Even after her parents’ deaths in Amsterdam, when Ester had labored in others’ homes for her keep, she’d still been treated as a daughter of the Portuguese community—set to sewing and other lighter tasks while the heavier labors were accomplished in back rooms by Dutch or Tudesco servants. Only here in London did she at last see the truth: a household was a creature of bottomless hungers. It ravened for wood and coal and white starch, for sailcloth and bread and ale; for breath and sinew, and life itself, which wreathed away invisibly beneath the press of daily labor like the wax of a lit candle. When the kitchen or the eternally waning fires didn’t demand Ester’s attention, she was sent to polish brass and pewter jugs with mare’s-tail, scour pots and floor, turn the beds, haul linens to the attic in buck-baskets. Daily, she beat drapes and furnishings to remove the soot of the cheap sea coal that heated the household; only the rabbi’s fire was made up with wood, as Rivka insisted that soot harmed the rabbi’s frail constitution, and Rivka would not under any circumstance have him breathe the coal-warmed air that drifted through the rest of the house.
Through these labors, Rivka offered Ester little by way of talk, though when tasks proved difficult she was patient with Ester’s clumsiness. Now and again Rivka offered a brief smile, or a squeeze of her thick hand on Ester’s arm to release Ester from some too-taxing chore, which Rivka then bent to herself. But these gestures never blossomed into greater warmth. Ester knew Rivka wished her comfort. But it was plain Rivka felt the distance between them to be unbridgeable, and their fellowship inevitably transient: the daughter of a Sephardic family, even an orphaned one, would marry and have a household of her own. Rivka, her hair thinned and colorless, her body as thick as her accent, seemed never to have entertained such dreams, even in her own long-ago youth. Wringing dry the heaviest feather coverlet for the rabbi, the next for Isaac, and then Ester, and the thinnest for herself, Rivka kept her own counsel—expending few words beyond her occasional incomprehensible Tudesco mutterings, which seemed to Ester more expressive than anything Rivka ventured in her terse Portuguese.
Sometimes, mending with her cramped stitches, Ester stole a moment’s reprieve to listen to the rabbi and his students in the room at the foot of the stair. Moshe kibel torah m’sinai . . . Words she herself had learned from the rabbi. She’d been still a girl when her father had first brought the rabbi to their house in Amsterdam. She’d known him by sight long before, of course: Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, seated at the edge of the men’s section in the Talmud Torah sanctuary, his lips moving to prayers he knew by heart. In Amsterdam, students had been brought to HaCoen Mendes when the other rabbis were unavailable or unwilling to teach them. To the younger boys he would tell quiet tales that left them rapt: Daniel and the lion, Akiva and his devoted wife, Bar Koch-ba and the saplings. The older boys he tasked with reading passages of Mishneh Torah, then dug for their opinions until they lit up with comprehension or became bored. Some took advantage of his blindness, making frivolous alterations to the content of the passages they read aloud, or circulating mocking verse while the rabbi spoke: pranks whispered of with righteous anger in the women’s balcony at the synagogue. Yet Ester had heard her father say that the other rabbis took advantage of HaCoen Mendes’s tolerance as well, sending him their most troublesome pupils. HaCoen Mendes never complained. When the congregation’s most disobedient student of all—Miguel de Spinoza’s son, a pupil determined to upend all tradition for the sake of his own self-regarding logic—was excommunicated for his hubris, HaCoen Mendes even had himself escorted to the synagogue to voice his objection to the severity of the punishment—to no avail.
She wished now obscurely, as the rain splashed on the London cobbles outside the window, that the rabbi could plead thus to some court on her behalf. But for what reprieve? The life she’d known in Amsterdam had vanished. The very table where she’d once pored over the rabbi’s lessons was now ash. So, it seemed, was her spirit, which had risen to greet each text she’d studied with the rabbi. In that too-brief time of her studies, a tide of words and reasoning had lifted her and rushed her far past the stagnant canals that hemmed the Jewish neighborhood, toward some bright distant horizon. She’d wanted that horizon so much, it dizzied her.
