The vicar regarded them. The scent emanating from him—incense and damp stone—pinioned Ester. How many had stood as she and Rivka did now, waiting to die for what they were, blood singing in their temples?
For a moment, as the vicar held them in his frail, vengeful shelter, the throng stood riveted. Then, as his silence lengthened, the crowd faltered—and in the next heartbeat, in some swift and mute decision, it broke, tempted beyond endurance by the open house and the shouts of those who had already ventured in.
Distracted by the dispersal of his congregation, the vicar cried, “He who takes for himself robs the church!” But it was plain that the house the vicar claimed would be a plundered one. By opening the door to the da Costa Mendes house, Ester had flayed open a body; now scavengers rushed to pick the meat from the bones.
She watched it happen. Beside her, equally fixed by the sight, stood Rivka and the vicar. Strangers emerged with arms full of valuables—Mary’s father’s silver plate and vases. A silk skirt of Catherine’s. Mary’s necklaces draped over the ten outspread fingers of the pug-faced man. A woman was busying herself nearby with a box of intricate velvet patches, running her thumb across the bristles of a brush Mary had used to glue them to her skin. Something—grief—seized at Ester’s throat, but there was no time for it, and the vicar was shouting. What did he want? She couldn’t make out his words at first, but saw that he, like she, was gauging the mood of the crowd. The house would yet be a fine shell, even if looted: a treasure for a church and its vicar to use in the world after the plague, if such a world even existed—and if the force of the law didn’t suffice to wrench it back to any surviving remnant of the da Costa Mendes family.
“These souls cannot wait,” the vicar cried abruptly, his voice at once bitter and glad, as though he’d expected no better and it satisfied him to know he’d been correct. “They must purge themselves now before the Lord!” He turned away from Ester and Rivka and began to walk. As Ester turned to follow, she spied Bescós framed for a moment in an upstairs window of the house. His arms, she could see, were laden with silver—yet his face bore a sickened expression as though they were empty.
The vicar’s calls had drawn half a score away from the spectacle of the house, and this diminished escort moved Ester and Rivka along in his wake. As they reached the end of the street, Ester wrenched a last look at the house that had been their prison and shelter. Its fa?ade stood violated, filth-splashed, the mullioned windows missing panes. As she watched, one of Rivka’s reverently whitened bed sheets sailed down from an upper window, forming a perfect bell of air as it fell—then, with astonishing gentleness, collapsed on the street.
A boy had joined them, bearing a censer that gave off scented smoke. He swung it hard, the chain jerking at the crest of every swing, and positioned himself at the head of the procession—Ester couldn’t guess whether this was some part of a ritual or whether he simply meant to drive off the plague, but the drifting smoke laid their path through a city unrecognizable. Door after door with painted crosses. People with faces pinched and ravaged walking singly on the street. A few hungry--looking children joined the procession, but others shrank away, as though they’d long since learned that death was in other people. Hands were upon Ester and Rivka once more—fewer this time, exploring at their leisure, more curious. Hands on Ester’s back, her hair, her ears, fondling her neck. Rivka, her grip dire on Ester’s arm, shuffled amid the press with head bowed and eyes half closed—a dreadful expression on her face. Raising her head to avoid the scratch of fingernails on her cheek, Ester glimpsed, for just an instant, something unexpected: high and sweet above the city, visible between the overarching roofs, was a sky the like of which she’d not seen since coming to England—a thread of thin blue, stretching to infinity. The proprietors of the tanneries and lime kilns that had fouled the city were dead or departed, leaving a clean-washed sky like a new truth stretched above all the city’s suffering, just out of reach.
Then it was gone. They’d come to an archway, and beyond it a courtyard boxed by high walls, each topped by stone-carved skulls. And then the church—how many times, in another London, had she hurried past these buildings? Now, prodded from behind, they entered the dim interior, the vicar barely visible ahead. Vaulted stone encased them; flickering candle-shadows, echoes, a dizzying smell like a hundred years’ incense lingering in the air. Ester leaned into Rivka. Words from childhood sprang to her mind—an incantation she hadn’t known she remembered, taught to Ester by a girl whose own mother had made her memorize it. “There’s something you can say,” she whispered to Rivka. “I learned it when I was a girl. It’s Spanish. It means Everything I’m about to say is null and void. You say, Todo lo que voy a decir es nulo—”
“No,” Rivka whispered. Her eyes were wide, fixed on the spot near the front of the church toward which they were being led. With her free arm she clutched her chest, as though cradling a baby. “God sees. I accept His judgment.”
They were at the front of the sanctuary—pushed up a set of steps by the curious hands that still surrounded them—and as they approached the altar someone spat, and the spittle landed on Rivka’s cheek, but though she flinched she didn’t wipe it off.
“So come they to Christ,” the vicar called in a high, thin voice.
There was a sudden hush, the nave echoing.
“So shall we,” he said. “Our land is desolate, our city in ruins. God has shown these lost ones the way, and our forbearance toward them redeems all of us. For enough have died, and it is now in our hands to save.”
His brittle mercy sank into the silence. In the expression of a white-haired woman standing near Ester, something dormant awoke. She nodded slowly at the vicar, and her eyes welled with a purity like love.
Entranced by the otherworldly peace on the vicar’s face and the growing strength of his voice, Ester failed to comprehend his instructions, even when he repeated them. But hands pushed her from behind so she fell into a kneel, and her head was pushed forward until her chin touched her chest, and the vicar spoke, and his hands, cold but efficient, worked some unfamiliar task. The vicar’s fingers dripping oil, marking a swift cross between her eyebrows. Water splashing the crown of her head, running warm down the bridge of her nose. Then she lifted her face and looked not at the people about the altar, but beyond them to the stone walls and roof. The church bent and swam, glazed with what she realized were her own tears—though how could the vicar’s gestures of conversion undo one such as she, who did not believe there could be a god who cared about such things? Still, she couldn’t deny the feeling she had now, as though she’d been dirtied beyond the possibility of ever being clean. Gazing across the nave, she saw a statue carved in pale stone: a woman—one of the Christian saints—beseeching the heavens with raised arms, her body racked with suffering. And lowering her gaze at last, at the smallest sound of protest beside her, she saw Rivka kneeling: the vicar’s cross oiled on her head, her weathered face lifted in supplication.
Dusk. The river widened and curved before them in a great gray arc. Overhead, a first prickle of stars—faint, sickly. The veiled smudge of the comet.
The boatman was bent to his task, his good hand grasping one oar, his claw-hand strapped with a leather thong to the other oar. Above the frayed nose cone of herbs that he wore against the distemper, his blue eyes rested now and again on Ester and Rivka—asking no questions, wanting no answers beyond the coins Ester had handed him, with the promise of the other half upon arrival.