The coal was packed heavy and required two to lift—a feat that had proved too much for Ester, who this morning had dropped her end and nearly split the sack, prompting Rivka to dismiss her without a word. With a sigh, Rivka said to the boy, “For pay.”
The message boy—who himself looked in need of a good meal—hesitated. Then, peering at Rivka more closely, as though checking for signs of ill health, he stepped over the threshold with the shrug of one casting his lot. He hoisted the sack with Rivka and together they stepped it across the room and down a few creaking stairs to the storage bin. Then he followed Rivka back to the door, brushing his sooty palms. The coin she offered appeared to please him.
“’Tis a prayer and fasting day again, you know,” he said, cheerfully pocketing the coin, “on account of the plague.” He leaned back against the wall, supporting himself with his palms against the plaster, and bounced contentedly there, proud at being the bearer of important information. “The preachers agree ’tis God’s punishment, of course—the warning’s in the comet we see each night over London. The preachers say the plague is fire sent to purge us.” His eyes turned briefly, dutifully, to heaven. Then searched beyond Ester and Rivka for the kitchen door. “Though in a house of Jews perhaps there’s food on offer?”
“No food,” said Rivka.
“See my rotten fortune?” he cried. “Even in a Jew house I’m too lump-headed to find food. So my mother would say.” He shrugged, then—bouncing slow against their wall—spoke on. “But ’tis an unlucky day to be about in the street for such as you. You ought not be found, or they may say it’s you that brought the sickness. You seem good sorts, if you don’t mind I say so. Best to stay quiet and use your Jewish fortunes to buy anti-pestilence pills.” He turned and gazed out at the street a moment, then nodded with an air of great wisdom. “Me, I believe it’s the Papists, with their rotted ideas, as bring this judgment on our city.”
When he at last departed, Rivka turned heavily to Ester. “Neither of us must venture out until the fast day’s past.”
Only at her words did Ester feel how rare speech had become between them, as though the dying of foot traffic outside their window had commanded them lately to hush their own voices as well. In truth Ester needed no admonition to remain indoors; only yesterday she’d been nearing home when she’d encountered a group of flagellants, a dozen men marching solemnly down the center of the narrow street toward the river, silent but for a low periodic chant and the sickening sound of whips on their bare backs. Ester had pressed herself against a shopfront to let them pass. The sight had stayed with her: men stumbling within reach of her; men walking stolidly on with the blood running wet down their naked torsos, the muscles of their low backs sheeted in red.
Rivka shut the door behind the message boy. Leaning against it, she opened the purse and counted the coins. From her expression of relief, Ester guessed the money Manuel HaLevy had sent would suffice not only for the week’s necessities, but for laudanum. The illnesses that had for years pursued Rabbi HaCoen Mendes had taken renewed grip these past weeks, and now brought unremitting pain. Laudanum and willow bark were the only palliatives that relieved him.
The physician had come twice, on the second visit pressing the rabbi’s belly and declaring that this great disturbance of the humors must soon prove fatal. Ignoring Rivka’s soft moan at this pronouncement, the physician had knelt his substantial bulk with difficulty at the rabbi’s bedside and, looking without flinching into his patient’s face as though he could penetrate the rabbi’s blindness to show his respect, said, “A man understands the span of his life is limited, and a man deserves to know of his dwindling days so that he may speak of them with dignity to his God, whether he be Christian or Jew.” The rabbi, raising himself in his bed then, had clenched the physician’s thick hand with a grimace of gratitude. Leaving, the physician accepted his payment and told Rivka and Ester that he’d come no more, for he could see money was too scarce to spend on fruitless treatment . . . and as for himself, he’d hardly slept in days for doctoring the ill and the merely frightened, and he feared the new contagion himself if he allowed his humors to unbalance through overexertion. He’d sprinkled their doorstep with vinegar to ward off the plague, and left in haste.
Since then, the rabbi’s nights had grown fitful, punctured by pain from some unknown source that made him cry out in a thin, nearly unrecognizable voice. Waking at the sound of the cry, Ester would descend the stairs to find Rivka already at his side—for it seemed Rivka’s ears could hear the cry even as it formed in the rabbi’s throat: “Me esta tuyendo, M?e.” Sometimes thrice in a night they stood together beside his bed or outside his door, Ester and Rivka, waiting in silence to hear his breathing settle. Only once, her gaze touching Ester’s shyly in the low light of the banked fire, did Rivka speak. “Who does he ask for?” Her voice was hoarse.
The fire flickered, for an instant revealing the longing on Rivka’s worn, pocked face.
Ester answered as truly as she could. She said, “He calls for comfort. I believe he calls for his mother.”
Rivka’s eyes shone with brief disappointment, then relief—then she wiped them with a quick, dismissive hand. And Ester rued her own blindness: so firmly had she believed she alone longed for what was out of reach, she’d admired Rivka’s wordless devotion to the rabbi without ever considering what Rivka’s heart might wish.
With each day of the rabbi’s labored breath, the solitude of their household seemed to deepen. A woman had knocked at the door on Sabbath and, in low tones, urged flight to the countryside—but before Ester could rise to see which of the congregation’s matrons it was, she’d heard Rivka tell the woman that the rabbi was ill, though not of plague, and couldn’t withstand the journey. By the time Ester had reached the door the woman had hurried away, as though Rivka’s answer were a pestilence in itself. Indeed Ester could no longer be certain which of the congregation were still in London and which had fled. The press of whispering women trading information outside the synagogue—who was leaving, who remaining in the city?—had vanished when the synagogue itself was shuttered. London seemed redrawn: the invisible borders between parishes, once unnoticed, now were gulfs to be crossed at one’s peril—for the death-roll of each was attended to widely, and no matter how the dead’s kin might lie to mask the cause of death, the numbers spoke plainly. The rising toll had spread these weeks from parish to parish like a tide—or rather, like a fire, for its advance was uneven, as though a quixotic wind carried sparks that might set one patch of forest ablaze while leaving another, for now, untouched. Fear now infected every human transaction.
What little income Rivka had once earned was gone: no mending or laundering had been sent to their household in a fortnight at least—attending to a torn seam or soiled shift was no longer worth the risk of contact with another household. London mended its own seams now; lived in soiled clothing; baked its own bread or bought it in a furtive rush, as though the disease might spy the transaction and pounce. Even Mary had sent no word to Ester in weeks—not since their day on the river. Nor had she answered the three notes Ester had left for her at her door—for the servant, arms outstretched, had barred Ester from entering, as though suspecting Ester herself of carrying the plague, and had said, with an asperity Ester disliked, that Mistress da Costa Mendes was not seeing company.
Shut in the house for long quiet hours, Ester read and reread the letters John had sent from his travels in the countryside, until their phrases made a strange poetry in her mind.
My heart is eager to return to you in London after I complete this brief business I do for my father.
I hear rumor of terrible things in the city, and hope not half of them be true. Are you well, my dear Ester?