Beside him, Helen nodded silently.
The letters he’d just read were an act of intimacy, and Aaron—in his cowardice, in his inability to make even the simplest answer to Marisa’s e-mail—knew himself unworthy to have witnessed it. Yet it wasn’t Ester, or even Spinoza, who now raised tears of gratitude in his eyes. It was Helen Watt. Her quaking hands, resting lightly on the tabletop, were the tenderest of sculptures, things of almost unendurable beauty. And he knew that he would never be able to tell her that he loved her as a foundering ship loves a lighthouse, even though the lighthouse is powerless to save it.
She opened her eyes and they looked at each other, and she offered him a weary smile. Then she turned back to the papers on the table.
It was as she leaned forward to reread that he saw there were a few pages still in the folio she held against her chest.
“What’s that?” he said.
For just an instant, her eyes seemed to telegraph some sort of apology. She uttered an unintelligible syllable. She cleared her throat, then repeated the word. “Ash,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She spoke crisply now. “Iron gall ink.” She drew herself back from the table, the folio to her breastbone. “Severe damage. These will need to go to the conservation lab before they’re handled.”
“Okay.” He squinted at her, the bar’s warm light suddenly inadequate for the task of interpreting the strange guardedness on her face. She hadn’t been herself all day, he reminded himself. She was unwell. “Do you want me to take them to the Patricias for you? Maybe they’d agree to—you know—fix the pages up a bit, even if the university hasn’t purchased them?”
She didn’t speak.
“You look—” He hesitated. He said, “You look spent.”
She smiled then, a small and rueful smile. “I’ll see to it,” she said. “Why don’t you go home and get some rest.”
He suspected it wasn’t only pride that made Helen refuse his help. He’d never been able to fool Helen Watt, and no amount of bravado could now hide how utterly he’d lost himself. Surely Helen could see it—surely she could see he was too weak to shepherd even these papers back to wholeness. And suddenly, as though her words had the power of a spell, he felt how very tired he was. How heavily the air weighed on his shoulders. His head.
He didn’t thank Helen, he didn’t say I’m grateful to you or You were right all along. He gathered the documents one by one, and passed them to her, and with the bartender ushering them courteously to the door he accompanied Helen to the lamp-lit street and into the night, where they parted.
28
August 12, 1667
22 Av, 5427
Richmond, Surrey
A sound beyond the window. A sharp, thin knocking.
And again.
She looked up, noting as she did that the candle’s light was unnecessary, for while she was reading the morning sun had strengthened, and now daylight flooded the panes and blanched half her writing table. Though such wastefulness would once have been unthinkable, she allowed herself a moment to enjoy the candle’s wavering flame, pallid in the white sunlight—the waxy heat kissing the skin on the inside of her wrist as she reached past it and rested her palm on the cool lever of the window.
The knocking stopped, then resumed: a bird of some kind, one of the many river birds whose calls she woke to, mornings in her sun-struck chamber with her head on soft white linen. She’d lived in this house, in these rooms with their windows overlooking the slow bend of the Thames, almost two years, without knowing the names of those birds. Perhaps, she thought with a laugh, she would ask her husband. Yes. He’d know.
Yesterday’s rain had passed, the mist had lifted off the hills, and something in their green had intensified in earnest. Even now, she thought, Richmond’s seasons had the power to bewilder her. London had been no preparation for the English countryside—in that matter, John had been correct.
She raised the lever and pushed. The window swung open onto a day so vivid it scuttled thought. The sky was a vibrating blue she’d only recently have believed impossible. The brightness was almost more than her eyes could bear.
What a fool she was, to cry at a sky.
And how different from the sky beneath which she’d married—and how fitting, that they’d wed under an obscuring haze. But Benjamin HaLevy hadn’t wished to delay the wedding a single day, despite the magistrate’s insistence that the smoke was an ill portent to wed beneath. HaLevy had waited long enough, he said—for it had taken months for his letter to reach the ship in its port in the New World, and months to receive the captain’s answer, and after that certain sums had to be paid in order to procure an impressed ship-hand’s release. Indeed, each delay in the plan had seemed to raise in the old man a silent vexation, so Ester feared he might change his mind. But when at last the ocean had returned what he’d long ago tossed to it, Benjamin HaLevy insisted that the wedding proceed the very next afternoon. And so the preparations were made despite the dreadful smoke, and despite the grim faces of the London boatmen and their fleeing passengers—people who’d only recently reconciled with their city as the coals of its plague burned low, only to see the fates smite it with a conflagration such as none had ever seen. London was in cinders. The dome of St. Paul’s had melted, people said; the lead ran streaming in the streets.
Yet in Richmond, the old man had presided over wedding preparations with a fury that cowed the household. The seamstress had pressed on with final adjustments on the silk wedding dress Benjamin HaLevy insisted upon, and throughout the morning the old man had checked on the progress of the work with an air of furious tension, as though each piercing of the woman’s needle into the layers of fabric must now, after a long and unjust delay, piece together all that had been rent.