“We’re wondering,” began Helen, “whether there are any remaining documents—anything that hasn’t yet been released for viewing—dated after July 8 of the first plague summer. That would be 1665.”
“Do you honestly imagine,” said Conservation Patricia, “that I need to be told the dates of the plague?”
Helen tipped her head. “My apologies. I’m accustomed to dealing with people who do.”
Mollified, Conservation Patricia opened the folder that was tucked under her arm, and consulted a page. “We’re still processing the final documents. However, none is dated later than July 8, 1665, with only one potential exception. There’s a document that we haven’t yet opened, for the simple reason that no one ever has—the wax seal, which we believe to be the original, is still intact. The humidifying chamber is currently in use, but when it’s next available we’ll use it to facilitate removing the letter’s seal, and then gradually soften the paper to prevent it breaking at the creases when unfolded. It’s a slow process. I’ve no idea what the date of that document will be. Otherwise there’s nothing left in the laboratory after that date.”
So Ester Velasquez’s writing had stopped with the rabbi’s death.
Aaron watched Conservation Patricia retreat to Librarian Patricia’s desk, where the two conferred, presumably comparing methods of beheading researchers who chewed gum.
Had Ester died in the plague? According to Wilton’s paper, the parish records had noted the rabbi’s death—but there was no mention of any female Velasquez in either the plague year or the subsequent decade. Had Ester died an unrecorded death, in the most chaotic weeks of the plague? Or had she survived the plague to vanish into silence—her scholarly life extinguishing the moment the rabbi’s death ended her access to writing? Was the evidence of her own death to be found in the London registers of a later year . . . recorded, perhaps, under a married name?
Aaron returned to the document on the cushion before him. They’d each read it a half dozen times. In truth, there was no justification for holding on to it all afternoon except the feeble wish to delay Wilton and his group from getting their hands on it. He stared again at the single word. Ahavti. I loved.
Past tense. Whatever the nature of that love, it had been done with by the time Ester put quill to paper to slip that word between the lines of the household accounts.
I loved, Aaron thought. The words made him feel old. He looked at the document before him. He felt an urge to remove it from its cradling cushion and rest his head in its place.
Well, he thought numbly.
Well.
Perhaps Ester Velasquez had simply died an obscure death in London, either during or after the plague, as Wilton’s article had implied.
But then, hadn’t Wilton seemed a bit too eager to brush off Ester’s story—a bit too preoccupied with the larger prize of Sabbatean Florence to have given Ester’s fate sufficient thought? What if Ester Velasquez’s death was absent from the London registers simply because it had occurred elsewhere?
One phone call and twenty minutes later, he was on a bus to Richmond upon Thames. He’d made up an excuse for leaving the reading room early—no reason to raise Helen’s hopes until he had something concrete to show.
He exited the station with the late-afternoon throng, walked the ten minutes up the hill to the building that housed the town hall and museum, and, through a warren of narrow bulletin-board-lined hallways, found the Local Studies office, where he was greeted by Anne—a girl younger than he’d guessed from her mature, professional manner over the phone. Yes, she had the records he’d requested. Yes, she could keep the office open another half-hour for him, as she’d promised on the telephone. The Local Studies office was supposed to be closing, but as she had work to do here anyway . . .
As she spoke, she busily cleared a small area of table for him in the cluttered space. The room was large but crowded with shelves and tables, all laden with files. Visitors, he gathered, were sparse even during normal hours—his mere interest in the archive’s offerings was commendation enough to merit keeping the office open late. Still, Aaron also noted the furtive glances Anne stole as she arranged a workspace for him, and the way she fled his gaze when she addressed him. He was used to this sort of response—but he rarely took a second look at someone like Anne. Yet he paused now to do so. She wore no makeup, and her buttoned blouse offered only the slightest guess at the contours of her breasts. Returning to him once more, she wordlessly set a pad and pencil in his reach. Was this the way such girls flirted? It occurred to him that it might be; bewildered by sexuality, they wooed a man with their reliability.
As he sat, Anne returned and silently deposited three thick volumes in front of him.
How had he ever overlooked shy girls? It struck him that the fact that he wasn’t attracted to them just might represent a flaw in his character, not theirs.
Seated at the table, three original seventeenth-century record books stacked before him, he considered for a moment his own proud record of acquisitions, and was startled. Could that be right? That he hadn’t so much as kissed a girl since Marisa? He scrolled through the past weeks—then on backward through the three months since she’d cut off contact, the five months since he’d seen her—and came up blank.
In his distraction, he opened the topmost record book and turned its soft, thick pages. Parish register, Richmond, Surrey. It was the same sort of textured paper he’d grown accustomed to in the rare manuscripts room, only without the high security guarding it. No gloves here, no pencil stubs, no Patricia to hiss at him. Though it occurred to him, squinting across the large room at Anne—who was filing something in a cabinet and occasionally glancing in his direction—that Anne might be a nascent Patricia, given enough years.
And, he thought with a pang, enough men with attitudes like his own.
Columns of names, dates, deaths and births and marriages, all reasonably legible if you were used to the ornate curves of secretary hand.
In the second book of records, he found the name HaLevy.
September 4, 1666. Married. Manuel HaLevy of Richmond, to Ester Velasquez of Amsterdam.
He sat back in the wooden chair.
So she’d lived. And married.
He ought to be delighted. Delighted for Ester that she’d survived the plague; and for himself—because now he knew how the documents had come to be deposited in Richmond. Ester, obviously, had brought them with her when she’d married . . . though in truth Aaron could hardly imagine what value a dowry of inked paper might hold for a man like Manuel HaLevy. The single reference to HaLevy in Ester’s writing had made clear the man’s disdain for learning. Was that why Ester had locked the papers away—to hide them from a husband who’d gladly have disposed of them in one of those broad stone hearths?
She’d refused Manuel HaLevy vehemently, or so the cross-written letter implied. She’d seemed to find him or his views repugnant. But then she’d married him anyway.