“Isaac,” she repeated. She stood opposite him, her hands useless at her sides. In Amsterdam she’d have reached up and tugged his straight hair, not hard enough to hurt but enough to say she knew his tricks, even if he was a man now and half a head taller.
Two of his companions had turned. Both were thicker set and far older than Isaac—men old enough to have families, perhaps to have deserted them. The shorter had a wide pockmarked face and staring blue eyes; the taller had thinning tufts of hair and features thickly veined from weather or drink—his eyes seemed buried in his florid face.
She turned to Isaac, her imp who was no longer impish, his blue eyes and gold-wheat hair . . . still her brother? It was weeks now since he’d shaved off his beard, but his naked jaw still made her uneasy—a reminder that he’d cast off the last remains of home. She feared she was not exempt from that purging.
“The rabbi needs you,” she said quietly.
At the sound of her Portuguese, she felt the workers’ attention thicken around her: another foreigner?
“He’s composed letters, Isaac,” she continued in a near-whisper. “In his mind. He requires your hand to set them down on paper.”
A shifting of the workers’ bodies—their growing awareness of their power over her. She stepped closer to Isaac. But he didn’t notice the men’s attention, or feigned not to. He pursed his mouth and then said something to her, in English, too fast—as though he’d forgotten that, unlike him, she’d had no opportunity to learn the spoken language, confined by household duties as she was. What good, here on these clanging docks, was the English she’d once gleaned from the printed page—the single volume of mysterious and confounding English poetry that she’d studied in secret in her mother’s room in Amsterdam, so long ago?
With a shake of his head, Isaac laughed a hollow laugh. He said, in Portuguese, “I left my scribing hand across the channel.” His eyes, averted, said the rest: and my allegiance to you as well.
She couldn’t hold her voice steady. “Isaac—”
“Tell the rabbi I’m occupied,” he said. “Tell him I’ve let a room and won’t be returning to his household.”
The words left her mouth thickly. “You ask me to spit on the one man who’s aided us.”
There was no change in his expression, yet her words had struck him. An instant’s hesitation. In it, she saw her brother as he’d once been. His straight golden hair, the perfect grace in his compact body, the salt-and-butter smell of him snugged in her arms those long-ago afternoons in Amsterdam when he’d been left in her charge. Mischievous Isaac, unscathed by endless scolding from the house servants, or by teachers whose voices rose with the fury of betrayed admirers. Untouchable by any discipline but their father’s mild remonstrances. In the wake of their father’s quiet disappointment Isaac would turn to Ester, his determined expression suddenly vague, the spark of a request in his blue eyes—if not for approval, then for forgiveness. She had granted it, always. She’d scooped the blond fringe from his eyes. Helped him hide the broken glass of the nursemaid’s mirror until he’d replaced it with another, taken from their mother’s dressing table.
And yes, she’d tied herself to the ballooning sail of his mischief—why pretend she hadn’t? She’d relished the freedom Isaac claimed in boyhood, freedom she herself was denied. Once she’d found him leaning from an upper window of their house, pelting the street with rotted apples he’d picked from the kitchen refuse, and she’d grabbed the linen of his shirt and twisted her fingers in it, round and round, until the shirt was tight around his middle. He’d tried to shrug her off. But instead of pulling him away from the window as they both expected she’d do, she’d knelt behind him and looked down to the street, at the cowed form of a man she recognized in a heartbeat—the synagogue beadle who had called her an unnatural girl, after the maid let out word that Ester had used up the household’s supply of candles for nighttime reading. The beadle had said it after Sabbath prayers, and repeated it gladly and often when he saw the approval the observation garnered. The girl has her mother’s beauty and must be overseen strictly—for with the mother’s blood so visible in her, the girl’s obedient ways might yet crack to reveal the same unruliness of spirit.
Without a word to Ester, as though understanding her heart and knowing she wouldn’t stop him, Isaac had taken aim again. She’d dug her fingers deeper into her brother’s shirt and felt his warm small body, all strength and purpose, and she’d leaned on him, her fingers tight in his shirt, and they’d breathed together as he reached back and heaved, and the brown apple smashed against the man’s temple and banished him, retching threats, down the road toward the synagogue.
The neighbors had been scandalized, of course. But as their mother looked at Isaac that evening, something in her expression flexed and was satisfied. It had been their father who’d taken Isaac to the synagogue to apologize to the man. From the window Ester had watched them go, and on their return had stolen to Isaac’s bed and left there on his pillow the small, clumsy figure she’d sewn—a dog of sorts, stuffed with bits of cloth she’d taken from the housekeeper’s sewing basket. A plaything to soothe his spirit.
He stood before her now, a grown man. It was true that his face had hardened long before coming to London. Yet here, in these few weeks since their arrival, something further had settled in it—something new and stringent—as though he’d undertaken the final stretch of a journey he’d set upon after their parents’ deaths. Without the short blond crop of his beard, his jaw was naked, tense. There had never before been a single thing unnatural in Isaac, nor a single thing unfree—yet now his face, which had ever been whole, seemed composed of parts. There were, she now noticed, lines on either side of his mouth, and when he spoke he seemed to her like a wooden puppet with hinged jaw.
“Scribing is for a different sort of youth,” he said. “For you, if you’d been born a boy. Never for me. Even before.”
Before the fire. Isaac had barely spoken of it these two years.
But his voice, which had been so eerily aloof, was now rising, snapping. “So the rabbi would have me pen interpretations of verses? Beautiful tributes to martyrs perishing in the Inquisition?” At the core of the spiraling words, a crying loneliness. “The rabbi wants my hand to set his holy thoughts to paper? Tell him I’m devoting myself instead to living up to my reputation as a murderer. Tell him what he knows: in my hand, his words would turn traitor. Tell him, won’t you”—he gestured to his face—“that the beard is gone. That I no longer even look a Jew.”
The workers had stood these minutes in silence, watching theater in a language they didn’t comprehend. Now one let out a chuckle: a lover’s quarrel, was it?
Isaac’s words flew at her. “I’ll wager you haven’t told him about my beard. I’ll wager you let him think I’m still what he wishes.” He tilted his head. “Tell him, if you like, that I’m lost and you couldn’t find me. Perhaps he’ll mourn me for dead.” Isaac smiled grimly.
“Isaac, please—”
The shorter of the men was laughing, saying something in English. He stepped forward. A leer, a gesture toward Ester: Is she yours?
Slowly, Isaac shook his head.
Like a shawl unwinding from her shoulders, she felt her brother fall away from her.