She hesitated. Then stepped up to it and knocked, avoiding touching the cross as though it were cursed.
Mary opened the door just wide enough for Ester to see her face. “I’m not sick,” she said. Swinging the door wider, she grabbed Ester’s forearm hard. “The cross is a lie.”
Ester let herself be pulled through the familiar entryway, and Mary shut the door behind her and locked it.
It took Ester just one step inside the parlor to know that no one else was present. The fine furnishings were askew, pillows lay in piles on the floor, blankets were heaped on a divan, and used dishes were scattered here and there. Mary had never kept house for herself. Now it appeared she had been sleeping and eating here in the parlor, where the window looked out onto the deserted street. Mary herself was dressed in a stained blue dress that gaped at the placket. Her belly was swollen past the point where it could be contained in her usual bodices and stays. It was clear she’d had none to teach her how to dress in the manner of a woman expecting a child. Without her customary makeup and jewelry she looked like a child herself, settling now cross-legged on a cushioned chair and pulling Ester to the seat beside her.
“The servants left over a week ago,” she said, still gripping Ester’s arm. “They helped themselves to some of my father’s things along the way.” She shrugged, as though she didn’t begrudge them what they’d taken. Then, releasing Ester at last, she said more quietly, “Thomas left.”
“I know,” Ester said, sitting. “I saw him go. With John.” She looked up into Mary’s wide, shadowed eyes—and could easily guess the terror of Mary’s nights alone in the deserted house, the city’s anguish sounding unseen all around.
“Did John ask you to accompany him?”
Ester began to answer, then faltered. At length she said, “At first. But I fear he wouldn’t wish it now, even had I a travel permit.”
In the silence that followed, an agreement passed between them: neither would make the other name what she’d lost.
“Why is there a cross on your door?” Ester asked. “Isn’t it the mark of a plague house?”
Mary shook her head hard. “No one’s died here, Ester, not yet. But Bescós came.” Mary’s soft face registered fear now, and she hesitated before continuing in a lower voice, as though they might be overheard. “Thomas told Bescós everything. He told him I’d stayed. That I was with child.” Mary began rocking herself gently, forward and back, arms about her belly. “And Bescós guessed that the servants would leave me. He says that now that I’m the sole guardian of my father’s wealth, it will be his.”
Ester absorbed this. She believed Mary—yet something here fit amiss with her notion of Bescós. She’d taken Bescós for a hateful man, yes . . . even a dangerous one. But she hadn’t thought him a petty thief. There had always been something haughty about the man. Wouldn’t Bescós consider himself above threatening a frightened girl for petty gain?
“He sent someone to paint the cross, Ester,” Mary said. “I didn’t know it was there until I tried to go out, and a man on the street shouted me back indoors as though I were a rat trying to escape its trap.” Her voice caught. “No one will come,” she said. “All the congregation are gone from London—and they’d stopped wanting to speak to me even before the plague. When I stole out my door to try to find you this morning, the woman who saw me screamed and screamed for help, and said she’d set a mob on me, and I had to run past her—like this, Ester.” She gestured at her belly, at the gaping fabric at her waist. “Bescós said if I don’t start paying him from my father’s silver, he’ll simply wait until I die of plague or hunger, and he’ll come get my father’s wealth then.”
Ester turned to the window. Through its panes she surveyed the empty street that had been Mary’s solitary view day and night. “Leave your father’s fortune,” she said. “Let Bescós claim it, let your father mourn it. Manuel HaLevy will take us in. You and I, and Rivka, I’m sure of it.” And she was.
And if Manuel asked her to pledge him something in return? Perhaps she ought. If she couldn’t love Manuel—if she forever mourned John—what of it? For reasons she could not comprehend, John had turned away. All else she’d cherished—her carefully built edifices and spires of thought—had brought pain to the rabbi and benefited none but herself. But a choice to marry could save them.
Manuel HaLevy had been correct: in the end, life would force her hand, and she’d greet his offer with gratitude.
Mary stared. Then something akin to a laugh rose in her throat. “Manuel HaLevy is dead. He died over a week ago, of plague. The servants told me, before they left. He fell ill the day he was to leave London. He never passed the city walls.”
The parlor was too dim. She could see nothing in the shadowed room. She stood.
Mary took her sleeve. “Stay with me, Ester.”
Slowly she shook her head, not in answer but simply for the sensation of motion.
“I can’t live alone,” Mary insisted. “I don’t know how. There are some foods still in the pantry and I don’t know even how to cook them. I’ll either die of plague or I’ll starve, or else I’ll live to birth the baby and I’m afraid to do that alone. I’m not brave like you.” She stopped herself. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer those letters you sent me. I thought . . . I thought perhaps you wanted to see me only because I paid you to look after me. I thought: first Thomas, then Bescós, all wanting only my father’s money—maybe you were the same. I thought, I don’t have a true friend. And then . . .” She looked up. “I thought you’d gone with John. And even if you hadn’t, I didn’t want any to see me like this.” She gestured at her belly without touching it, as though it were a thing entirely separate from her. Then, a moment later, she wrapped her arms protectively about it once more. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice taking on a solemn hush, “about the rabbi. Is that where you were this morning?”
Ester nodded.
Mary hesitated. “May the Holy One comfort you,” she began uncomfortably, “among the—” She stopped, unable to recall the remainder. With a small, helpless giggle she subsided.
The world had reshaped so quickly, there was no room left—so it seemed to Ester—to do anything but act. In the rabbi’s household there remained perhaps a few days’ food and fuel, and after that nothing—no income, no salvation in the form of a purse from Manuel HaLevy. She thought with apprehension of the cross on Mary’s door. Yet in this house there was also food, and silver and fine furnishings that might yet be traded for some means of escape. If they were careful, they might come and go as they needed.
“Rivka as well?” she said.
Mary nodded, relief suffusing her face so that for a fleeting instant she resembled paintings such as Ester had sometimes seen in rich homes in Amsterdam—of a young woman dreamy and ripe, anticipating the birth of her babe.
Mary stood, the pale skin of her belly bulging through the gap in her skirt. “Come today,” she said. “This evening, before the curfew.”
By sunset it was accomplished. Rivka, who’d replied to Ester’s explanation of Mary’s predicament with naught but pragmatic questions, set immediately to gathering her few necessities, then followed Ester—locking the door of the rabbi’s house behind them and departing without backward glance, as though she couldn’t bear to stay another moment within those walls without the sound of his frail breathing.