February 17, 1658
13 Shvat, 5418
Amsterdam
To the learned R. HaCoen Mendes,
News of your praiseworthy labors reaches us here in Amsterdam, as David Rodrigues brings report of your work to welcome the children of our English brothers under the tent of the Torah and to further the work begun by Menasseh ben Israel of blessed memory, as it is written, It is not incumbent upon you to complete the labor, nor are you free to desist from it. In these days when our hearts recoil from further ill news of our people’s suffering in Portugal, it is our prayer that your labors will succeed and find favor with G-d. He will bring peace and redemption within our days, and we are assured that it will be so.
We will send the books that you require by the end of the month, and are pleased that you aspire to find among the Jews of London candidates for the study of such texts.
There is one matter that remains of concern to us. Rodrigues noted with sorrow your tidings of the Velasquez boy, who surely walked in the shadow of the great curse with which G-d afflicted his family in the form of the fire that consumed the parents’ lives, the understanding of which is G-d’s alone, as it is written, The ways of G-d are a pure light wrapped in darkness. Rodrigues was disturbed, however, by the presence of the young man’s sister in your house of Torah.
We understand well that learned scribes are few among the London community. It is a wilderness of ignorance that you tame, pupil by pupil, and it may be that no Jewish family of London has a son learned in the necessary languages. Yet the Velasquez girl is at an age when she must seek marriage, and it is therefore only a reasonable kindness to her that she not be burdened with duties and thoughts beyond her realm. Although there be differences among our kahal on the principle of female learning, and we recognize that the girl’s own father was known to favor such indulgence while he lived, still even he would surely disapprove a long continuance of such labor for a daughter. I myself trust in the words of Rabbi Eliezer of the Talmud, For the word of the Torah should be burnt rather than taught to women. I remind you that the girl has no dowry, and I am told that even the Dotar is not eager to provide her one, due to the ill reputation of her late mother. We advise you to consider that continuance of her labors as your scribe will deny her any remaining prospect of marriage.
With understanding that it is ever difficult to find a learned scribe who is obedient to your needs, we will take care to select an appropriate student and will send him to your care at the first opportunity, should you but send word that you are unable to find a suitable young man in London.
Although I made only brief acquaintance with the Velasquez family before the parents were gathered to G-d, yet I write with great respect and tenderness for the fate of all the sons and also the daughters of our suffering people.
In perfect faith in the coming Redemption,
Yacob de Souza
The certainty hit with a thump of adrenaline. With effort Helen resisted it. She closed her eyes, then opened them and reread. She checked her translations. The Portuguese was archaic but clear. Sliding her notebook close, she studied the dates of the documents they’d so far discovered that had been signed by the same scribe—one, a brief note requesting two volumes from an Amsterdam bookseller, directly predating the letter Helen had just read.
She sat back in her chair. And was startled by an unfamiliar sensation in her chest: the flurry of her own heart, like something long silent abruptly waking to argue its innocence.
“Mr. Levy,” she said.
He didn’t seem to hear.
“Aleph was a woman,” she said, testing the words.
He raised his eyes from his computer screen as though dragging himself from a great depth, and regarded her without focus. He looked, for the first time, vulnerable.
8
November 12, 1657
6 Kislev, 5418
London
A shuddering boom.
Rolling echoes up and down the quay.
Damp wood, damp thatch, damped footsteps staggering on rotting boards—the men with ropes taut on their shoulders straining the crate away now from the stone wall it had collided with. Swinging dangerous from a high pulley, the crate sank—the men cursing it lower and lower onto a waiting barge, which took the weight and pressed deeper into the choppy water.
A scattering of seagulls against a white glower of sky.
She shielded her eyes.
The skirts she wore were miserably thin, though they’d not seemed so in Amsterdam. But the damp here in London carried a blunt cold she couldn’t outpace. Her shoes, too, now proved paltry, though they’d been adequate to Amsterdam’s smoother streets. She’d slipped on waste-slicked cobbles all the way down the narrow alleys to the river, and the soles of her feet ached past endurance. All about her, a tumult of English faces: sharp, incomprehensible features, shaped by words equally sharp and foreign. Were she to speak the softer language pent inside her, her utterances would go unrecognized—sound shorn of meaning.
How quickly, with the first touch of her foot on English shores, she’d become a thing without words. The ugliness of her life pooled inside her. Long ago she might have let it turn to tears.
The rabbi had sent her for her brother. Three days now since Isaac had last set foot in their household—three days that the rabbi had no scribe to set down his thoughts.
She hadn’t yet glimpsed her brother among the dockworkers, but knew to look twice. Isaac was ever thus. In Amsterdam, when their father had taken him about the port to educate him in the ways of the city’s trade, he’d been a quick student as well. Then only a boy of ten, he’d slipped easily into the tableau of sailors, much to the discomfort of the well-shod merchants and investors surveying the scene. In their father’s bemused telling, the boy had all but leapt in to help the laborers break open crates, tugging to the best of his small ability on chests of cargo, until the laborers could no longer dislike the boy for his kinship with the watchful Jewish merchants in their black cloaks and broad feathered hats.
Ignoring the stares of the laborers preparing to heave a second crate, she moved cautiously along the riverside. She slid carefully around an old, bleary-looking man tarring the hull of a small boat—but his fingers grasped at her hem as she passed. She yanked the fabric away, and he winked into her face and raised thick palms as though to say Age permits me. She turned away, flushed, and here he was: her brother, standing among the English dockworkers as though he’d been born to this place.
She’d known she’d find him here—she’d told the rabbi so. Why then did it sting to see him so at his ease amid strangers?
“Isaac,” she said.
He raised his eyebrows in that new way he had, neither acknowledging nor denying her.
Her throat seized. She’d never possessed Isaac’s ease with people. She’d been, always, a peculiarity: Isaac’s peaked, quiet elder sister with her constant apologies, her inability to make her voice heard in a crowd, her strange devotion to the bookish labors most girls were glad to be spared. Until now, though, her brother’s talent to befriend had been hers to share. All his life Isaac had gathered goodwill easily, and shared its harvest with his sister—friends, jokes, treats from vendors in the market. But here in England, though they slept under the same roof his ways were unknown to her.