Slowly he reread Ester’s lines. A beauty to tempt away a man’s better angel, corrupting his saint to be a very devil. Then, the final lines of the letter from the Dotar. Her power to tempt the better angel of the most righteous among us, and corrupt his soul to be a devil. Even in the Portuguese, the reference was plain: a phrasing coined by William Shakespeare, presumably to describe the woman he loved against his better judgment. Sonnet 144.
Of course he could dismiss it as a coincidence—Ester’s memory of her mother’s story so closely echoing the Dotar’s account of the same woman’s screed. So what if both used the same peculiar, signature wording? So what if Constantina Velasquez had repeatedly insisted on expressing her fury through these specific phrases? Perhaps she was an avid reader of English verse. Perhaps she was delusional and had fabricated her mother’s story. Perhaps Aaron was somehow misunderstanding the Portuguese.
And yes, so what that Constantina Velasquez, based on the records Aaron had long ago gathered for Helen, would have been ten years old in 1616?
He could publish a rich dissertation—ten rich dissertations—using the rest of the letters in this folio, without chasing after coincidences. He could bury this last coda to Ester’s tale . . . let it, as Ester said, be ash.
But the thumping of his heart said he wouldn’t. Once he’d feared his own clumsy weight could damage the fragile documents arrayed beneath the stair. Now he was their steward, protector of the life they contained.
And as such, he would before all else give Ester Velasquez her due. Ester’s life and her letters required no embellishment, nor extra revelation of connections to another of history’s marquee names, to make them important. It would take months, if not years, to track down any surviving letters she’d sent to her correspondents . . . and simply corroborating Ester’s story in itself—verifying the origins of the letter from Spinoza, countering inevitable accusations of fraud—would be a great labor.
Only after Ester had had her day and he’d published her annotated correspondence would Aaron explore this final possibility. He’d need to be careful; Brian Wilton’s haste to publish a false report of a Florentine crisis—a misstep for which Wilton would surely pay a price for years to come—was a cautionary tale. And amid the eternal flurry of cherished certainties and crackpot theories surrounding Shakespeare studies, would anyone be willing to entertain the notion that Ester’s grandmother, a Portuguese Jewess, might have been Shakespeare’s conjectural Dark Lady—his woman color’d ill with eyes raven black?
Aaron himself didn’t know whether to entertain it.
But Helen had thought it possible. And one thing the past months had taught Aaron was that he understood less about secrets, or love, or regret, than he once thought he did.
He imagined an atlas of seventeenth-century history, its pages inked with a tangle of dangers—and all Ester’s labors forming only the faintest watermark. But the mark was visible to those who knew to look. And whether or not any kinship through blood existed with Shakespeare—or for that matter with any other thinker of the time—one existed in spirit: Ester Velasquez was a link in the ongoing conversation that wove through Shakespeare’s revolutionary humanism and on through Spinoza’s wrenching, liberating depersonalization—and on beyond them, to all that roiled and consoled spirits even now. All that roiled and consoled Aaron Levy, as he sat, this very minute, at his kitchen table.
His mind was a lit corridor, each step before him clear.
In the morning he’d bring the documents to Darcy—Darcy, who could be counted on to graciously overlook Aaron’s temporary breakdown. It was true that Wilton might be an ideal scholarly partner in this area, and perhaps Aaron would work with Wilton in the near future. But Darcy was the one who would help Aaron ensure that Helen’s name would appear as first author on an initial paper that laid out Ester’s story for the world to evaluate. Aaron would write that paper before anything else—Helen’s paper, his name trailing hers on the byline.
And when he’d finished all his work on the documents, assuming patrimony laws hadn’t taken them out of his hands before then, he’d sell them to the university. He wouldn’t profiteer, but neither would he be a fool about the price. He wanted Marisa and the baby to be comfortable . . . and the salary of a historian, whether he spent his career in England or in Israel, wasn’t lordly.
Marisa.
He didn’t have her phone number. How could he not have the phone number of the woman he’d be connected to for life, whether she wanted him or not? He’d worry about airline tickets later. For now he stood, turned his back on the documents arrayed on his small kitchen table, clicked on his desk lamp, and opened his laptop, his fingers moving quickly on the keys.
Dear Marisa,
There’s no point trying to find a good place to begin. What I have to say is complicated but really very simple, and it’s true whether or not you decide you want me.
32
Pulling himself from the water, his white shirt clinging so she could see every rib, he squinted up the path.
“Promise!” she said. But the sunshine had turned delicious on her face.
A high, clear birdcall sounded from a nearby tree.
Alvaro wrung his blouse at his narrow waist and watched her. “Richard says it’s a linnet that makes that call.”
The river flowed thickly before her, and she shielded her eyes to watch it. Upriver, a few men fished off boats, their voices coming thin across the water. Nearer to Ester, three boys were towing a small raft against the current, laboring on the path on the river’s far side. In a brightly painted skiff, traveling more swiftly and in the opposite direction, a portly boatman rowed a bored-looking couple toward the city. The young man stared unseeing at the riverbank, but the young woman, fair-haired and expensively dressed with a trail of small black patches just visible on her throat and bosom, leaned in the direction of the city as though this might encourage the boat to travel faster—past this relentless greenery to London’s enclosing walls, its parlors that cradled and amplified laughter, its rebuilt theaters and newly widened streets.
The more Ester looked, the less tame the river appeared: the calling birds unperturbed by the receding skiff; the high, ragged grasses along the banks, bristling with hidden life. The wildness of things came back to her.
Turning to Alvaro, she let him see she was afraid.
On the grassy hill above them, Rivka was laying blinding white linen to dry on the grass. They squinted up at her, and for a moment she paused to look down at them, shaking her head absently as though at two children. Then they made their way under a tangle of tree branches to the small inlet where, Alvaro said, she’d be shaded and safe from the current.
In the shelter of the tree, her back to him, she disrobed to her shift. When she turned, her arms crossed on her chest, shivering and regretful already, he was in the water, swimming a brisk loop across the current and calling back instructions. Yet, strange though it was, just then she did not comprehend his words, but only the confident voice in which he spoke them. Her husband: a propertied man, keeper of the ninety-nine-year lease inherited from his father that would outlast their lifetimes. Standing on the shore, she stared. Something was lodged in her throat, aching to come loose.
She stepped in, ginger, the muddy rocks shifting under her tender feet. One step; a second; she stood and dipped her hand into the edge of the current. Thick, cold water streamed between her fingers, gently at first—then more strongly as she stepped deeper, the water now forcing her palm open and her fingers wide as the current found its way between them.
How bitterly she’d been brought to understand—through fire and fever, through deaths and her own failure to die—that life fought for its own continuance.
But she realized now that she’d never thought to ask why.
This, she saw, was the reason. Water forcing her palm open, the current kissing her fingers. This. This shock of pleasure.
33
April 7, 2001