Rather than find a cart whose very wood might be permeated with plague seeds, Ester brought her possessions by hand, taking care to avoid being seen coming and going from the da Costa Mendeses’ door. Her own belongings, bundled beneath her arms, required only one passage between the da Costa Mendes house and the rabbi’s. Returning alone for the rabbi’s books, Ester carried his library two stacks at a time.
Over and again she passed through the hushed streets, the tender pages and worn covers marking the exposed skin of her forearms with deep red grooves and slashes—like a mute alphabet spelling accusations she couldn’t refute. Finally, on her sixth and final passage, she brought the papers. The rabbi’s body lay in a pit, yet she could still preserve his writings. Unable to bear sorting the pages she pulled from drawers and shelves, she swept all together: household accounts, notices from the book bindery, the rabbi’s sermons, all in a jumble. And somewhere among them, the rabbi’s letters to his pupil in Florence—letters she now understood were intended for her, to pull her back from the folly of her own notions. She brought, too, her own writings. Yet it seemed to her now, as she hurried down long alleys in the fading light, that her very questions and propositions were themselves written in an alphabet of scored flesh and damaged spirit. Such cruel wounds, from such small markings of her quill on the page.
That night, Ester lay awake on one of the fine mattresses of the da Costa Mendes house. In a bed beside hers, Rivka lay quiet—whether asleep or not Ester couldn’t say. In a nearby room, Mary tossed noisily in her bed.
She could not yet grieve the rabbi’s death. Her mind failed, somehow, to comprehend it. Beneath the mattress where she lay, stowed there hastily this evening, were his papers and her own—a mute presence whose demands on her she couldn’t fathom. Her spirit shrank, too, from the scalding thought of John.
Yet she circled back again and again, without understanding why, to one single comprehensible fact: Manuel HaLevy was dead. She could not break away from the thought of him. She could almost feel his astonishment at his first moment of faltering . . . his great body suddenly weak, hot with fever, not responding to his command that it rise, stride, shake off what dogged it. She could see his pale eyes, understanding at last that he too would yield. And although she hadn’t loved him, that first night in her new lodgings she cried hot tears for his robust body, racked and stilled. And for the protection he had so long offered her. And for that protection which he had so fervently, even courteously, requested from her in exchange: the surety of a wife who would not succumb.
23
April 4, 2001
London
He lingered in the shower, took his time over coffee in the dining hall. He ran an errand he’d meant to run for weeks—stopping at the supply store near the Tube entrance to buy new toner for Helen’s printer. Waiting to pay, he even let a mother, jabbering on her mobile while her toddler poked at a pen display with the sticky end of a lollipop, into the queue ahead of him.
But delay though he did, by late morning he found himself at the usual long table in the rare manuscripts room, facing the final batch of documents.
Grimly then, notched pencil digging into his knuckles, he worked his way down the evenly inked lines. He understood, of course, why he hated to finish the cache: like a gambler spinning the roulette wheel, he’d come to rely on the eternal promise of the next round of letters.
But as he made his way down the lines of the fourth-to-last document—and then the third-to-last—he acknowledged the folly of the trust he’d placed in these papers. There would be no grand revelation, no smoking gun, no hidden three-century-old wisdom to galvanize his drifting life. Ester Velasquez was not going to pop out from behind the curtains and save him from himself. Even if she’d actually written under the name of Thomas Farrow, they’d never be able to prove it. Not if the rest of the documents were like this.
The sole labor that remained for Aaron then, in these dwindling hours of reading, was to listen. No more, and no less. Which was, as he should have known all along, a historian’s only true charge.
He tried now to listen to what Ester was actually saying, rather than what he wanted her to say.
There wasn’t much of it. In silence, he translated another list of household expenses, this one without any extraneous doodles in the margins. He read a missive from the rabbi to his student in Florence, but it was brief and mainly repeated the rabbi’s earlier opinions about Sabbatai Zevi and the dangers of misplaced fervor.
When Patricia lay the second-to-last document on the wedge before him, he realized he was clenching his fists.
It was a single sheet of paper, and the writing covered only half the page.
June 28, 1665
15 Tamuz, 5425
With the help of G-d
To the Esteemed Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca,
From my sickbed I send to the honorable kehillah of Amsterdam my greetings. Each hour now brings me closer to my end. The angels who escort the sun on its passage across the sky do not slow to lengthen my final days, nor do I ask this. Such work as I have had sufficient merit to do in this world is now ended, whether or not I have succeeded in it.
My household here in London sees to my needs and reads psalms for me, and I am blessed to lack neither comfort nor a soul to whom to make my confession.
I have a request of you. It is my hope that you will find merit in me to grant it. It is my wish that you should prevail upon the Dotar to provide a dowry for Ester Velasquez, should the day come for her to wed. Little has been given her and much ripped from her in her life. When she has attained the honor and stability of the marriage canopy I believe she will prove herself a woman of valor. Should there be questions about the girl’s mother, I ask that the Dotar grant this wish nonetheless, as a duty to the dead. In this broken world, I request that you escort and comfort my departing soul through this good deed, which will bring you merit in the world to come.
For my sins I beg G-d’s forgiveness.
In faith in the coming of the Messiah and the merciful reign of G-d, which will break on us like a dawn, illuminating every mystery that now confounds our sightless souls.
Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes
?
He sat back.
The quiet in the hall was absolute. A faint shaft of light rested on the wooden floor beside his feet. His eyes stung.
After a moment he stood. It was two o’clock. Just another twenty minutes until he’d have to leave to meet Helen in her office. In truth she seemed to have lost her taste for the rare manuscripts room this past week. He wondered if she, too, was dragging her feet about reaching the end of the cache. She hadn’t looked quite her usual fierce self lately—and the rabbi’s deathbed letter was unlikely to cheer her.
On with it, then. Librarian Patricia watched him approach.
“I’ll take the last in the series.” He tried to sound jauntier than he felt.
She wasn’t fooled. The look she gave him was almost, but not quite, sympathetic. “The ivy letter isn’t ready.”
“Which letter?”
“The final document. It’s a folded letter, with an unbroken wax seal.” She pursed her lips. “The seal is an ornate image of climbing ivy. Quite lovely, in fact.” Her eyebrows lifted just a millimeter; her smile this time was faint but real.
“When will it be ready?” he said.
“My colleague upstairs has removed the seal and is preserving it for display. The letter itself is now in the humidifying chamber. She expects it will be ready in another week.”
“That long?”
Librarian Patricia lowered her glasses.
He persisted. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what’s actually in the letter?”
She closed her mouth, breathed out slowly through her nose. “You don’t understand the English at all,” she said, “do you?”
“Nope,” he said. “Not a bit.”
She gave a short hum, then surveyed him in silence. “Let me help you, then.” Slowly she leaned forward at her desk. “We’re very patient people.”
“It’s getting old”—he said—“your stoic-Britons-confront-the-impatient-American thing. Thought I’d just let you know.”