He waited for her parting shot. But her expression had turned contemplative.
They walked out of the antechamber. The landing was filigreed, the sunset stretching from the windows in diamonds and rhombuses. Gold on the shoes of the elderly couple lingering over the artwork—gold on the backs of their shoulders, on their hair, gentling the blatant braying art.
Surely the gallery had lights meant for this hour of the day, but Bridgette didn’t move to turn them on. She stood beside Aaron on the landing while the art turned pale in the dusk, and together they watched Helen return: one hand clutching her cane, and in the other a trembling white envelope, her figure completing its slow ascent beneath the patient gaze of the cherubs.
The door of Prospero’s swung open to admit them, its smells of ale and pie crust and oiled wood filling Aaron’s nose, and at just that moment the rain started: a swift hail of droplets like a hand at their backs, ushering them inside. The pub was snug and dry, their table warmly lit and bare as though prepared just for their purposes—and as Helen painstakingly wiped dust motes from the table, then removed each document from the folio and set it down with care, Aaron felt as though he were in some dream more real than reality, in which sounds were strangely magnified and every object backlit. The chairs creaked but held, and the amber pint cradled by the single customer at the bar was a chalice meant for some rite of solemn beauty, and the fact of Helen’s quaking hands laying out documents before him one after another had been ordained before he was born—just as this impossibly perfect place had been waiting here for them all along, hidden across the road from the Eastons’ gallery. The wizened bartender rubbing glasses peaceably with a white towel—the bartender with his impartial, half-shuttered eyes—was ancient Tiresias, who had foresuffered all; the bartender was Prospero himself—he’d broken his staff and relinquished his powers in order to make his peace with the ravishing world. And if only Aaron could understand how a man could live at peace with such a choice, or what it might wreak on him, then he too would have earned his place in this blessed circle that had sprung up so swiftly and magically around them.
Having arranged the first dozen letters on the thick wooden table beneath the mellow lamplight, Helen leaned back—and in an instant Aaron could see what she’d understood from the start. This folio held Ester’s jewels. The other documents, the ones Alvaro HaLevy had hidden under the stair rather than burn, were the detritus—the long, arduous account of the road to these final ink-and-paper treasures. He and Helen had mistaken the earlier find for the real prize. But all along Ester had held back the best.
He read standing beside Helen’s chair, beginning with the document farthest from them, making his way down each row. Ester’s hand he read fluently; letters penned by unfamiliar hands required more care, yet each gave up its secrets. He read, in succession, letters from Thomas Farrow to a half dozen correspondents, each followed by the reply it had received and then Farrow’s response—sometimes accepting his correspondent’s arguments with brisk praise, sometimes rebutting, refining, challenging.
Yet how do you propose to reconcile such opposing views? Of this your reader remains in ignorance. Sometimes Farrow’s correspondent wrote back with his own rebuttal or clarification, and then more letters would be exchanged before the discussion was closed. Van den Enden. Adriaan Koerbagh. Thomas Browne. Aaron knew some of the names and others were unfamiliar, but in each case the precision and ferocity of Thomas Farrow’s replies—sometimes through three or four exchanges—was breathtaking. He understood why Ester’s correspondents were often prickly in their defense of their arguments—she gave no quarter to sloppy thinking, and mercilessly cut away false logic. But there were those whose replies indicated they’d recognized Farrow as a rare kind of friend. From Van den Enden:
Your reasoning, which you build cunningly upon my own definition of piety, forces that definition to rebuke me, firming my resolve on a course I’d only half completed, this being the fullest incorporation of women in the citizenry of the ideal polity. Perhaps you know I’ve educated my daughters, though this be not greatly in fashion. Your proposal that I consider in theory the notion of a woman as a leader in a democratic body is a natural development of my own thoughts regarding universal education . . . one that would have presented itself in time but revealed itself more swiftly through your questioning, for which I offer my gratitude.
And, from one Jonathan Pierce,
It pains me to understand from your last letter that your circumstances do not permit travel. May I suggest, honored friend, that it is to the benefit of a scholar to shake off other cares now and then to seek the company of like minds, and the solace this provides is also of benefit to the constitution. Should your health improve sufficiently to permit you to escape your seclusion, I promise the fellowship of like minds will heal you further. Friendship is a physick all its own, and most especially to those such as we, who through the peculiar paths of our thinking must ever be lonely men. You would be welcomed here in London at the Royal Society, where I should be glad to acquaint you with many whose company fortifies mind and spirit.
And then—at Helen’s direction Aaron carefully stacked these pages and laid out a second set on the table—the correspondence was no longer addressed to Thomas Farrow, but to one Bertram Clarke. And then, as the correspondence progressed through the 1670s and the 1680s, the letter writer was a William Harrington, and then an Owen Richards, and then, from 1688 to 1691, one James Goddard. But always the hand was Ester’s, and the reasoning. The highest principle is life, and this principle must therefore serve as the basis for all morality. Aaron turned from one letter to another. Three exchanges with Pierre Bayle. But can you be sincere in this elevation of faith, Ester had written, even as you declare it incompatible with reason? Or is it your aim to leave a trail you wish other thinkers to follow? A letter to John Wilson that seemed to go unanswered: I maintain that logic demands you reconsider your assault on Philosophia S. Scripturae Interpres, for the reasons I have here described. And, to Aaron’s astonishment, two exchanges with Thomas Hobbes.
If there exist no incorporeal substances, then this must unmake the world as it has been described to us. It is then the obligation of the philosophe to declare the world’s true properties, for which reason I pose the following questions.
The final set of letters Helen laid down was between Thomas Farrow and Benedict Spinoza. Scanning the pages, Aaron saw it had taken two letters from Thomas Farrow to goad Spinoza from hiding, and another three to elicit a first substantive response. The correspondence spanned years, starting and stopping for reasons that surely included the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Dutch wars—yet whatever difficulties each had surmounted to send these pages of Latin between London and Voorburg were not belabored—as though the arduousness of life required no explanation, nor would it be permitted to further impinge on the urgent business of argument. Starting in the sixth letter, Farrow had pressed hard on a point of disagreement:
Yet despite your urging of the love of God you disdain the sensual. You argue that man must attain equanimity and calmness. Yet a true system of thought must not exclude passion but rather account for it as the mathematician accounts for each component of his equation. You argue as though human desire were error or blindness, rather than an essential element within Deus sive Natura: a force always in motion and questing. Without acknowledgment of this, your universe lacks animating fire, therefore admire as I do the beauty of your edifice I do not believe it.