Only reluctantly did strength return to her body. Dizziness forced her readily back to bed. Five days after her fever had broken, she was able at last to stand without support and, gathering herself at a window overlooking the garden, unlatch and push open the heavy frame. The sunlight blazed in her eyes, the world swam. She knew the day was warm, yet her body seemed to have forgotten how to absorb warmth.
In the garden below, Rivka set down a full washtub, rested a moment, then upended it and stood watching a moment as the dark rivulets sank into the soil. She can read, Ester thought. In her pride, she’d been blinder than the rabbi—and now she saw how thin a divide had separated her from Rivka’s fate. Had Rivka had the gift of just a few years’ more education—had she been tutored in the necessary languages—then she, rather than Ester, might have scribed for the rabbi. Rivka would have sat in the warm front room, at the rabbi’s table—doing his bidding without wronging him. And Ester would have labored at running the household, until a marriage to Manuel HaLevy would have seemed a very heaven.
And yet how strange it now seemed, her fervent pursuit of study against all obstacles, as though she couldn’t live without the ability to write. Illness had proved more persuasive than any teacher; her old ideas, if she could recall them, seemed paltry, hollow things. She dozed and woke atop her mattress with hardly a thought of the papers lying untouched beneath.
How wrong she’d been, to believe a mind could reign over anything. For it did not reign even over itself . . . and despite all the arguments of all the philosophers, Ester now saw that thought proved nothing. Had Descartes, near his own death, come at last to see his folly? The mind was only an apparatus within the mechanism of the body—and it took little more than a fever to jostle a cog, so that the gear of thought could no longer turn. Philosophy could be severed from life. Blood overmastered ink. And every thin breath she drew told her which ruled her.
25
April 6, 2001
London
In the airless confines of the parish records office, Helen inched the cotton gloves back onto her hands. The fact that the records room was now requiring gloves had proved an unpleasant surprise. The gloves thickened her fingers hopelessly, so that every page turn required multiple attempts; worse, they rendered her unable to grip a pencil, so each note she jotted in her notebook meant long wasted minutes as she labored to remove her right glove, then put it on once more. The exertion worsened her tremor; at times, fearful of damaging the paper, she forced herself to suspend her work until it eased.
She’d woken that morning disoriented from a night of dreams piled one upon the other: a glimmering black well that repelled and drew her; the sensation of relinquishing some precious burden she’d carried; a crushing, absolute silence, in which not even her own racing heart was audible. Rising with a start after oversleeping, she’d skipped breakfast, telling herself she’d go directly to the parish records office, then drive to the university and eat in her office, away from prying eyes.
A thoughtless plan, and unlike her.
Her stomach growled again, loud and low. The middle-aged man working at the other end of the long table issued a reprimand in the form of a small, dry cough.
She squared herself, and faced off once more with the record book. Names and dates of decease blurred before her eyes. John Williamson, dead of plague 5th July, 1665. Below John Williamson’s name were dozens of others from the same day, all meticulously noted in the careful slanted hand of some anonymous parish clerk. With difficulty, she turned another page. No trace yet of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, but she knew she’d find him here. She could simply have taken Wilton’s word for the rabbi’s death date, of course; yet she’d felt she owed it to Rabbi HaCoen Mendes to do this herself, accompanying him to the very final words of his story: a single line of ink hidden somewhere here, amid this infinite roster of expired souls.
When she thought about Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s life, she felt at peace. It was the absence of a single written word in the wake of Ester Velasquez’s marriage that refused, somehow, to nest peaceably in Helen’s mind. She’d counted on Ester’s obstinacy to vanquish all: loss, terror, death. She’d needed Ester’s voice to endure.
In order to believe that she herself could.
With a shudder now, Helen recalled the abrupt, unanswerable silence that had haunted last night’s dreams.
How great a weight she’d rested on what had never been more than an instinct.
Back in November on that last afternoon in Richmond, with Aaron vanished on one of his breaks and the snow falling thinly on the path outside, and the hours winding down to the moment when the Sotheby’s assessor would arrive, Helen had stood from her seat and—following a feeling as steady and sure as the beam of a torch—climbed quietly and with effort up the great staircase. Treading softly, she’d surveyed the second floor—a scattering of small rooms, jib doors leading to servant staircases; and then, on opposite sides of the central gallery, two full sets of rooms in grand seventeenth-century style. The first set, closer to the staircase, was clearly in use by the Eastons—the faint sound of running water told her the original seventeenth-century closet had been turned into a bath. Farther along the upstairs gallery was the second set—a large chamber leading into a second, smaller one, and the second into the third: anteroom to bedchamber to closet, like nested boxes. The last and smallest room—the wood-paneled closet—was cluttered with the Eastons’ boxes. Still obeying that same wordless feeling, Helen had picked her way past these to the single window, with its blackened metal lever jutting like a crowbar. Through the narrow panes, which had surely once offered a view of orderly gardens, she could see tangled vines, the neighbors’ rooftops, and a patch of slow-winding river. Helen lingered here a while, for no reason she could explain to herself, watching the river through the uneven glass.
She’d just retreated to the central gallery when she heard a tread on the stair. She should’ve guessed, of course, that Aaron Levy would be unable to resist the lure of defying Helen’s explicit orders. Stepping behind a column, she watched him crest the landing, stop in the upper gallery, and stare: at the carvings on the lintels, the shadowed heights of the ceiling. With a jolt she’d realized that Aaron Levy’s face held the same reverence as had her own only moments earlier—the same astonishment at the simple fact that this was here . . . that a place like this should have survived . . . and that he, Aaron Levy, had the great good fortune to stand in its cavernous embrace.
A strange fascination overtook Helen, then, as she watched Aaron Levy try, one after another, the doors Helen herself had already opened. A moment later she’d been startled to hear Bridgette’s voice, and then, Aaron’s parry. Even from where Helen stood, around the corner and unable to see into the room where Bridgette was, the electricity between Aaron and Bridgette had been unmistakable.
Her own quiet tread, as she retreated to a jib door, didn’t break the spell of their mutual enticement. She’d half-stumbled down the twisting staircase, a dreadful, chastened feeling in the pit of her stomach, her bony hands gripping the rail to prevent her fall. And some voice telling her she’d failed to understand something about life. Only her immersion in the documents had saved her from her confusion, and she’d returned to them with a ferocity that almost comforted her.