Her eyes were on the book. “Iron gall ink,” she said after a moment.
Following her gaze, he understood that the damage had been done before he ever touched the ledger. The pages were like Swiss cheese. Letters and words excised at random, holes eaten through the page over the centuries by the ink itself. What remained, blurred brown ink on thick paper, appeared to be a detailed accounting of a household’s expenses, the pockmarked entries clustered in Portuguese and Spanish and Hebrew, the handwriting varied. He didn’t dare touch the page. Moving as gently as he could, he closed the book; perhaps something could be salvaged in a more controlled environment. He spat the dust quietly into his sleeve.
“The letter.” Her voice was tense.
His words rang with petulance, surprising even him: “Maybe you ought to handle this one.”
Her gray hair had fallen into her eyes. There was a silence, long enough for him to feel the first sting of shame. Then, her face impassive, she raised one hand in the air.
Dumbly he watched Helen Watt’s palm and saw it waver incomprehensibly—the thick fingers working the air as though to spell words in some obscure sign language.
A few seconds more. Then she lowered her hand.
“The later pages of the ledger may be in better shape,” she said, turning away from him, “but we’ll let them determine that in the conservation lab.”
So this was why she needed him. She couldn’t trust herself to touch fragile documents. Was that his role then? To be her robotic arm?
She was reading the letter. Reflexively, his eyes followed hers to the aged paper. Its textured surface drew him, and without looking to her for permission he touched a corner of the page—and felt the fine grid of ridges and troughs, delicate and intimate as the lines of his thumbprint. Held to the light, it would reveal the pattern of the paper mill’s screen and perhaps a watermark that might indicate, with a little research, where the paper had been purchased.
The letter was in good condition, only a faint brown haze around each word, a penumbra of age.
They read in silence.
After a moment she turned to look at him. Without a word, he nodded: he knew it too. Not seven feet from them were two packed shelves—and if the rest of that material had been selected by the same source who had seen fit to preserve this letter, and if even a quarter of those pages were readable, this could be a monumental find.
In the hush that filled the house, a new landscape opened to Aaron Levy.
Gingerly, he collected more loose pages from the shelf: three letters and a copy of a sermon, all in Portuguese; a half page of Latin jottings that looked like someone’s reading notes on a theological topic; something in Hebrew—a list of ritual items to be prepared for a Passover seder. He laid the pages on the table, then pulled up a second chair and studied the document before him, lingering over the archaic Portuguese. Beside him, Helen took even longer with the page in front of her.
Moving very slowly from one document to the next, they surveyed the lot.
At length she straightened, removed her glasses, and lowered them, suspended on their thin chain, to her breastbone.
“I hadn’t heard of HaCoen Mendes,” he said.
Her voice was husky. “I’ve seen one or two references to him in seventeenth-century sources, as one of the early teachers of the Jewish community here after they came out of hiding. He was blinded by the Inquisition in Lisbon in his youth, taught pupils in Amsterdam into old age, then came to London near the end of his life. Apparently only one work of his was ever published, and posthumously—an argument against Sabbateanism. I’ve never read it. I don’t even know if copies still exist.”
Aaron paused, rereading. One line drew him, his eyes tracing the elegant, looping lines of the Portuguese words. Unlike me, you are not yet an old man. May I then offer my counsel, that your able body and spirit might make use of it?
An inexplicable longing tightened Aaron’s throat. “I like him,” he said quietly, and regretted it immediately: the unguarded tone of his voice, the na?veté of his words. He waited for her to say the obvious: it wasn’t his business to like or dislike a subject. But she said nothing, only turned back to the documents.
“Of course,” she said after a moment, “he didn’t write these himself. You note the initial of the scribe?”
“Scribe?”
“Scribe, scrivener, copyist, whatever term you use for it. As I said, HaCoen Mendes was blind.”
She stood and walked through a doorway to a side room, returning a moment later with another page. She’d laid it atop a tea tray and carried it carefully, as if handling fine china. “This is the one I read yesterday.”
As she passed it to him, he noted that her hand shook less dramatically now—evidently the tremor was variable.
He read the letter slowly, its antiquated phrasings difficult to decipher. When he’d finished, he looked at the other pages spread before him. There it was, at the bottom right corner of each letter: the faint spidery mark that he’d taken for a few small test-strokes of the quill. Now he saw it was the Hebrew letter aleph.
“The copyist was probably one of his students,” she said. “We might eventually be able to work out who. It was a minuscule community.” She paused. “HaCoen Mendes’s practice of keeping copies of letters he sent does imply that he knew he was doing something significant in aiding the reestablishment of an official Jewish community in England. Perhaps he felt his records would be important to someone.” She looked at her watch, and what she read there seemed to distress her. “We’ll meet here tomorrow,” she said. “Seven o’clock in the morning, until six. I’ve arranged it with the Eastons. That will be the schedule the following day as well. And that’s all we have.”
Aaron stood. With regret he lifted his eyes from the page.
She pulled two plastic sleeves from her satchel and handed them to him, indicating with a wave that he was to insert the letters. As he set to work she stood, leaning on her cane, looming over him. Like a gargoyle. The thought amused him and he felt suddenly buoyant.
“So our scribe is aleph,” he said.
“Presumably.”
“Avraham?” he mused, sliding one page into its holder with deliberate slowness. “Asher? Amram? Aaron?”
“We know nothing more than aleph.”
“Aleph the faithful scrivener?” He grinned abruptly at her. “Doesn’t have much of a ring to it. Lacks pizzazz, don’t you think?” This was how he would save his sanity working for this woman. Because he was going to work for her.
He could admit to himself only now how the panic had grown in him these months—quietly, steadily, soft and choking like silt. How anxiously he’d wished for an excuse to flee his chosen subject. Shakespeare, where the best and brightest went to test their mettle. Shakespeare, where Aaron Levy had launched his mission to hypothesize and prove, applauded by every mentor who had ever said he had great promise. Shakespeare, where Aaron had lately begun to understand that while he was terribly good at promise, he seemed to have promised more than he could deliver.
But this find was something entirely different. Every historian dreamt of this sort of mother lode. No one would question why he’d turn his attention away from Shakespeare for a little while. And if this cache of documents fulfilled even half of what Helen Watt seemed to expect of it, then—it wasn’t too far-fetched to imagine this, though of course it would be premature to speak of it—some fragment of its riches might become a dissertation. A solid, unassailable dissertation. Maybe even a dazzling one, fulfilling every bit of promise Aaron had ever issued.
A fresh chance.
He would survive working with Helen Watt—even as the thought occurred to him, he recognized it as a stroke of genius—by pretending she was a different sort of person. He would act as though she were a woman with a sense of humor.
She was looking down at him, her jaw tight.
“Joke,” he said. “Ha ha.”