I mean . . . you love art, right?”
“No,” Bridgette said. “I like art.”
She set her foot on a wooden crate in front of her. Slowly, she leaned forward. The crate slid against the floor with a scraping sound, which seemed to satisfy her.
“I took a drawing class, once. And some art history classes. And I have taste,” she said. “Which mainly means I’m good at figuring what will sell. And I have some money too, don’t I? But it’s rather disappointing, isn’t it, not to be more impassioned than that?” She’d tried for irony, but her voice was hoarse. “You should be proud, you know. My ridiculous aunt would have approved of the way you and Helen Watt are about history.”
He watched Bridgette lift her foot off the crate, then set it on another—then hesitate.
“Ian and I don’t love anything that way,” she said. “Or at least I don’t. Ian might love me that way.” She grimaced, then added, “At least, he used to.”
This time she shoved the crate long and loud. Then she squared herself, and faced him.
“If everybody thinks I’m soulless, then I might as well act the part, shouldn’t I? Sell the documents to the most craven collector I can find, one who’ll lock the papers away from historians. And then I’ll use the windfall to fund my fondest wishes.”
“Like what?” Aaron asked.
“Like,” she said, “a new bloody kitchen.” She laughed sharply—then rested the weight of her gaze on Aaron. “That’s what Ian wanted. But I said we had to use the full renovation budget for the gallery’s public spaces. I won the argument, as usual.”
From beyond the door, the sound of visitor
s shuffling patiently along the balcony.
“I’m going to be a father,” Aaron said.
Bridgette let out a hoot. For a moment, she stared. On her face a faint, wistful glimmer. “The poor kid.”
He nodded.
After a moment, she hooted again.
It was clear to him, suddenly, that he wanted no power over Bridgette Easton. Over anyone. He no longer trusted himself with it.
I’m sorry. He sent the words silently to Helen, whom he’d failed.
“Bridgette,” he said. “These letters? They aren’t like the—”
“Of course they’re not like the other ones,” she snapped. “I’m not stupid, you know. And you’re a terrible actor. If she wants them that badly, there’s something different about them.”
“Different,” he said, “is possibly an understatement. I have to tell you something. There’s at least one piece of paper in there signed by Spinoza.”
Bridgette’s brows rose. Then he watched her pretend not to be impressed. “Well,” she said, studying her nails. “Twenty is enough for Ian’s kitchen.”
“That folio you’re holding,” Aaron felt compelled to press on, “might well be worth more than that.”
Bridgette raised her chin. “Don’t discuss money with the English. It’s uncouth.”
Aaron shook his head. Then shook it again.
Bridgette was enjoying his incredulity. He let her stare him down.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said after a moment.
“Other than getting the hell out of my house?”
“Other than that.”
He waited for her parting shot. But her expression had turned contemplative.
They walked out of the antechamber. The landing was filigreed, the sunset stretching from the windows in diamonds and rhombuses. Gold on the shoes of the elderly couple lingering over the artwork—gold on the backs of their shoulders, on their hair, gentling the blatant braying art.
Surely the gallery had lights meant for this hour of the day, but Bridgette didn’t move to turn them on. She stood beside Aaron on the landing while the art turned pale in the dusk, and together they watched Helen return: one hand clutching her cane, and in the other a trembling white envelope, her figure completing its slow ascent beneath the patient gaze of the cherubs.
The door of Prospero’s swung open to admit them, its smells of ale and pie crust and oiled wood filling Aaron’s nose, and at just that moment the rain started: a swift hail of droplets like a hand at their backs, ushering them inside. The pub was snug and dry, their table warmly lit and bare as though prepared just for their purposes—and as Helen painstakingly wiped dust motes from the table, then removed each document from the folio and set it down with care, Aaron felt as though he were in some dream more real than reality, in which sounds were strangely magnified and every object backlit. The chairs creaked but held, and the amber pint cradled by the single customer at the bar was a chalice meant for some rite of solemn beauty, and the fact of Helen’s quaking hands laying out documents before him one after another had been ordained before he was born—just as this impossibly perfect place had been waiting here for them all along, hidden across the road from the Eastons’ gallery. The wizened bartender rubbing glasses peaceably with a white towel—the bartender with his impartial, half-shuttered eyes—was ancient Tiresias, who had foresuffered all; the bartender was Prospero himself—he’d broken his staff and relinquished his powers in order to make his peace with the ravishing world. And if only Aaron could understand how a man could live at peace with such a choice, or what it might wreak on him, then he too would have earned his place in this blessed circle that had sprung up so swiftly and magically around them.
Having arranged the first dozen letters on the thick wooden table beneath the mellow lamplight, Helen leaned back—and in an instant Aaron could see what she’d understood from the start. This folio held Ester’s jewels. The other documents, the ones Alvaro HaLevy had hidden under the stair rather than burn, were the detritus—the long, arduous account of the road to these final ink-and-paper treasures. He and Helen had mistaken the earlier find for the real prize. But all along Ester had held back the best.
