She didn’t speak.
“Tell me, are there enough books for you here? Enough heresies of mind and body? An unnatural girl needs not only a man’s stuff, but an entire library to appease her wild appetites.” His voice rose. “Whereas a true maiden—”
He stopped.
For an instant he looked dizzy, uncertain of himself.
Then he continued as though there had been no interruption. “—needs only to trust. And remain pure.”
A strange certainty pierced Ester: she’s dead. Bescós’s hoped-for love, his maiden of fine quality—their union blocked for a time by her father . . . and now, Ester thought, forever.
Through the mullioned panes, Bescós looked like a man assembled out of tiles, each laid alongside the next to form the semblance of a man. She thought: he’s partitioned himself like this city—one portion shuttered from another. As Ester watched, he closed his eyes as if in fatigue, held them shut. Then opened them onto the street. It was like witnessing someone waking from a dream to a pitiless landscape, and swiftly calculating an acceptable path through it. So if this is the world . . .
With a jolt, she thought: it was like witnessing herself waking from a dream.
Looming closer, Bescós braced one arm at the top of the window, and spoke slowly through the glass. “According to Thomas’s telling,” he said, “John looked sick at the mere mention of you. Your appetites got the best of poor John, did they? Yet even as you try to prove your worth, you disprove it. For only one sort of woman is true, and all others repellent.”
Her limbs had gone leaden. A line from a sonnet, read in a volume she’d paged at a bookseller’s table, floated dimly to her. Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight.
From above, a slow scrape of wood on metal, then a foul splash on the pavestones beside Bescós. Mary had emptied a bucket from her window—urine or slops, or perhaps only dirty wash water. It missed Bescós narrowly, but some of the splash hit his boot and lower leg.
He jumped, cried out, and for a long minute shook his leg as though terrorized by the filth. In his struggle he appeared on the verge of weeping. It would have been comical, yet it seemed to Ester that she’d never seen a thing more dangerous, and she cringed at the sound of Mary’s loud laughter from above.
Then all was still. The arch smile Bescós had worn earlier did not reassert itself. He leaned into Ester’s window again, and his expression was wholly somber. Sharply, just once, he knocked on the glass with his signet ring, so hard she thought it would shatter.
He departed.
From behind Ester came Rivka’s voice, low and quiet as breathing. “He’s going to bring a mob on us,” she said.
Ester turned.
“With someone tired of waiting for what he wants,” Rivka said. “That’s how it starts. That’s how every evil in the world starts.” She gestured, cloth in hand, at the da Costa Mendeses’ silver, their tapestries. “He wants this.”
Slowly Ester shook her head. “I think what Esteban Bescós wants is dead.”
But Rivka only closed her own eyes and tapped her eyelids gently, almost caressingly, with two thick fingers. “I’ve seen.” She opened her eyes. “I know.”
Ester picked up her mending. What difference if he was driven by love of silver or his lost maiden?
But a wish for silver could be appeased.
It was several days before Rivka ventured out again, and she was gone hours before she returned. She’d searched out three bakeries before finding one that hadn’t been closed, if not by deaths then by rats—for since the cats had been killed, the rats had multiplied a thousandfold, the storerooms were plundered nightly, and there was no traffic into the city to restock London’s shelves. Rivka didn’t describe what she’d witnessed trawling the city’s streets for bread—but as she stacked six loaves on the shelf, she said softly, “Now this city understands.”
Ester, glancing up from rinsing butter, saw a look of sorrowful recognition on Rivka’s face, and realized that at last Rivka had forgiven London, and made the city her own.
They sliced bread and spread it with a thick layer of butter—their new custom for the noon meal, for even Rivka could no longer bear to light a cooking fire in the day’s heat. But when they called Mary to eat, she was nowhere to be found.
They searched the house, their voices calling her name plaintively into the cellar, the attic, the garden. She had disappeared.
Hour by hour, without Mary’s fretful presence, the silence seemed to expand, until the house brimmed with a dreadful quiet that Ester and Rivka could break only in whispers.
At dusk, the front door slipped open. Rivka, waiting beside Ester on the stiff parlor cushions Rivka rarely permitted herself, sprang from her seat and grabbed Mary’s arm, shoving the door closed behind her. “Where were you?”
“No business of yours!” Mary cried, wresting free with a furious gesture. In order to cover her growing belly for her outing, Ester saw, Mary had altered a skirt using extra fabric snipped clumsily from her bedclothes. Mary was flushed, her eyes bright—a marked contrast to her dull expression of these past weeks. The excursion, Ester saw, had done her good.
“The house’s errands are mine to do!” Rivka’s accent had thickened with emotion, her words barely intelligible. “Not yours. You should have sent me.”
Mary, struggling in vain to release her arm, spoke with a repugnance long repressed. “You’re a liar! A greedy . . . thing! Just”—she gestured at Rivka—“look at you!” Carved on Mary’s face was a truth Ester hadn’t before guessed: that what Mary feared most was ugliness. All her life, prettiness had ever been her polestar and her safety. Now all protection was gone. She stood, belly jutting, forgotten. Facing Rivka like a creature from a nightmare.
But Rivka laughed, and Ester was glad to see that Mary couldn’t hurt her.
“You take all the freedom for yourself!” Mary pressed. “Or, no”—Mary pointed wildly—“you just want to escape this hell. That’s why you want to go into the city! It’s because you want to die.”
Without warning Rivka seized Mary’s other shoulder and shook her, hard, so that Mary lost balance and was kept on her feet only by Rivka’s grip.
For a moment the room was hushed, Mary’s face loose with disbelief.
Rivka released her. “Stay in the house,” she said. “If you can’t be sensible for yourself, do it for that baby.”
Mary snatched her arm away and, rubbing it with her opposite hand, cursed Rivka in nearly incoherent temper. But Rivka had turned for the stair.
Minutes later, standing in the kitchen stuffing buttered bread into her mouth, Mary addressed Ester as if nothing had happened. “It’s all filth and horror in the streets, Ester. There are people wailing like—like ghosts, but more. Like they’ve lost their minds.” She stopped chewing suddenly, as though gripped by a pungent memory. Then she started chewing again, and Ester could almost see the energy surging up from her belly—an unthinking hunger for bread, drink, life. “I had to run past a dozen carts with bodies so I wouldn’t have to see—the first one I saw was vile enough. It took me hours to find someone who would send my letter to Thomas. And then the knave ruined my letter by spraying it with vinegar so it wouldn’t carry the distemper. I swore to him I’m not sick, but he wouldn’t heed. Now Thomas is going to think I stink to the heavens.”
Lovely tears welled in her eyes. Ester watched, riveted. Could Mary still care about such a thing? “Why were you writing to him?” she asked.