“Two women, yes. They hid in a cave with some children. It seems they disagreed with their leader’s notion that kindness meant self--murder for a noble cause. It seems they were of the opinion that kindness meant something quite different.” Helen’s finger was now wavering so widely he wanted to grab and steady it. “Everyone looks at that silhouette,” she said, “and thinks of people who chose to do the so-called honorable thing even though it meant death for themselves, their wives, and children. And that’s the only story of Masada anyone talks about. No one ever mentions those two women who decided to live and be captured, and find a way in the world whether or not it was honorable or free. No one ever mentions that they might have been something other than weak-hearted—that they might in fact have disbelieved the worldview that required their murder. But they stayed alive—and Aaron, they were the ones who told the story to Josephus—they’re the only reason we know what happened up there.”
It was true. All those times he’d heard the Masada story, no one had ever troubled to linger on the question of how the details of the story were known—nor had he wondered. It was as though the story had been received from the ether. The one teacher who had mentioned the women hiding in caves, Aaron now remembered, had referred to them as cowards.
“Right there,” Helen said. “There’s the watermark of a different choice.”
She lowered her hand.
She was asking him to connect dots across millennia, as though Ester Velasquez were part of the same invisible chain that included two women’s refusal to martyr themselves on Masada. “You’re proposing,” he said slowly, “that a seventeenth-century woman would go so far as to fake a Sabbatean crisis, just so she could write a few letters to philosophers.” He hesitated, feeling himself in an untoward position: he needed to impress upon a historian decades his senior the rashness of chasing grand, unsupported visions. “Don’t you think we need to be a bit cautious about superimposing some template of modern feminist rebellion onto people we know almost nothing about?”
“I think, young man, that the time for caution has passed.”
There was a long pause.
“You’re not well,” he said.
She didn’t bother answering. But he saw. She’d been in some obscure decline since he’d known her, but something had changed. Something in her was pitching toward a destination that he didn’t want to consider—that made him feel sick himself.
But now she was speaking firmly, as though to erase the sound of his words. “I contacted your Derek Godwin. Through the Internet. I trust you won’t object. I told him I was fortunate to be working with you, you should know. And I kindly asked him for a sample of Farrow’s handwriting—promising, of course, not to publish about Farrow until after Godwin’s own article is in print. He was cagey, but he sent me a photo—a close-up of just a single sentence fragment. Aaron, it’s the same hand. Ester Velasquez wrote under the name of Thomas Farrow. And if we know Ester Velasquez lied about one thing, then why should lying about a Sabbatean crisis in Florence be any more surprising?” In her excitement, she half stood. “It was all made up, do you see?”
His skepticism must have been written on his face.
“Are you shocked, Aaron Levy, by the cold-bloodedness of the woman?”
The words disoriented him. For an instant he was uncertain to whom she was referring.
“If it seems unlikely, just think—think, Aaron, of when Ester Velasquez lived, and what kind of person she’d have to be to write the heretical things she appears to have written under Farrow’s name. Religious persecution, you’ll remember, was everywhere. The tortures were grotesque. Even Jews who chose to repent to the Inquisition were killed—in exchange for confession they were just offered the supposedly merciful death of the garrote, rather than being burnt at the stake, though after the garrote their bodies were burnt at the stake anyway for good measure. Life was strewn with terrors, and the worst were reserved for atheists. Imagine the kind of person it took to defy all that, and question religious belief altogether—in writing, on paper. She could not, you understand, have been nice.”
He’d no answer for this. Helen had always been a stickler for proof. Yet somewhere in the past few days—or maybe gradually, during the weeks since she’d learned of their defeat at Wilton’s hands—she’d abandoned proof. He noticed, now, that her cardigan was buttoned askew.
Intolerably, now, Helen was resting her gaze on his, trusting.
A ping from Helen’s computer. He turned gratefully to the screen.
To his surprise, there was already a reply to the e-mail they’d sent. At Helen’s terse nod, he opened it.
From: Jewish Archives of Amsterdam
Subject: Letter
Professor Watt,
You find me on a quiet day, and I’m glad to help with your inquiry. We do indeed have the letter you describe, and I’ve scanned it, see attachment. Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.
Dina Jacobowicz
Fourteen minutes since they’d made the request. May the Patricias of the world be blessed, he thought distractedly—may they sleep well at night, their desks clear and consciences clean. Helen beside him, he clicked the document open.
There it was, Ester’s familiar writing. But seeing it on a screen rather than under his hands on textured paper made him feel tender and apologetic, as though he were suddenly seeing a woman he’d cared for in a museum display, anesthetized and out of reach.
In the screen’s glow, Ester’s inked letters were a deadened, blanched brown. She’d copied the opening lines of the rabbi’s letter to Aboab exactly, he saw. Yet in the third paragraph, she’d omitted the sentences that extended sympathy to her and vouched for her as a woman of valor. She’d omitted, too, the rabbi’s request for God’s forgiveness for his sins.
Aaron read the words she’d substituted.
I have kept to my path though surrounded by waywardness.
The rest of the letter Ester had copied faithfully.
So the rabbi had tried to provide a dowry for Ester—and she’d refused the benefit of his praise.
Hadn’t he just been faulting Helen for unproven conjecture? But now Aaron couldn’t resist picturing Ester Velasquez as he’d wished her to be all along—fierce, principled, determined.
Helen was squinting at the screen, the miniaturized image of Ester’s script apparently defeating her. Without asking, Aaron leaned over and clicked Print.
As Helen lifted the page off the printer, Aaron thought, improbably, of the only morsel he remembered from high school physics: the story of Ludwig Boltzmann, a man derided in his lifetime for his theories. So adamant had Boltzmann been that he’d ordered his repudiated entropy equation carved onto his tombstone. And there the equation remained to this day—right there on Boltzmann’s tombstone . . . and also in every physics textbook in the world, because Boltzmann, as he’d known, had been right, and had let nothing deter him.
Ester too must have possessed that sort of stubbornness. Aaron respected her for it—yet he also wanted to curse her stupidity. Why suddenly become a stickler for integrity, just in time to cost herself some measure of stability? Maybe if she’d actually tried for that dowry from the Dotar, she wouldn’t have had to marry a wealthy man who wouldn’t let her write.
Well. Not that any seventeenth-century husband would have let her write.
His mobile rang. Turning his back on Helen, he dug it out of his bag, answered. The voice of the English girl on the line disoriented him.
“Anne Fielding,” she repeated. “From Richmond Local Studies.”
“Of course,” he said, but too late. The shy, hopeful voice with which she’d greeted him retreated immediately. In a tone of swift efficiency, she proceeded. “Ester HaLevy died in 1691. The records have it as June 13, of a fever.”
“Thank you,” he said slowly.
“You’re quite welcome.”
“Any mention of children?” he thought to ask.
“None we’ve record of.”
He’d no justification for the disappointment he felt.
Helen had stopped reading to listen. He mustered another “Thank you.”
Catching wind of his mood, Anne spoke in respectful tones. “I assume her husband outlived her. But so far I haven’t found the date of Manuel HaLevy’s death. We’re missing three and a half years of records, though, from 1694 to 1697, due to some water damage that happened in the 1920s in the building where these records were housed. So I can’t guess at what might have happened in those years. But as far as I can tell there were no heirs. The house was sold in 1698.”