When she’d woken Alvaro to go, she’d thanked him. Did you learn anything? he’d asked as they stepped from the overheated coffeehouse into the cool, enveloping evening. Yes, she’d said, I heard some new thinking and will consider it. Yet I learned too that I’m an ivy twined so long against a tower of strange design that I cannot now assume any other shape. And Alvaro had taken her arm and said, I understand.
Yet now here he stood before her, insisting.
“Today!” Alvaro repeated. “I won’t be put off anymore.”
Again, that soft, lit-from-the-inside smile. He was the most maddening of men—or perhaps it was she who was maddening, for she could not hold steady in her estimation of him. He was a fool and she wanted him to leave her be. He was her friend, and she wanted him to stay in her room, with his smell of fresh air and his grass-stained shoes, and his collar loose at his throat—a brother who could be counted on to tease and forgive.
She spoke, her face stern. “Your cherub maker comes today?”
Alvaro’s brows rose high and stayed there. “He’s a master carver!”
She laughed in his face. “Who carved every last cherub in Petersham and Richmond.”
Alvaro blushed. “His carvings are incomparable,” he said. “Admit it.”
She pretended to consider.
He pressed his case earnestly. “The king’s residence at Windsor has invited him to carve three lintels. He’s been asked to carve for the French. My father was fortunate to have him make the cherubs on our stair before his work was in so great demand as it is today.”
She bit her lower lip, conquering a smile. “They’re . . .” She paused, watching him await her verdict. “They’re agreeable.”
Alvaro was still waiting.
And suddenly she could no longer be stern. “Yes, all right. He’s agreeable as well,” she said. “I’m sure.”
His face broke into a broad smile.
“His name is Richard. And we’ve agreed there’s no need to keep such discreet distance when he visits. I’ve told him you understand.” Alvaro looked at her now, a request in his eyes. “Richard hopes to make the acquaintance of the noble lady of the house.”
She could not help the dark mood that enveloped her at these words. Her eyes returned to the table before her. “This house has no noble lady,” she said.
He said nothing for a moment, obedient to her mood. “Perhaps he’ll meet you another day, then?”
She lifted her head. She was too moved by his hopeful face to be jealous of the earnest love written there. “Yes,” she said. “Of course I’ll meet him.”
He was smiling with such gratitude that she had to smile as well. His eyes were bright. “No one but you knows of our love,” he said.
She very much doubted if half the countryside around Richmond and Petersham didn’t know of their love—even Rivka couldn’t quell the servants’ talk.
“To the river, then?” he said.
But she shook her head. Some obstinacy was pulling her back to their earlier conversation. “You’ve a promise to make to me first.”
“What promise?” His brow furrowed. Then he remembered. “Still that?” he said, his surprise genuine. “But it’s absurd.”
She pressed her lips.
“No,” he said. “I’d no more do it than break your arm. I’d no more do it than”—he gestured, words failing. “I simply won’t.”
She couldn’t allow his affection, or hers, to rule this moment. She gave him her most severe look. “Promise.”
He shook his head, stubborn.
His betrayal blinded her—what a fool she’d been to trust him. And yet how could he not understand? She half stood from her desk, the anger breaking in her voice. “Have I asked anything else of you?”
He shook his head, more slowly.
She steadied herself. She’d mulled the matter, and though she couldn’t separate the strands of her fears, she’d declared them sound nonetheless. She was a woman, and she’d written heresies. Even Spinoza and Hobbes feared to make direct statement of their disbelief in God.
Yet after her death, as Alvaro argued, she’d have nothing to fear. Why not allow him to preserve her papers, then?
Because her writings made a mockery of the rabbi’s suffering.
But though she’d never forgive herself this, shouldn’t she leave her writings intact so others might consider them? Wasn’t the cruelty in the world, and not in her words?