He read standing beside Helen’s chair, beginning with the document farthest from them, making his way down each row. Ester’s hand he read fluently; letters penned by unfamiliar hands required more care, yet each gave up its secrets. He read, in succession, letters from Thomas Farrow to a half dozen correspondents, each followed by the reply it had received and then Farrow’s response—sometimes accepting his correspondent’s arguments with brisk praise, sometimes rebutting, refining, challenging.
Yet how do you propose to reconcile such opposing views? Of this your reader remains in ignorance. Sometimes Farrow’s correspondent wrote back with his own rebuttal or clarification, and then more letters would be exchanged before the discussion was closed. Van den Enden. Adriaan Koerbagh. Thomas Browne. Aaron knew some of the names and others were unfamiliar, but in each case the precision and ferocity of Thomas Farrow’s replies—sometimes through three or four exchanges—was breathtaking. He understood why Ester’s correspondents were often prickly in their defense of their arguments—she gave no quarter to sloppy thinking, and mercilessly cut away false logic. But there were those whose replies indicated they’d recognized Farrow as a rare kind of friend. From Van den Enden:
Your reasoning, which you build cunningly upon my own definition of piety, forces that definition to rebuke me, firming my resolve on a course I’d only half completed, this being the fullest incorporation of women in the citizenry of the ideal polity. Perhaps you know I’ve educated my daughters, though this be not greatly in fashion. Your proposal that I consider in theory the notion of a woman as a leader in a democratic body is a natural development of my own thoughts regarding universal education . . . one that would have presented itself in time but revealed itself more swiftly through your questioning, for which I offer my gratitude.
And, from one Jonathan Pierce,
It pains me to understand from your last letter that your circumstances do not permit travel. May I suggest, honored friend, that it is to the benefit of a scholar to shake off other cares now and then to seek the company of like minds, and the solace this provides is also of benefit to the constitution. Should your health improve sufficiently to permit you to escape your seclusion, I promise the fellowship of like minds will heal you further. Friendship is a physick all its own, and most especially to those such as we, who through the peculiar paths of our thinking must ever be lonely men. You would be welcomed here in London at the Royal Society, where I should be glad to acquaint you with many whose company fortifies mind and spirit.
And then—at Helen’s direction Aaron carefully stacked these pages and laid out a second set on the table—the correspondence was no longer addressed to Thomas Farrow, but to one Bertram Clarke. And then, as the correspondence progressed through the 1670s and the 1680s, the letter writer was a William Harrington, and then an Owen Richards, and then, from 1688 to 1691, one James Goddard. But always the hand was Ester’s, and the reasoning. The highest principle is life, and this principle must therefore serve as the basis for all morality. Aaron turned from one letter to another. Three exchanges with Pierre Bayle. But can you be sincere in this elevation of faith, Ester had written, even as you declare it incompatible with reason? Or is it your aim to leave a trail you wish other thinkers to follow? A letter to John Wilson that seemed to go unanswered: I maintain that logic demands you reconsider your assault on Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres, for the reasons I have here described. And, to Aaron’s astonishment, two exchanges with Thomas Hobbes.
If there exist no incorporeal substances, then this must unmake the world as it has been described to us. It is then the obligation of the philosophe to declare the world’s true properties, for which reason I pose the following questions.
The final set of letters Helen laid down was between Thomas Farrow and Benedict
Spinoza. Scanning the pages, Aaron saw it had taken two letters from Thomas Farrow to goad Spinoza from hiding, and another three to elicit a first substantive response. The correspondence spanned years, starting and stopping for reasons that surely included the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Dutch wars—yet whatever difficulties each had surmounted to send these pages of Latin between London and Voorburg were not belabored—as though the arduousness of life required no explanation, nor would it be permitted to further impinge on the urgent business of argument. Starting in the sixth letter, Farrow had pressed hard on a point of disagreement:
Yet despite your urging of the love of God you disdain the sensual. You argue that man must attain equanimity and calmness. Yet a true system of thought must not exclude passion but rather account for it as the mathematician accounts for each component of his equation. You argue as though human desire were error or blindness, rather than an essential element within Deus sive Natura: a force always in motion and questing. Without acknowledgment of this, your universe lacks animating fire, therefore admire as I do the beauty of your edifice I do not believe it.
Spinoza’s reply to this was piercing. There were none of the niceties of the other philosophers’ letters, no I have read your missive with interest.
This argument is folly. You admix desire and passion in your reasoning as though these were the same, whereas passion is passive and desire is merely the being’s awareness of Conatus, a finite thing’s striving on behalf of its own existence. As for the passions, they are a bog that snares the philosophical mind. Unless you would have a morality rooted in baseness these must be subdued by reason, and unless you would animate the universe with rageful trees or lusting clouds and call yourself a pagan, you must concede that passion cannot be the essence of the universe.
As for desire, it cannot be the essence of the universe because it is bound to the consciousness of a finite being.
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