He was surprised to note that Helen was, for once, looking at him in a way that was almost sympathetic.
“Well,” Aaron said, momentarily disoriented. He buttoned his coat and tried to sound chipper, though he’d no stomach for it. “At least we’ve got a head start on other scholars who might hear about the papers.”
He expected a lecture about the universal benefits of collaborative scholarship, which would have restored him to a comfortable irritability. Instead Helen smiled grimly, as though she appreciated his competitive spirit.
Darkness had begun to blur the roof and the out-flung walls of the large weathered house. Aaron crammed his fists into his pockets and looked, dumbly, at his feet. The snow-covered dirt he stood on had been trod more than three hundred years ago by the occupants of the great house. He wished obscurely now for the company of those people—as though knowing them could warm him, change him in some necessary way he couldn’t manage on his own.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said softly, though he wasn’t even sure what he was referring to. All of it, maybe: Marisa’s e-mail, the assessor’s satisfied smile, the papers. His own strange, abrupt grief.
Helen started down the path, her cane leaving small black circles in the thin snow.
He walked beside her, matching her slow pace. “Why,” he said, his voice strengthening, “would any Jew in a religious community risk taking Spinoza seriously—let alone write down his words? All contact with Spinoza and his ideas was forbidden. If I’m remembering right, it was forbidden in the most severe, threatening terms the rabbis could muster.”
Helen stopped walking. She leaned on her cane. At first Aaron thought she was resting, but then he saw her eyes. Their cornflower blue was shockingly keen, her face alive in the lowering sun. She didn’t look like the colorless harridan he’d suffered under for the past three days. She wore an expression of complete attentiveness, at once mournful and reckless.
Knowing when not to speak was a talent that visited Aaron rarely. But as it settled on him now with its feathery grace, he knew to be grateful.
She said to him then, crisply, “Never underestimate the passion of a lonely mind.”
She lifted her cane and continued ahead of him down the path.
Part 2
10
October 2, 1659
15 Tishrei, 5420
London
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease.
She fitted her hands to the rippled glass of two diamond-shaped panes.
On the street below a thin, distorted stream of strangers passed—none bracing his gaze against the white sky to glance up at her window.
What might she possibly be longing for?
She pulled herself away from the window. Rubbed her hands together to warm them. The failure of the Lord Protector’s son was rippling through London; she’d heard shopkeepers say change was everywhere. In the wake of the younger Cromwell’s abdication, gambling and theater were springing back already. Motes of life rising, defying the morbid sobriety of the Puritans. Soon, perhaps, there would be a final end to Puritan apparel, a return to bright fabrics, ribbons. Even, perhaps, the return of a king.
And if there were? What had she to do with London even now, and what sense wishing for change?
The figures below her window wavered in the thick glass of the bottom panes. They stretched, their somber colors braided—then seemed to loft, curving into the air before snapping out of view—angels or devils climbing their own ladders, wending toward their business in a world beyond her reach.
There remained only one flame still lit in her life. It glimmered in the room below, in the rabbi’s mercifully quiet library.
She descended the stair.
From the library, the rabbi’s voice dipped and rose. After a hesitation, his soft chant was taken up by the bleary voices of his two pupils.
“Moshe kibel torah m’sinai” . . . How many times had she heard Isaac repeat the words of this lesson at the rabbi’s patient insistence? And how Isaac would have laughed at the spectacle that greeted her now as she reached the bottom of the stair: the HaLevy brothers—two young men with beards already sprouted on their chins—reciting phrases that should be the province of boys fresh from their first haircuts.
For an instant, Isaac’s boyish chanting voice broke the surface of her memory. She pressed her fingertips into the hard wood of the handrail until they whitened.
She would constrict the world to a pinhole.
Pushing off from the handrail, she walked across the room, toward the light still available to her. She settled at her table, ignoring the curious glances of the HaLevy brothers. She took up a quill and began to copy the letter she’d written for the rabbi that morning. Across the room, the rabbi was passing the next phrase to the brothers, tipping each syllable gently from his lips: “U’masrah l’Yehoshua, v’Yehoshua la’zkenim.” The younger of the two mumbled after him; the older had fallen silent.
The rabbi paused, waiting for his second pupil to repeat the words.
“I didn’t hear,” the older brother said, in a voice that made no attempt to mask his lack of interest.
Did he think the rabbi too blind to comprehend rudeness?
But Rabbi HaCoen Mendes merely offered the line once more, and the elder brother repeated it in an indifferent tone. His younger brother’s voice swiftly joined, as though in apology for the elder’s inattention.
The two dark-haired sons of the merchant Benjamin HaLevy: according to Rivka they’d been sent to study with the rabbi only because their father wished to please the rabbi’s rich nephew, Diego da Costa Mendes, with whom he’d invested heavily in a trade venture in the New World. Ester lifted her face from her work for just a moment now to regard them. The younger was slightly built, with a pale, oval face and a nervous air. His eyes rested on the rabbi only briefly; then returned, troubled, to his older brother; then ventured toward Ester, almost reaching her before fleeing back to his brother, as though seeking the next cue as to how he ought conduct himself.
As for the elder brother, Ester had free rein to watch him now. He’d leaned back in his cushioned seat with his eyes closed, bored.
“V’zkenim li’nvi’im,” the rabbi continued.
The next time Ester looked up from her work, she saw that the older brother had sat forward and was watching her, his eyes a keen adamantine color—green and brown that made her think of dirty brass. He was taller and more thickly built than his younger brother; the set of his jaw said he was accustomed to the fulfillment of his wishes.
“Coffee,” he called, his voice booming across the rabbi’s in the quiet room.
She’d started in her seat. It took her a moment to realize he was issuing a command, and another to realize it wasn’t addressed to her, but to Rivka in the kitchen.
There was a silence, interrupted only by the sound of the fire. Then he smiled at Ester, just slightly. Here we are, looking at one another, his smile said, and the blind rabbi doesn’t know. An idle invitation, issued perhaps only to amuse himself. Nothing in his demeanor said he thought her worth more.
Still, she felt herself straighten, her indignation twinned with curiosity.
The rabbi continued. “The sages would say three things,” he said. “‘Be temperate in judgment. Take many pupils. Make a fence around the Torah.’”
The elder brother’s eyes still held hers—a lazy dare. He was sprawled in his seat, as though its confines, too, bored him. He lifted his chin.
Beside him, the younger brother turned from him to Ester, uncertain.