Please, she thought.
But he was looking at her as though she’d beckoned him far, far out onto a narrow ledge and then, as his own balance trembled at the awesome height, excused herself from daring it. “I told Bescós he was wrong,” he said. How ready to tumble he seemed, his expression pitching between ardor and sickness. “He said a Jewess will always pick her tribe over any other loyalty, and I said he was wrong.”
“No,” she said. “No, it’s not that way. I choose with my heart, and my heart is for you.” As she said it she felt her heart insisting within her ribs—indeed, for the first time in her life she almost could see her heart, and to her astonishment it seemed a brave and hopeful thing: a small wooden cup of some golden liquid, brimming until it spilled over all—the rabbi breathing in his bed, the dim candlelight by which Ester had so long strained at words on the page, the dead girl with her father in the cart. All that was beautiful and all that was precious, all of it streaming with sudden purpose here—to this place where they now stood.
John.
She laid her hands on his chest, his heartbeat rapid as her own. “The rabbi has been my father since my own died. I owe him comfort in his final hour.”
“I understand,” he said.
But she saw that he didn’t. She saw that his own ability to save her had taken root in his mind; that it meant something prodigious to him; that this was the beacon he’d chosen to follow. He’d determined to be a pure and simple thing to her—her savior.
For the first time, she understood that words and logic could not convey all. They could not make John understand what she was willing to pledge to him, even as she refused his offer.
The image came to her of her grandmother’s hands, delicate and sure on the spinet. She lifted her own hands from his chest. She set one on his shoulder. Then the other, and, stepping forward, she pressed against him as though walking through a door. Shocked by her boldness, he rocked back—then, tentatively, forward. The kiss he pressed on her lips was firmer—a test of something new—and she showed him in answer that she’d speak plainly to him with all she had. Swiftly, blindly, she led him to a side door, then another, behind which they found a bed, and there she lay him down beside her—and she chose not to think of Mary’s fate, but helped John to unlace and unpin, her fingers atop his trembling ones, guiding them until she was bare beside him and he—realizing with absurd gentlemanly embarrassment that he alone wore clothing—hastened to join her, both of them laughing at the comedy of his shirt and breeches confounding him as he tried to slip them off in too much haste.
His skin was pink and pale, warm against the gold of hers, his body thin as she’d imagined, and she closed her eyes and found once more the green daylight she’d remembered from that day beside the river, and of which she’d dreamt since. But not even in her dreams had she unfurled herself so alongside him, the two of them in silent tandem using every sense but sight. His touch on her skin like spider’s silk, so delicate a mere breeze could tear it beyond repair—for they were choosing not merely to love, but to love thus, and as he entered her the words were a piercing brightness in her mind: we two invented this. She opened her eyes to tell him, and his face was strange to her—wild and alive and beautiful as a storm crashing against every lit windowpane. John’s dear face, quickened with such sacred clarity that she thought: so would be the angels, fierce with desire and understanding.
This love has no endpoint, she wished to say. See how we’re borne within it, on and on and on? She called his name, and as she did she laughed aloud.
Yet even as she laughed, she saw his delight falter. She saw some stray thought tug at him, as though a voice had, for just an instant, called him—a tiny, flickering herald from a place beyond this bed: a world of iron-cast virtue and vice, where his own heart had never dared utter a sound, so its beating now was thunder and calamity. Unease fell over his eyes.
She lost his face, then. His body was flush with hers; he gripped her hard in his arms and his face burrowed into the cloud of her hair on the pillow. A hopeful confusion, his breath fast in her ear.
A wince of pleasure.
He lay quietly atop her. Then he separated from her. She felt his eyes on her, but when she looked at him he glanced at the window. They lay breathing on the bed. She tried again to meet his gaze; again it fled hers. As though she’d led him too far, too fast—as though a force had summoned him back from himself, and he’d fain be any other man now, so frightened was he to be John. The room was silent.
“You were a virgin?” he said.
The words were discordant, a script for the wrong play. Didn’t he understand what she’d just said to him—what she’d offered—with her body? What had her virginity, or his, to do with what had just taken place?
Yet the question demanded an answer, in the same foreign tongue he’d spoken. Reluctant, she nodded. Yes. Seeing that words were still required, she said, “I trust myself in your hands.”
She felt him nod. But something in his body had solidified. When he looked at her a moment later, it was as if from a distance—as if he feared something in himself, and her.
There was a bang—a door slamming in its frame. Thomas. At the sound John jumped to his feet and dressed, passing her things to her courteously but without looking at her. A moment later she was dressed—and John squeezed her shoulder with forced warmth, murmured something with a slight apologetic laugh, and then she was in the parlor and on her way to the door, with John out of sight behind her, Thomas greeting her with a bleary smirk as she passed.
She could not regret what she’d done. She could not.
She reached home with no recollection of what she’d passed on the street, or whether she’d encountered any, living or dead. She shut the door behind her, turned, and the sight of Manuel HaLevy, seated at her writing table with a cup of ale, stilled her.
Rivka was perched uneasily on the rabbi’s chair. It was plain she was restless to turn to her chores—yet the rabbi was asleep in his bedroom, and some unaccustomed impulse toward politeness seemed to have seized Rivka, preventing her from abandoning their visitor. As soon as Ester entered the room, Rivka turned to Manuel HaLevy, murmured “By your leave” in thickly accented English, and left with a quick curtsy—a gesture so foreign to Rivka’s usual demeanor that Ester simply stared.
Moving as in a dream, Ester turned to Manuel HaLevy. She saw, with a dull, distant shock, that she hadn’t put away her writing from yesterday. So distracted had she been by her conversation with the rabbi that she’d let the page she’d written for him remain in broad view on the table. But Manuel had pushed it aside, and did not seem interested in reading. He looked in good spirits, his robust figure fit, his color high.
“I came to check on my investment,” he said.
Her eyes could not seem to contract. There was too much light; the window was a white blur and his face hazed in her vision.
“My father sent me to attend to some small affairs of his here in London and make sure his servants take no advantage of his absence. But of course I was glad of the reason to visit—even with London in this state.” He looked closely at her. Concern furrowed his broad brow. “You’re not ill?”
Resisting the impulse to raise a hand to her flushed cheek, she shook her head.
He looked glad, then amused. “Has the pestilence tamed your famous tongue?”