Yet though he turned obediently solemn at her insistence that he see what she was, he neither condemned her nor made any suggestion that she cease her writing. The possibility did not seem to occur to him.
It took her months after their wedding to understand what so captivated her about Alvaro: she felt unafraid of him. It was such an unaccustomed feeling that for a time she wondered whether this lack of fear might be love. She doubted that her heart was capable of new love. Yet in the absence of any demand that she be other than what she was, something small and insistent flowered within her—so that once, in a feverish hunger in the first spring of their marriage, she touched his sleeve, then led him to his rooms. It was their sole experiment with being man and wife: an awkwardness of laces and buttons, a rushed disrobing as though they both feared losing nerve, a wave that washed them onto his bed and left them marooned there . . . at length dissolving into fits of laughter that shook first his frame, then hers, then the bed they lay upon, so that a servant called from outside the door in a voice taut with concern, which quickly turned surly when the master of the house refused to open the door. This was their love: her naked chest shaking with laughter until tears slid down her temples, and then—as she lay beneath his bright window with his arm across her belly—into her ears, so the sounds of her heartbeat, and his, and the quiet household shifting all around them, made a sunwashed, underwater blur. For a moment, lying absurdly with her husband, the light and the tears making diamonds across her vision, it seemed to her these must be the sounds heard by a babe carried by its mother.
It was Alvaro who made arrangements for the printing of Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes’s Seven Arguments Against a False Messiah, and who himself went to London to carry the manuscript to the printer. She’d spent weeks redacting the rabbi’s letters to his pupil in Florence into a single condensed argument. Where she’d thought the rabbi’s arguments weak, she’d subtly strengthened and clarified them, so that when she finally ordered the pages and sent them with Alvaro, it seemed to her that no other denunciation of Sabbatai Zevi and the Sabbateans had so rigorously pointed out the follies of their arguments. The recent news of Sabbatai Zevi’s arrest and conversion to Islam had not yet dissuaded his followers. The rabbi’s words, she was certain, were still needed. It seemed to her that, were he able to overlook the identity of their editor, he might have been pleased.
She’d hesitated over the dedication, but on this matter alone Alvaro had been insistent. “Make it for my father,” he’d said firmly. So she had inked the name onto the front page, followed by the words Alvaro dictated to her: Benjamin HaLevy, a man with a heart heavy and brimming with love for his people. She thought the words a desecration. But Alvaro had taken the manuscript from her hands with a determined nod. “This book is your atonement to someone you had to wound,” he said. His gaze slid to one side of her. “The dedication is mine.”
She wished to tell him there was no comparison between her need to atone and his, nor between the gentleness of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes and the stone-heartedness of Benjamin HaLevy. Hadn’t HaLevy sent his son to be entombed in the sea? Hadn’t all expected rosy-cheeked, faltering Alvaro to die the very week he sailed—impressed to a ship at the hand of his own father?
Unlike Alvaro, Ester had wronged a flawless man—and the wrong she’d done was of the deepest nature. For much though her deceit haunted her, there was a far greater sin she’d committed against the rabbi. She, Ester Velasquez, had taken the rabbi’s teachings and his trust—she’d taken all his labors to show her how to use her own intelligence—and she’d employed these to prove that there could be no God who would prize martyrdom. The meaning of this was inescapable—and she knew the rabbi had understood it all too well. For when she proved that there was no God who could treasure martyrdom, then she proved, too, that Moseh HaCoen Mendes had walked through the world sightless, and his mother had offered up her body to be broken, for naught.
It was this that she could never forgive herself.
But she saw that Alvaro understood none of this—and that he was set on paying tribute to a noble father who had never existed, and that guilt still weighted him. So she allowed him to go to London and hand the pages to the printer with an inscription that was a lie, that it might lessen that weight. And they’d spoken of the matter no further.
She’d learned of Thomas Farrow’s death in a riding accident a half year after it had occurred. Though she’d been writing under his name for months without knowing he was dead, once aware of his death Ester found herself unwilling to sign his name, using it only wincingly to answer those correspondences already set in motion. Her own fastidiousness stymied her—she’d thought herself heartless when seated at her desk, long since numbed to sentiment.
Yet now London was in ruins. The synagogue, located in that sliver of city spared the flames, had survived. So too had the da Costa Mendes home, only recently reappointed by Mary’s father and his heavily pregnant wife—a lady described by Rivka as young, and lovely, and unafraid to weep openly over Mary’s fate while, with her very own hands, she helped Rivka retrieve those books left unmolested by plunderers. But the rest of the city that Ester had known—narrow Milk Street, Gracechurch and Thames Streets, Fishmongers’ Hall, the binderies and the booksellers’ tables outside Saint Paul’s, and the thatch-roofed warren tipping down toward the bridge . . . ash.
Some things deserved entombment. So she’d laid Thomas Farrow to rest—and after sitting at her table a long time, the ink drying on her suspended quill, she had dipped it again, and conceived Bertram Clarke.
These past months, Clarke had written a series of letters to Johannes Koerbagh, and he would author the next missive she was planning, to one Matthew Collins, whose recent essay on theology and social order had troubled her. After Clarke had lived his useful life, there would perhaps be another. A small school of philosophers, all claiming to be temporary guests at this address in Richmond, their views all cohering around the same beliefs . . . their reasoned arguments floating ownerless from her window like the seeds of dandelions, journeying she knew not how far.