How improbable it seemed—even tawdry—that a mob should gather. That she, along with Rivka, would die this way. Yet she was no better, and surely worse, than many who had died at the hands of mobs.
“Ester,” Rivka said.
A thump on the upper window. Ester looked in time to see the manure sliding down the pane. Another thump—two streaks on the glass. Her body clenched, but she couldn’t keep from staring down through the streaks at the pug-faced man, whose eyes were squeezed nearly shut with a wild hunger. He bent to scoop more from the street, took aim at the window, missed; she heard the muck hit the wall of the house.
The others watched, shifting uneasily, as though awaiting some decision. There ought to be more noise, Ester thought. Why isn’t there more noise? But there was only the man’s hard grunts as he worked, hurling one clod after another; now and again a sharp shout of encouragement from those watching.
Then with a nauseated, heartsick glance at Bescós, the woman with the diseased eye pierced the quiet with a scream. “Heralds of sickness!” And she lurched forward, bent to take up a rock, and hurled it with a cry.
Commotion. Bodies stooping, rising, jolting. Rocks against the edifice. Wild hoots, a cry of rage, the slam of something heavy—stone on wood. The air above the street seemed to shudder—Ester stared, but Rivka was pulling on Ester’s sleeve, forcing her away from the sight. Something hard hit the window, leaving a long crack in a pane. Outside, an old woman’s desiccated voice: “Shake the Jews loose from this house in the name of the Lord.” And Bescós calling, in a voice too calm for the thought to be spontaneous: “They’ll leave or be burned out.”
A moment later, an insistent rapping below, on the front door.
Pushing past Rivka, Ester descended the stairs so fast it felt like tumbling. At the bottom she caught her balance on a wooden post. Trying to quiet her own breathing, she stood listening in the shadowed entryway, poised between the front door and the kitchen, from which she could flee to the walled garden—and then where?
“You might save everyone the trouble of a fire.” Bescós’s voice was intimate even through the window, rich with astonishment at his own easy success.
“You’d burn this house for its silver?” she said.
“Even melted, the silver will satisfy me,” said Bescós. “But perhaps not these good neighbors of yours, whom I found begging on the streets of their parish. Perhaps you ought to save them the exertion and do the knifework yourself, as your people did at York.” He laughed. “None will mourn two Jewesses dead in a house they stole from a dead girl’s family.”
Beside Ester, Rivka’s soft breathing.
“Take the house,” Ester called to the door. “And the silver. Give us safe passage.”
A low laugh. “That might or might not be mine to give.”
One of her sleeves was pushed up past the elbow—she touched the soft skin at the crease of her arm, the faint blue trail of her own vein, pulsing.
“Ester.” A plea like a child’s.
She turned. Rivka’s cheeks shone with tears, a thin line of mucus from each nostril. Her head wagged slowly, side to side. “They’ll do it,” she whispered. “Before they kill us.”
“Rivka—”
“Or worse”—Rivka squeezed her eyes shut—“they’ll do it and leave us alive.” She wrenched back from Ester’s outstretched hand and brushed roughly past, knocking Ester off balance. Stumbling, Ester followed, the sudden exertion dimming her vision, so she had to cling to the wall all the way to the kitchen.
When her sight cleared, she could not at first comprehend what she saw. Rivka, whispering psalms with her back to the oven. Rivka with a knife, its tip to her bosom—the metal piercing the fabric between her breasts. The look on Rivka’s face had narrowed, as though she were peering down a tunnel to glimpse some invisible horizon. Her lips moved in recitation and her cheeks were flushed pink as with shame. She wore a strange expression of submission, like a child asking forgiveness. Ester cried out and threw herself forward—but the lunge she made for the knife was feeble, and Rivka knocked her back easily with one arm. Ester fell hard to the floor, where she struggled to catch her breath.
Rivka, looming above her, continued a broken recitation: “Shfoch levavi—al mnat kedoshecha.” Now she closed her eyes, her lips moving ceaselessly—and even as Ester cried out for her to stop, Ester recalled helplessly how often she’d heard Rivka speak of holy martyrdom and the kindness of a death that did not compromise the soul. And it seemed to Ester that Rivka had been rehearsing for her own death since she’d first been cursed with survival.
But the stream of Rivka’s prayer seemed to have snagged on some detail. She squeezed her closed eyes, struggling to resume her concentration. She shook her head—once, twice—like a merchant ready to sign an agreement, but for one minor point. And for all she wished to, she could not let this point rest.
The tip of the knife quivered at Rivka’s bosom. It writhed, burrowed, and then was still. Ester saw a small spot of blood flower on the front of Rivka’s dress. But the knife pierced no farther.
Rivka opened her eyes. Gently she laid the knife down atop the stove, caressing its handle once, as though the instrument of her failure must not be blamed for her cowardice. She turned, and set her hands on the stout table where she’d labored to produce bread to keep them alive all these weeks.
Slowly, as Ester raised herself from the floor, Rivka bent forward in grief, giving the weight of her body to the floured wooden surface. Her flurrying prayer had ceased. Rivka would throw herself on the mercy of the world, Ester saw, and would wait for it to do the violence she herself had failed to do.
And how strange, when Ester’s hands were hot and shaking, and her own pulse—danger danger—was thick in her ears . . . how strange that the words that floated into her mind should be words of reason. In silence she mouthed them: life being the ultimate morality, so it must savage all.
It took long minutes to coax Rivka into motion. When Rivka turned at last, she seemed uncertain, weak as though she herself had just risen from a sickbed. But at length Ester ushered her, with a hand on Rivka’s back, up to the room where Rivka had nursed Ester through her fever.
There, Ester took Rivka’s rough hand and squeezed—Rivka, her gaze downcast, let out a murmur—and Ester left her standing beside the bed.
Ester opened a window. The din outside had grown. A man now threw himself bodily against the door below, to cheers. There were several more men now, sour-faced and ill-favored—and more women too, and a few children on the edges of the crowd, one girl with a collection of small stones in her bunched apron.
A sharper shout—she’d been spied. A bit of refuse pelted the wall to her left.
She cried down to them—she had to call the words three times to be heard. “We give it to your church!”
There was a single shout, then a confused murmur.
A rock hit the brickwork above the window.
“We give all this house to your church.” Ester drew another breath and trained her attention on the woman with the swollen eye. “We deed it, every bit of silver and furnishing and the very bricks and timbers, to your vicar. Let him come and accept our tribute.”
The woman was about Ester’s age and, Ester saw, must once have been pretty. Her brown hair, though dull, framed a heart-shaped face whose soft outline was still discernible despite the distorting eye. As Ester spoke, the woman fell silent. She turned to some nearby women who were whispering, and waved them quiet. As Ester repeated her message, one of those women turned to two men jostling beside her and laid a hand on one’s shoulder. “The vicar!” she reprimanded him.
The men hesitated.