She couldn’t explain her choice, even to herself—no more than she could explain the terror she still felt at the most unexpected of moments: hands grabbing and tearing at her hair, her sex; diseased faces straining to spit in hers. She pressed on, speaking steadily as though the words cost her nothing. “I want you to burn my papers when I die. That’s my request, and it’s a simple one, and I won’t rest until I’ve secured your promise.”
He rose from her table. “Burn them yourself!” He strode toward the door.
A single thought took her: Don’t leave me alone in this room.
As though hearing, he slowed, and stopped halfway through her bedchamber. After a moment, he returned to stand before her.
“I can’t do it myself,” she said. She gestured at the hearth. “I can’t bear to. Not while I can still read and think and write.”
He opened his palms, showing her he meant no harm. “I know you’re”—he hesitated. Then continued firmly, “You’ve had to hide so very long.”
Her anger had vanished, leaving her confused. She wagged her head slowly in apology, before realizing she ought to say it aloud. “I’m sorry.”
“Ester,” he said. “There’s none left alive to be hurt by what you’ve done. Not the rabbi, not your family. I won’t be unhappy if your work comes to light and stirs trouble. What might anyone do to harm you after your death?”
What, indeed? She was concentrating with all her strength on his words.
“What might they do?” he repeated.
She couldn’t control her voice. “Not listen,” she said. “Because of what I am.”
His hand was on her shoulder. He persisted. “So you’d have me burn your papers, and in doing so ensure they’ll never listen?”
She hated to cry before him. Yet he, who idolized her strength, should see the truth: the small, weeping creature she was, beneath all.
He paused to let her gather herself. “You say it’s enough that your ideas will be visible in the writings of others,” he said softly. “But Ester, none will know they’re yours.” He waited a moment, then continued. “At the right time, the truth ought be known.”
Slowly, she shook her head. “Let the truth be ash.”
He stood for a moment. Then his long fingers loosened on her shoulder. After a moment, he nodded in something like defeat.
Yet when he raised his head and nodded again, squeezing her shoulder gently before letting go, there was something else in his manner. She wasn’t certain it had been defeat, after all.
He’d reached the door between her closet and her bedchamber. With one hand he gripped the doorframe as though to swing himself through. “The river is calling,” he said.
She stared at him. Had it been defeat? At length she nodded. “Thank you,” she said.
He left. She settled back at her desk. The page before her was only just begun.
She’d finish it later. She stood now and, after a moment’s uncertainty, opened the window wide to admit the fresh sounds of the river. Birdcalls, the hush of the moving current. The sun was stronger than she’d expected and she leaned out to feel it on her face, its warmth as shocking as laughter. Blue and blue and blue swam in her vision. A bright bewildering sky: a riddle she couldn’t guess how to solve.
29
April 6, 2001
London
She’d known immediately that she needed to read it alone. So she’d lied. When, laying out Ester’s precious letters one by one in that pub in Richmond, she’d reached the final pages in the folio, her eyes had fallen on the da
te—June 8, 1691. 11 Sivan of the Hebrew year 5451. The week before Ester’s death. The writing was Ester’s. But even in the dim light of the pub, she’d been able to see that the familiar hand had been shaking.
Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth.
Without a word to Aaron, she’d tucked the pages back into the folio. She’d told him, when he asked, that the paper was too damaged—knowing even as she said the words that she ought to tell the truth and permit him to make this last discovery with her. But wresting these treasures from Bridgette, all the while knowing she herself no longer possessed the stamina to study them in earnest—it had depleted her. To read this final document with anyone else—even Aaron Levy—required more steel than she possessed.
So she was alone in her flat when she read it—first carefully setting on the sideboard the letters they’d already studied together, then laying out the remaining sheets one by one upon her small kitchen table. The pages would not lie down peaceably, but rasped and buckled like living things, several dropping to the floor. As she labored to pick them up, they bent in her clumsy, pinching fingers, and she knew that in her refusal to accept help she was doing unforgivable damage. As she fought to control the papers with her hopeless hands, the verse came to her. Im eshkaheh Yerushalayim, eshkah yemini.
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning.
