“Perhaps later,” said Patricia, her irony tempered by something like respect.
She could not have stopped her hands had she wished to. Behind her, Patricia let out a sound of disapproval but restrained herself as Helen’s palms rose and settled on the glass, and rested there. A tentative, fluttering embrace, like a lover made shy by years of rejection.
The handwriting was unmistakably different—rounder and less cramped, unrushed. Innocent. And when she reached the signature she understood at last.
“That’s how you did it,” she said aloud.
She read, and she reread, and the history that had refused for so long to speak to her now greeted her clearly. She listened with the flooding gratitude of a wanderer at last called home—her name sounding through the dusk in a voice raised up to remind her, finally, that she had been its child all along.
The lift doors pinged open once more, and Patricia Starling-Haight was back, bearing clothing from Helen’s apartment. And like two sisters in a fairy tale, the Patricias flanked her in silence, outspread arms laden, to gird her for her final battle.
26
September 7, 1665
27 Elul, 5425
London
Forty days and nights: a number even the Christians respected. Forty days and nights of flood to drown every stirring thing and wash the earth clean. Forty days and nights of Moses pleading forgiveness on the sun-beaten mountain; of Goliath’s thundering challenges in the valley, met only with terrified silence.
Their pantry ran low. Only due to the da Costa Mendeses’ servants’ practice of stocking quantities of firewood and oil, and the fact that Rivka had for some time made a habit of purchasing extra flour, were they able to sustain themselves. Some time during Ester’s sickness, Rivka had divided their stores into daily portions to last until their release from quarantine. Now every day she baked bread, which they dipped in oil with thyme from the garden and ate for each meal.
Just once, when but a week remained until the guard would leave his post at their door, did Bescós appear. Standing beside the bedchamber’s window, Ester saw him enter the street. He walked like a man much aged. When he reached their house, he conferred with the guard in low tones. Straightening to squint upward, he saw her.
“You’re alive,” he said. Then he added, “Today.”
Shadows under his pale eyes, under his cheekbones. His face was cavernous. She’d never thought of Bescós as a hopeful man, but she understood that the thing that had been burned out of his face was hope. Something keen and unbending had taken its place.
“You Jewesses make it tiresome to get my money,” he said.
She stood rooted at the window.
On the street, Bescós made show of pausing a moment in thought. “I wonder much,” he called scornfully, “at the strange fate of the Jews. Always pouring out your lifeblood. You have an affinity for it.”
The guard let out an uncertain laugh.
“Every moral error in Christianity,” Bescós said, “can be traced—” But he stopped, then waved his hand dismissively—the recitation too tiresome to continue with only the guard for audience. He stepped back a few paces, and seemed to survey the entirety of the da Costa Mendes house with care. Then he nodded to the guard, and departed.
Avidly, the guard watched Bescós’s retreat—the only sport to come his way in weeks. Ester too watched him go, her knuckles striated white where they gripped the windowsill, her heart banging. The temerity of her body stunned her: no matter how she counseled it to accept its own inevitable defeat, it refused, insisting on each next breath, and the next.
And didn’t an equally insistent force animate Bescós? Dread shadowed him—yet stubbornly he refused dread’s claim. He would hack at it with all he possessed, she saw, until it was eviscerated.
So when the fortieth day dawned and their doorstep at last was vacant, she wasn’t surprised to see Esteban Bescós on the street. But he stood with his back to their house, as though awaiting someone.
Rivka joined Ester at the upstairs window. For a long time they watched Bescós. As though he might possibly overhear through the closed window, Rivka spoke in a whisper. “If he wants us out so he can have Mary’s things, we’ll go.” There was a note in her voice Ester hadn’t heard before. She turned. Rivka’s eyes were intent on the street, her nostrils wide, her breaths now coming rapid and suppressed. “I won’t,” Rivka murmured, as though counseling herself. “I won’t step out the door until he assures safe passage.”
Voices in the street. Below, three men had joined Bescós. They were followed by two women entering from the direction of Bury Street, one stooped, the other young. The group stood in conversation. Then, at some remark from Bescós, they looked up in unison, at the window where Ester and Rivka stood.
Bescós’s words were louder than necessary, meant for Ester’s and Rivka’s ears too. “Two Jewesses hiding behind a painted cross. Why didn’t they die, if the sickness was here? If you wish to see sorcery, look in that window.”
The ring of faces peered anxiously. Rivka stepped back swiftly from the window; Ester shrouded herself in a curtain, hoping to see without being seen.
“The younger one,” Bescós continued with a gallant gesture, “believes herself to have powers of thought. She reads books that in the hands of a woman—let alone a Jewess—lead to heresy and worse.”
The men and women blinked in the bright daylight. They looked, at present, too sleepy to be moved by Bescós’s words. But the ugliness of their upturned countenances told Ester what she needed to know of Bescós’s purpose in summoning them. Squinting to catch a glimpse of Ester were faces that told of poverty and ill health steadier and more clawing than the plague. One of the men had an inflammation of the skin that gave his nose the appearance of raw flesh. The young woman had one good eye, its companion so grossly swollen and crusted with pus that Ester’s mind at first couldn’t properly make sense of the woman’s distorted features. Ester knew she herself must look unearthly as well: her complexion hollowed to ash by the distemper, her eyes emptied by all they’d witnessed—this much she’d glimpsed on the one occasion when she’d been tempted to lift a corner of one of the cloths with which Rivka had covered the house’s mirrors. But the condition of those below her window was of a different order.
The woman with the diseased eye addressed Bescós quietly, her soft smile revealing broken teeth. As she spoke she lifted a hand toward him in emphasis—and he stepped back from her hand so swiftly he lost his footing and stumbled, catching himself on the low masonry wall. A slight stumble, surely not enough to hurt him—yet it was a moment before he stirred again. As he leaned on the wall, his face turned away from the others, Ester glimpsed his turbid expression. He seemed near weeping.
He righted himself slowly; when he straightened, his face bore only a trace of distaste. He resumed speaking with the woman, as though her near-touch hadn’t undone him. But the woman had stiffened. When they’d finished speaking she turned away, her shoulders bunched.
“Jewish sorcery,” one of the men called—the words still tentative.
Bescós wore a look of exasperation. “Jewish sorcery,” he affirmed, impatient. “Yes. There they stand.”
“The vicar’s spoken of that,” said the older woman.
Church of England, then. Bescós didn’t even share their faith.
Now three more joined the group, most strikingly a young able-bodied man with a close-shaven head and puglike features. His gait was stiff, as though his very limbs were tight with rage. Ester watched him traverse the short space of cobblestones. Looking to the window the gazes of the others were trained on, he gave an impatient shudder that made her belly tighten. He barked something to Bescós.