There, in the margin alongside the third paragraph, written in the same elegant handwriting Aaron had been reading for three days, were the words Deus sive Natura.
He stared at the page: the blockish Hebrew of the Amsterdam rabbi; the small sloping letters added by Aleph in the margin. And the Latin: one of Spinoza’s catchphrases. He recognized it from a philosophy course he’d taken his senior year in college. Deus sive Natura: God or Nature. The phrase encompassed Spinoza’s radical notion that God and nature might be one and the same. It was the springing-off point for Spinoza’s mind-bending contentions about extension, determinism, and more.
“This makes no sense,” Aaron declared.
Helen waited.
“Where the hell does a seventeenth-century Jew—let alone a seventeenth-century woman, if Aleph is even really a woman—get off making a reference to Spinoza? Spinoza was banned. Plus this is Latin, and there’s no reason a Jewish woman would study Latin, let alone have any involvement with philosophy.” Yet there was no denying that Aleph’s margin note was a direct comment on the part of the letter that referred to God as separate from nature. A contradiction of it. He thought a moment. “This letter is what, 1660?” he said. “Spinoza hadn’t even published his major works then, had he? Who would even know about his theories at that point?”
Helen’s answer came low and compressed. “Maybe someone from the community that excommunicated him. The Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam.”
Aaron raised his head. “Do you think HaCoen Mendes or his scribe might have crossed paths with Spinoza?”
“It wasn’t a large community.”
There was a sharp knock on the great carved door. It echoed in the entryway.
Neither Helen nor Aaron moved. Then, abruptly, Helen pulled several more pages to her and began scanning them.
The door’s knocker sounded again, heavily. Then again.
There was a rustle from above, followed by Bridgette’s step on the stairs. “Coming . . . ,” she called. She was dressed now, wearing slacks and a powder-blue wrap and heels. She didn’t look at Aaron as she passed.
Helen still hadn’t raised her eyes. Aaron heard a man’s voice, and Bridgette’s teasing response: “You’re early. You scholars are an eager lot.”
A flirtation meant for Aaron’s ears, or the unseen stranger’s? Aaron was too preoccupied by what he’d just read to care. But the portly figure that accompanied Bridgette across the entryway provided the answer. The assessor, a short, middle-aged man, grasped two satchels in his right hand. A stack of large polyester-film document sleeves refused to stay tucked under his left arm, causing him to pause midway across the room to adjust them; as soon as he resumed walking, they slid immediately out of place once again. It would have been comical, Aaron thought, in another situation. Everything about the man said bookworm. Everything about him said cozy, likable, unthreatening, and Aaron hated him immediately. Any notion they’d had of what these documents might be had been sent flurrying by three words of Latin: Aleph might or might not have been a woman; might or might not have been copying down opinions she didn’t understand; might or might not have been championing Spinoza’s notions. The mystery, Aaron felt instinctively, should rightly be Helen’s and his to solve—but now the documents were being impounded. And if the assessor spotted the Spinoza reference, there was no guarantee that the whole trove wouldn’t be snatched by another institution that could limit Aaron’s access—the papers might even be locked away by a private collector, if England didn’t have strong enough patrimony laws against that sort of thing.
Bridgette led the assessor into the nook beside the stair; without a word, Helen and Aaron stood and rounded the corner, in time to see the man bend before the open panel under the stair.
There was a long silence.
“Oh my,” the man said.
Aaron followed his gaze to the open space: the top shelf that Helen and Aaron had only partially succeeded in emptying, the untouched shelf of documents below.
The assessor straightened with a grunt of effort, his eyes still fixed on the cupboard beneath the stair. The soft smile that broke on his face hurt Aaron’s stomach.
Helen’s voice behind Aaron nearly made him jump. “Good afternoon.”
The assessor turned, still smiling. “You’re the historian Mrs. Easton has told me about, I trust?”
“Yes,” said Helen. “A pleasure to meet you.” She turned from the assessor to Bridgette—who pressed her lips together in a way that said Now that that’s done with.
In fact, something in Bridgette’s tight expression surprised Aaron. He hadn’t spotted it until now—but Helen had gotten under Bridgette’s skin. He’d no idea why. He decided not to care.
He braced, instead, for the launch of Helen’s argument: they needed more time with the manuscripts. Another hour or even half-hour would do.
“Well then,” Helen said to Bridgette. “Thank you for your toleration of our little endeavor here. We’ll be on our way.”
Helen turned for the library.
Aaron followed her only as far as the doorway. There he stopped, confused. Helen was gathering her things with the slow, careful motions of a woman who could not, after all, get worked up over something as trivial as having these papers taken out of their hands for what, with luck, might be only a period of weeks or months.
He turned back to look at the open stairwell. There, beyond Bridgette pattering about her renovation plans and the assessor fussing with his satchels, lay a set of documents that had traveled mutely through centuries to arrive here, fragile and mysterious as a newborn. Aaron Levy, unworthy, had cradled them for just a moment in his hands. And all he wanted was to hold them again.
“Mr. Levy?” Helen Watt stood with her satchel, her coat folded across her arm.
Did the woman reserve her strength strictly for bullying subordinates? Was she incapable of mustering to do battle when it was important?
In the silence, the assessor let a pile of transparent sleeves slither onto a chair. As the man knelt laboriously to remove a first document from the shelves, Bridgette gave Aaron an amused smile.
He met it with a flat stare, then turned for the library. He stacked his notes, packed away his laptop, threw on his coat, and followed Helen out the front door. Someone—Bridgette, he presumed—shut it behind them.
Outside on the path he confronted Helen. “So you’re just going to walk away? Wait for someone else to decide whether we ever get another shot at those papers?”
It had stopped snowing. A light coating covered the ground, and the black branches of two trees overhanging the yard clicked against each other in a brief wind.
“I didn’t wish to argue for more time,” Helen said quietly, “or draw attention to what we found in the margin. The assessor might not notice it. Not every specialist in antiquities, not even one from Sotheby’s, is going to know the difference between a catch phrase of Spinoza’s and three random Latin words.”
Gathering her coat collar tighter to her throat, she looked up at the house. “Both of us did,” she said.
She was complimenting him, he realized belatedly.
“If Sotheby’s spots the Spinoza reference,” she continued, “and if they think it’s evidence that someone in the London Jewish community might have been debating Spinoza’s ideas even before Spinoza published them, the availability of these papers is going to be hard to keep mum. The price of the documents might rise out of our reach. Jonathan Martin may be able to jolly the vice chancellor into a moderate expenditure, but there are limits.”
The stonework of the house was bluish in the falling light, the frigid afternoon rapidly darkening. Inside, the assessor would now be beginning his work in earnest. The thought of the papers being carted away from this hulking edifice—the stairwell that had housed them left hollow—filled Aaron with an irrational loneliness.