She had devoted her life to remembering. And yet she’d failed. She had, somewhere across the years, forgotten what she’d once understood. What Ester Velasquez had understood. That desire was the only truth worth following.
She’d arrived at the end of her own life too stunned to make her own confession. Was it wrong to want Ester Velasquez’s to speak for her?
She set the final piece of paper on her kitchen table and lowered herself into a chair. Whatever her flaws, she reminded herself, she was a woman without illusions, who faced what needed to be faced.
She sat under the steady light of the lamp, her feet in their bedroom slippers perched on the chair’s rungs like a schoolgirl’s. She traced an unsteady hand along the wavering lines, dropping caution and touching each word reverently, as though wet ink might yet rub off on the pads of her fingers.
She read.
June 8, 1691
11 Sivan of the Hebrew year 5451
Richmond, Surrey
Let me begin afresh. Perhaps, this time, to tell the truth. For in the biting hush of ink on paper, where truth ought raise its head and speak without fear, I have long lied.
I have naught to defend my actions. Yet though my heart feels no remorse, my deeds would confess themselves to paper now, as the least of tributes to him whom I once betrayed.
In this silenced house, quill and ink do not resist the press of my hand, and paper does not flinch. Let these pages compass, at last, the truth, though none read them.
My name is Ester Velasquez. I have lived fifty-four years and linger now at death’s threshold, life being tethered to body now by mere filaments. My death calls and I answer, and through pain make confession, though it shall not satisfy the formula prescribed by my people. Yet I wish now to shed the secrecy that has been salvation and millstone.
Let each forbidden truth speak once its own name.
My husband and his beloved are silver-haired with the long years of their love—the love of two men which I have witnessed with envy and wonder, for love is not my fate. Of them I ask forgiveness for only the daily unthinking sins of life, for they and I have not wronged but saved one another, and with them my conscience is easiest.
Seeing the depth of my illness, this household has silenced itself. All about me it braces to mourn, though my hand moves on the page still.
In the autumn of the year 1657 I arrived in London, being brought to that city by Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes in order to support his labors to bring knowledge to the Jews of London. That I did not do so, that I eroded the very foundation of his scholarship and peace—that I stood opposite him whose dearness was my world’s greatest solace and allowed him to give his thoughts into my hands under the illusion that I was true—this I here confess. Yet I would choose again my very same sin, though it would mean my compunction should wrack me another lifetime and beyond. And so I die confessed but unrepentant, and if all my thinking be in error and there be wages to pay in some world beyond this one, though they be fierce I shall pay without murmur. Nor do I fault my father nor the rabbi for permitting me acquisition of learning deemed unnatural for the female sex, for they did not foresee the creature I would become, the greed that would grow in me to learn and question and crack the foundations of the world I perceived. Yet though I saw myself straying ever farther from the path laid before me, I cried out then and still: why say woman may not follow her nature if it lead her to think, for must not even the meanest beast follow its nature? And why forbid woman or man from questioning what we are taught, for is not intelligence holy?
The world and I have sinned against each other.
Here I might end my own confession, for though there be other sins upon my conscience, my condemnation is accomplished in this one stroke. Yet a few lines more remain for the writing. For confession is a gift permitted to those with days or hours in which to foresee their own deaths. There are those I loved who were denied it.
The servants have shed shoes and muffle their steps, for they have been ordered not to disturb me. In this hushed house a dread settles on me—I fear it makes my reasoning waver.
I believe in no heaven or hell, nor any world to come, yet I know not whether life be snuffed wholly by death or merely assume some unknown form. It is perhaps vain to hope that some essence of what yet beats within me, though in a torment of pain, might endure past death. Yet I love it. I love the sweet labor of this heart in my chest.
Even the birds are silent today.