Yet now she touched books only in the basest sense. The rich library they’d brought with them from Amsterdam to London required tending like all else in the house, for coal soot found its way even behind the curtain that protected the long shelf of books. The first time Ester had been assigned the task of dusting the rabbi’s treasures, she’d drawn back the curtain and stood breathing in wonder at the leather-and-gilt spines. The library, a gift from the congregation in Amsterdam to support the rabbi’s undertaking in London, was a gauntlet of expensive tomes thrown down by Amsterdam’s Jews. The titles embossed on the spines were astonishing: Pirkei Avot, yes, and Moreh Nevuchim and Ketubim, of course, but also works of philosophy. Standing flush with Menasseh ben Israel’s De la Fragilidad Humana was a volume of Aristotle’s writings—as though the Amsterdam Jews who had donated these books assumed that England’s Jews had become such boors in their separation from the community that they now required not only reeducation in Jewish teachings, but an introduction to the rudiments of thought itself. Slowly Ester slid books from their perches. Frontispieces, framed by calligraphers, were inscribed with the signatures of the Amsterdam merchants who’d had these extravagant gifts bound for their London brethren—without, Ester felt sure, ever reading the books’ contents themselves. She opened a supple leather binding to discover a work by the Englishman Francis Bacon, translated into Castilian. What use had the givers of this lavish volume felt the Castilian would be to a Jew of England? And was it envy that made her think the men who had given these books valued the bindings more than the words they bound?
But Rivka, seeing Ester stilled and dreaming at the task of dusting, had issued a grunt of disapproval and sent Ester to wring linens.
Not two months since their arrival from Amsterdam—yet the brief flare of hope Ester had carried with her had deadened in these damp stone rooms. Considered slight before her arrival in London, she’d grown thinner still. Some afternoons her exertions darkened the air and she had to sit on the floor while the room swooned about her. Once, as she crouched waiting for the swooning to cease, with the shelf of magisterial volumes above her as unreachable as the moon, it seemed to her that the stone floor she clung to was an isle on which she’d been exiled from the last remains of all she’d once loved. It came to her to wonder whether the banished young de Spinoza too had felt his rebellious mind darkened in his own exile by the labor of earning his keep. Had his thoughts, rumored the worst sort of heresy, also been smothered, as the rabbis surely hoped?
Questions that floated away in the silt of the dim, rocking room.
Nights, when Rivka’s snores resounded, Ester lay silent under the cover, willing herself toward the sweet sleep she now craved more than almost all else. The death of each day’s life. End it, she thought. End this day’s life if the world holds mercy. Her long-ago studies were mere shadows—she could not recall what had made her think them worthy. Here and again, as she lay in the dark, a thought might rise murky out of the fatigue, and—she couldn’t help herself—she’d hold it tender as a newborn lest it slip from her hands, caressing it, trying to shield it against oblivion. Until finally it slipped, a spark extinguished by sleep.
A dream, buried in the night like a seed of light in the dark: her father’s hand, atop the polished wooden table—patting it once, twice. Protection, safety. Gone.
The rabbi’s face was turned toward the livid flames.
“Since your brother chooses not to return,” he said, “I’ll ask to employ your hand the remainder of today.”
She stood. With tentative steps, she made her way to the table. Lowered herself into the wooden seat, hesitated, then selected a goose quill from the jar.
Its smooth shaft, rolling between her fingers, was foreign. Had it been two years since she’d held a quill? More?
“Begin a letter to Amsterdam,” the rabbi said quietly. “Sixth of Kislev.”
The paper was before Ester. Her hands were clumsy.
She wrote,
6 Kislev, 5418
With the help of G-d
“To the honored Samuel Moses,” the rabbi said.
She dipped the quill and wrote the words, her lettering cramped. The wet blue-black letters shone on the thick paper.