The ringing of the bells. Day and night, the churches marked the departure of each perished congregant, every peal thickening the blood of the city. Sometimes half a night passed without a single tolling. Then a first heavy clang followed by a silence, long enough to draw breath in, as the bell swung back to speak again. Sometimes one tolling came on the heels of another—then the unseen hands working the belfry’s rope abandoned their efforts quickly, letting each clanging dull and subside. Six times in an hour. More.
In the heat of day, the da Costa Mendeses’ windowpanes fogged. Mary, jumping up from an hour-long torpor by the front window, stumbled through the house flinging windows open—her sudden rage like a tide sweeping along all the members of the household. Ester trailed mutely behind, and Rivka as well—Rivka’s heels striking hard on the wooden floors as she grimly slammed each window shut—one, another, a third. Bang. “Plague seeds float in air!” Rivka cried after Mary—but Mary had already gained the second floor, where she threw herself sidelong onto her unmade bed and cursed Rivka viciously in Castilian terms that made even Ester call Mary’s name in protest. Ignoring Ester, rolling onto her back and slapping her belly with a storm of blows, Mary cursed it in English: “Foul lump.”
Was it a fortnight since Ester had spoken to any others? More? Those few who passed their door saw the painted cross there, and walked faster. Bescós’s cross had hidden them from London—yet it remained unknown whether this made them safer or less so.
With each passing day of silence Mary’s vexation seemed to sharpen. Once, washing at her basin—a feat she accomplished with umbrage, for her belly now impeded her—she turned on Ester: “How can you bear to stay in this cage?” she cried, her face dripping with water she didn’t bother to wipe. “Don’t you want air?”
Ester blinked at her. How to explain that this reverie was all she wanted—that it was the world outside that had turned vertiginous? The pestilence, the bells, the rabbi. John. Unbearable, sickening thoughts.
Mary shook her head hard, droplets flying, her hair fanning about her like a wild creature’s. Then she stopped and leaned forward, propping herself on her hands at the dressing table. In the mirror she looked at Ester, the tender hairs on her temples clinging to her pale skin. “You’re glad to hide here,” she accused.
It was true. Ester had lain awake that morning, her thoughts making a wide wary arc as though skirting a precipice. With her head heavy on the pillow, she’d endeavored to trace a logical argument. It began: Love causes pain.
Why does it cause pain?
Because it depends on another. Because it is not self-complete and therefore cannot be contained within one spirit.
She hadn’t been able to follow the logic further. That part of her that had known how to inscribe clear lines of argument on the lurching world had fallen mute.
“Ester, if John spurned you”—Mary was searching Ester’s face in the mirror—“well, then.” She struggled visibly for unfamiliar words of consolation. “He was never so lively, was he? In truth, I thought him a bore! You can find another.” Mary’s expression darkened a moment. “Not like me.” She stared long into the mirror. “But,” she murmured, letting go of the dressing table to press palms to her belly, “Thomas will want us.” Before Ester could answer, Mary fled the room, in her haste nearly knocking into Rivka, who was climbing to the second floor with a stack of pressed linens.
Sealed away though they were from the city’s soot and dirt, Rivka had asserted a strict routine of housework to which she held herself and Ester, ignoring Mary as hopeless. In truth the fine things of the da Costa Mendes house seemed to exert on Rivka a kind of enchantment. Ester would come across Rivka running a hand over linens trimmed with point; sanding the iron clean yet again; adding indigo to the white starch to produce a still finer white for the linens of a household whose owners she neither liked nor respected—yet Rivka seemed to hold the possessions of the da Costa Mendes family blameless for their owners’ sins. And while Mary paced about the house, sometimes muttering prettily to herself and sometimes snorting fragments of an argument—“I’ll not be your doxy”—or with tearful disdain—“He’s something like!”—Ester drifted down the stairs to labor alongside Rivka. For once Ester was grateful for the trance of work—her body pounding and wringing in a rhythm that obliterated thought. The very drudgery she’d hated for tearing her from her beloved studies was now salvation—and what was it, after all, that she had so treasured about her ability to think? What desire could she have had for the open landscape of her mind, when it harbored fearful things or—worse, now—a vast, featureless stillness? The papers she’d carried with such care from the rabbi’s lay untouched beneath the mattress of her bed. She feared to look at them, as though they accused her of crimes she couldn’t deny.
Rivka insisted that only she herself go abroad in the city, claiming she could not fall ill of the plague—for, she said, she’d suffered many girlhood illnesses in her Galician village and these strengthened her humors against disease. Mary scoffed at this reasoning, griping to Ester that Rivka only wanted all the freedom for herself. But Rivka seemed to trust in it, and often during their confinement Rivka slipped out late in the day to purchase provisions, returning just before curfew.
One evening, shortly after Rivka’s return, a man’s voice on the street roused Ester. She’d been sewing in the fading light from the downstairs window, mending a small tear in a seam of a sheet, her fingers stiff from working the needle. The bell had signaled three deaths already that hour.
“See here, the wily Jewesses!”
It was Bescós’s voice. She rose, dropping her mending to the table.
“You’ve multiplied.”
He stood on the street outside the window, too close. His face, intent, peered at the pane. Then his eyes fastened on hers.
His face was thinner, and something about it was changed. Even in her fear, a strange thought occurred to her: he’s in danger.
But the thought was banished by the sharp rasp of Mary flinging open an upstairs window. “It’s true!” she shouted. “I’ve friends with me now.”
Stepping back to squint up at her, Bescós shielded his eyes. Then he laughed. It was a long laugh, with time in it for him to decide what sort of man he wanted to be. After a moment, Ester saw him decide.
There were no other passersby. The shutters had now been drawn in every visible dwelling along the street—every house’s eyes sealed by plague.
“So this is your new family?” Bescós called to Mary.
“Why, does it concern you that I’m no longer alone?” her voice sailed back.
“I’m only curious,” he said. “Which of you is the mistress of this brothel? I’d have guessed the silver-headed one”—his eyes still fixed on Mary, he gestured at the window behind which Ester stood. “Yet judging by what Thomas was able to get out of John, she’s taken to selling her own wares.” He wagged his head, disappointed. “Or offering them without pay.”
Abruptly, he turned and banged a palm, hard, on the wall of the house. Ester started, her heart thumping in her chest. From behind her, she heard Rivka’s low gasp. Bescós was laughing—he’d guessed, even from the outside, how hollow the rooms must echo.
“The idiocy of some women,” he mused, speaking slowly once more, “to give freely the only salable asset they possess. But unless you’ve some spare Jewesses I haven’t yet seen, then the bald one must be the mistress?”
Ester turned at a quiet intake of breath behind her. Rivka stood, a half-unwrapped parcel in one hand.
“You might have found a better advertisement,” Bescós continued. “The doxies are tolerable pretty, but their keeper needs a wig.”
If ever Ester had thought Rivka beyond hurt, she was corrected by the sound of Rivka’s treads fading to the pantry. A moment later, the soft pounding of a pestle.
Now Bescós neared Ester’s window. She shrank back—two steps, three, deeper into the dim room. But he addressed her calmly through the glass panes, as though confiding some casual bit of information. His voice was low, the words for her alone. “Mary thinks she’ll sit on her father’s fortune like a bird,” he said, “and lay her brat in a nest of silver. But you don’t care about the money, do you?”