I do not believe my soul as I know it will be allowed a single footfall beyond the threshold of death. Yet for the sake of others who did so believe and could not confess, I endeavor now to lay down their burdens here beside my own. My father’s spirit I believe was at peace, for he was ever a man whose words and deeds were aligned with what he in his heart felt right and good. My brother, in turn, needs none to confess for him, for he repented unto giving his very life for a sin that was never his own. Dear Isaac. It was never yours. The deed was that of sparks and flame fighting for their own freedom, as do all things. My grief all these years has been that their will to leap and live robbed you of yours. Yet I wish you could know that you did not fail in your dream of saving another by your death. For though I would it were otherwise, your death paved the sole path my strange spirit could walk. I wish only, Isaac, that the one you saved had been more worthy than your sister.
It is my mother, Constantina Velasquez, whose regrets lay heaviest upon her heart. The unease of her spirit visits now and again in my dreams. Sometimes on the verge of sleep I hear her voice, though I’ve confessed this to none. It calls so simply, only one word: my name.
I write of her now to answer that call, though I know not of any help it be to any who exist today. Yet the unspooling of ink has brought me much comfort always, and often have I written what I would not speak.
I was ever ill-suited for this world and could not bend my nature to it. So, in her own manner, was my mother. Constantina de Almanza Velasquez had a nature that might have flowered in other climes, yet she was neither born nor constituted to be a matron of the Amsterdam synagogue.
The writing, shaky but insistent, proceeded down the remainder of the page, and filled two more as well. There were places where the ink seemed darker or the quill tip thicker—here Ester had rested and returned to the text, perhaps an hour later, perhaps on a different day. Helen’s eyes slid down the lines, and with each she felt a lightening, as though it were she disburdening sentence by sentence. Her spirit could not be bent, yet her rage found little purchase . . . Helen read on, realizing now and again that she was dragging her heavy finger down the
paper, heedless of the damage it might do. It was all here—Ester’s family, her mother, the pinched morality of Amsterdam’s frightened Portuguese refugees. And one detail—one absurd, audacious detail—Helen had not at all expected. Rising with difficulty, she made her way to the cabinet and searched out what she’d pulled off her printer only two days earlier: the final document e-mailed by the Amsterdam archivist. The Dotar’s self-righteous reply to the rabbi’s final letter, dated weeks after his death. The phrase that corresponded, word for word, with one of Ester’s.
Her head listing with fatigue, she closed her eyes and worked out the dates twice, three times. Ester’s year of birth; her mother’s; her grandmother’s.
A gossamer-thin connection. But if there was one thing she’d no longer do, it was fight intuition.
Yes. It was indeed all of our history. No people’s thread was separate from any other’s, but everyone’s fate was woven together in this illuminated, love-stricken world. There could be no standing apart. She’d known that always, hadn’t she?
Long after midnight, she rose. Her legs wavered under her. Had she eaten today? Patricia had fed her something, she was nearly certain of it. Near the bottom of a drawer in her bedroom, sifting papers under a bright light as though she were hunting for evidence at a crime scene, she at last found the page. She unfolded it, clumsily tearing the brittle paper, and carried it to her kitchen table where she smoothed it atop Ester Velasquez’s pages.
She reread the single dense, ruined page of notes. Had her own handwriting ever been this tiny, this precise, this bloodlessly certain of itself? Blue script covered the page: first her name in sharp, angry letters—Helen Ann Watt. She remembered how restlessly she’d penned it, planning to show her notes to Dror when he returned to the room where he’d left her to read his precious history book. She’d burned to mock this primary-school exercise he was forcing her into—as though reading his history could ever persuade her to leave him! Then, below this, scattered names of city-states, dates. Here and there, lower down on the page, a question: Inquisition laid the ground for 19th century? She saw where her fury had faded—where the history she was reading had caught her and her fury had given way to fascination. She saw where she’d run out of space at the bottom of the page, where she’d filled the back of it, turned the page upside down and written another full page between the lines of each side. Inverted words, observations, exclamations, all swarming up between the enraged logic of her earlier notes. And half of it ruined—blurred where she’d spilled the coffee Dror had brought her and the bright ink had bled freely, mixing lines penned in outrage with those written in growing understanding—a page poised between love and fear.
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