It was nearly dark when they stepped out at the small splintered dock. As Rivka surveyed the dim meadows about them, Ester paid the rest of her money into the boatman’s good hand and watched him pocket it and push off from shore without a word. For a moment he seemed to hesitate midcurrent: the free night air filling his nostrils, or the city and his livelihood? He dipped an oar and turned his boat for London.
Above them, on a ridge of land a short distance from the river, the great house. There could be no mistaking it, even in this light. It rose formidable, walled and ornamented. A brick front, Manuel HaLevy had written, to make the Jew-haters forget they hate us and come polish our boots instead.
They walked blindly through the meadow for a few moments before their feet found a winding path. It climbed gently through a stone gateway before branching, one part proceeding to the house, the other disappearing between two arches of pleached branches to gardens beyond. The grand house itself was a pale orange, with light stone carvings, three stories high; in the dark Ester made out deep eaves and soaring windows, a few of which glowed with the light of some lamp or hearth within. A house of unguessable depths and dimensions, whose proper upkeep would require a fleet of servants. Manuel HaLevy had been right: his father had issued a challenge made of brick and mortar, so solid none could deny its claim to a piece of England’s map.
In the growing darkness, Rivka’s monumental figure—once more padded with the few books she’d salvaged—faltered.
Stepping into the boat in London, Ester had told Rivka only that they were going to Manuel HaLevy’s estate. Rivka hadn’t questioned the plan, nor had she asked who at the estate might receive them or what Ester might do, should they be refused. Now, though, as Rivka registered the scale of the great house, she stopped walking.
“Rivka,” Ester urged.
In the dim light, defeat showed plainly on Rivka’s face. She gestured at herself: too ugly, too poor, too tarnished.
Yet a moment later she resumed walking with the air of someone too depleted for skepticism—her defeat displaced, unaccountably, by trust.
They climbed the remainder of the hill.
She’d thought no further, in truth, than the grassy bank: stepping out of the boat, standing on a bed of green so soft it made her throat ache. But now a plan formed in Ester’s mind, and she steeled herself to follow it whether or not it had hope of success.
It took both her bony hands to lift the knocker from the carved oak door. It bounced heavily on its metal plate: a dry, solemn sound.
A shadow at a nearby window hesitated, then vanished. There was a long silence.
At length, a servant carrying a candle opened the door. His silhouette was framed by the firelit hall behind him. His grayed head and sloped shoulders reminded Ester of a stuffed hawk she’d once seen in a shop: frayed and molting, its scowl undiminished.
The man raised his candle toward Rivka, then Ester, not bothering to disguise his scrutiny. “From the city?” he said.
Too late Ester realized she must wear the catastrophe on her very skin. She resisted the urge to raise a hand to her face to touch the scars left by her illness.
“Papers of good health?” he said.
“We’ve none,” said Ester.
He stiffened and stepped back from the door, closing it further before speaking again through an opening no wider than his narrow face. “You’re not welcome.”
She was about to insist that she knew his master, when from within the dim house came an indistinct call. Without another word the servant closed the door.
A low rumble of voices. Then the door swung open, wider this time, and peering at them alongside the servant was Benjamin HaLevy himself.
She’d long since grown accustomed to faces carved by grief. Still, the change in HaLevy was startling. Gone was the haughty merchant who’d stood in finery outside the synagogue, speaking with Mary’s father of tides and profits. Benjamin HaLevy wore the dark colors and torn collar of mourning, and though he stood in silence as he regarded them, his breaths were dreadful to behold: each a silent indictment. He had the look of a man in a labyrinth who has just tried the only remaining exit and found it blocked; she saw that the very walls of his house, indeed his very breathing body, were prison.
A flinch of recognition. “You’re the one he wanted. Aren’t you? From the house of the rabbi.”
She saw he could not speak Manuel’s name. “Yes,” she said.
“Where is your rabbi?”
“Dead, though not of plague.”
He received this information without remark. His gaze on her face was pitiless. “Yet you’re scarred.”
She allowed his gaze without turning away—knowing as she did so that she gambled. He might recoil from the marks of her suffering, or see them as cousin to his own.
After a moment he turned from her to Rivka. Then, as though unable to resist staring at her scars, back again to Ester. “So,” he said at length. “You come here bringing the city’s pestilential air, to finish off what remains of the HaLevy name? You can’t wait for it to die of its own decay?” For a moment his voice rose as if with anger. But almost at the same instant something in him gave way; he no longer had enough faith in anger’s utility to pursue its course. He’d been defeated—not by her, but by his own impatience for this hour, this day, to be extinguished. Abruptly he motioned to his servant, murmuring, “Tonight they stay.”
She’d always thought Benjamin HaLevy and Manuel alike in appearance—their stocky bodies and square-set faces, their green-brown eyes coolly evaluating the world. And now it seemed to her that in the father’s grief-stilled countenance she saw both faces, Benjamin’s and Manuel’s—twinned in their comprehension of death, as they once had been in their determination to take firm hold of life.
“In the morning you go,” said HaLevy. Turning from them, he added, “Don’t eat from my plates.” To his servant he said, “Burn the sheets they sleep on.”
The servant cast his eyes once more over Ester and Rivka—then glared at his master’s back.
HaLevy disappeared from the doorway. Ester heard his tread ascending a stair.
The servant stood with his arms folded. Rivka made a small, deliberate sound in her throat. Ester saw the two lock eyes. It would have been hard to say which looked at the other with greater haughtiness. Then, stepping aside to allow them entry, the servant called a maid to prepare their meal. He led them swiftly to the back of the house, bypassing a grand wooden staircase and rooms whose doorways offered glimpses of opulent furnishings. They followed, hurrying to match his pace, through a jib door and up one flight of a dim, twisting stair, into a maze of narrow passages—the hidden arteries through which the house’s servants circulated.
The servant showed them to a windowless room with one narrow bed, upon which lay a pile of neatly folded bedding. He indicated a candle and striker, waited for Rivka to kindle a flame, then left, shutting the door behind him.
The water basin was empty and layered with dust, the bed sheets clean but patched, the bedding thin. A metal chamber pot adorned a corner. There was no hearth.
They sat side by side, listening to the house around them—its silence punctuated only by occasional footsteps that drew tantalizingly near before fading in distant passages. Some time later—a quarter hour? an hour?—Rivka opened the door to find food, left there unannounced: a basket of cold meats and dry bread, a small pail of water. There were no utensils or plates. They ate hungrily with their hands, then drank from the water and splashed their faces with what remained, and went to bed shoulder-to-shoulder on the hard cold bed, still dressed in the only clothing they had. Ester shivered, grateful for Rivka’s warmth beside her and her cloak thrown over both of them.
She waited until Rivka was asleep and the house’s quiet had reached a deeper register. Then she stood, found the candle and striker, and lit the wick.