Alvaro HaLevy—that was the younger one’s name. And the elder was Manuel. She met Manuel’s stare with a stony one of her own. His brows rose: he was amused by her defiance. Together they ignored his smooth-cheeked brother.
“Make a fence around the Torah,” she pronounced, without dropping her gaze. “Meaning, establish further requirements beyond the perimeter of God’s laws. This shows the sages’ eagerness to follow God’s word, and their wish that even those who stumble fulfilling the details of these additional laws won’t risk violating God’s will.”
The rabbi turned his face and spoke mildly. “I trust, Ester, that Manuel and Alvaro are capable of interpreting the passage without your aid.”
She flushed, but brushed aside the rebuke—and along with it, some dim hunger Manuel’s stare had woken in her. At least she’d made her mind clear to Manuel, she told herself, on the matter of his rudeness. It served nothing for the rabbi to tolerate such behavior. In this she and Rivka were in agreement.
As if summoned by this last thought, rather than Manuel’s command, Rivka emerged from the kitchen. She served the rabbi first, then set a small bowl before each brother. It pained Rivka, Ester knew, to dispense the sooty coffee to the rabbi’s students—she was in the habit of grinding the precious beans only as a medicinal for the rabbi. Although the rabbi’s nephew had thus far paid them a handsome upkeep, Rivka still treated each month’s payment as though it might be the last, and counted each coin with a suspicion that made the delivery boy mutter about the hag Jewess. But even Rivka understood that the HaLevy boys’ money and family connection must be respected. If they required coffee, she’d serve it.
Only later, rinsing the grounds from the bowl in the kitchen, would Rivka mutter her verdict: uma papa santos. A saint-sucker. Her rounded shoulders rolling in rhythm as she worked bread dough with the heels of her hands, she’d break her laboring silence to say abruptly to Ester, They’ve traded faith—for—gold. In truth, it seemed to Ester that Rivka’s condemnation encompassed any Portuguese Jew who’d succeeded in evading death, whether through true conversion or merely by donning a thin mask of Catholicism here in London. Only those who’d confessed to the Inquisition and been killed—or nearly killed, such as the rabbi—seemed to merit Rivka’s respect. Her thick back twisting to one side, then the other, her hair escaping her cap in limp strands, Rivka hove into the dough with the single-mindedness of one who knew death to arrive in the form of flying hooves and clubs—never in the form of a choice. The Inquisition, in her view, offered all of Sephardic Jewry a gift denied to her and the other Tudesco Jews: the opportunity to choose death, rather than having it descend unannounced. Death, for Rivka and her Polish kin, was a pogrom scouring all in its path—not an iron-wielding priest offering a small window to freedom that might possibly be unlatched by disavowing one’s Judaism. Once, wringing linens in the attic, she had said, In my village, they died without even a moment to pray. That’s how it was: The men with clubs came. The village died. Though Ester waited, there was no more. Rivka bent over the buck-basket in the dim attic. A sudden splatter of heavy droplets raining into the wash water.
But if Manuel HaLevy knew that the woman who now served him coffee considered him a saint-sucker, he was indifferent to the charge. He raised his bowl in one hand and drained it at once. “More,” he said.
Rivka removed the bowl.
A knock at the door.
Rivka, bowl in hand, opened it. The change in her expression was instant: the quick snuffing of a candle.
“Well?” A voice like a curled ribbon, high and pretty—and familiar, though Ester was surprised to hear it at the rabbi’s threshold. “You did receive our letter saying we’d call?”
Ester had long been struck by Rivka’s ability to make herself impenetrable in the face of Amsterdam’s wealthy, offering no detectable response in face or body to their scoldings as she tended their needs. Now Rivka, impassive, swung the door wide to admit Mary da Costa Mendes, the daughter of the rabbi’s nephew. Entering behind her daughter, Catherine da Costa Mendes chided in a fainter voice, “Mary, didn’t you know better . . . than to have my note delivered to a Tudesco?” Overriding Mary’s murmured excuse, her mother’s voice continued in bursts: “Next time, Mary . . . have the message boy deliver the letter to . . . someone who can read.”
For the barest instant, Ester saw the ripple where the arrow went in—but by the time the two women had stepped into the house, Rivka’s face had closed and locked once more.
They entered, mother and daughter, elegant dark skirts swaying fore and aft like bells as they walked. Mary’s dress was laced tight, placing her abundant bosom and the white flesh of her upper arms on full display. Her plump face was framed by immaculate black ringlets. She peered about the room with hungry fascination. Catherine da Costa Mendes handed Rivka her fox-fur tippet; then allowed Rivka to ease the cloak from her shoulders, revealing a broad farthingale and heavy skirt, each thickly embroidered with silver thread. Unbidden, Isaac’s name for such women rang teasingly in Ester’s memory: tapecaria andadoria: walking tapestry. But Catherine da Costa Mendes’s labored inhalations, audible from across the room, made Ester doubt she was in robust enough health to bear the weight of her attire about London.
“Coffee,” the woman breathed at Rivka.
Rivka disappeared into the kitchen.
In austere silence, Catherine da Costa Mendes surveyed the rabbi’s study. Beyond offering a generous nod of greeting in the street or the synagogue, she’d not concerned herself with the doings of the household her husband supported. Even within London’s small constellation of Portuguese Jews, the da Costa Mendes family was set apart. Alone among the synagogue’s matrons, Catherine seemed uninterested in gossip—more than once Ester had seen her summon Mary from an avidly whispering cluster with a disapproving glance. Nor did the family come and go from the synagogue by foot, as did even the wealthiest of the other Jews. It was common to see the trio alight from a fine black coach, even on the Sabbath: deep-voiced, silver-haired Diego with a vigorous step, pattens protecting his fine shoes from the street’s muck; Catherine more slowly and with the air of one much older, as though the years had spun faster for her than for her husband. And, stepping onto the cobbles delicately—toe, then heel, as though confident of being watched, pausing with a white hand laid as if casually on the coach’s well-shined black veneer—their one daughter, sole surviving child of whatever number Catherine had birthed.
The rabbi spoke—for a moment Ester had forgotten his presence. “Whom do I have the honor of welcoming in my home?”
Catherine da Costa Mendes turned her head regally to gaze at the rabbi. She was not, it was apparent, accustomed to explaining herself. Broadening her gaze to include the HaLevy brothers, she summoned Manuel with a slight nod.
The brothers rose—the younger with a quick and nervous smile, Manuel at his leisure but with respect.
“Catherine da Costa Mendes,” said Manuel in a deep and formal voice. “And her lovely daughter, Mary.”
Had something—amusement, perhaps?—flickered below those last words of his? Ester noted the color rising in Mary’s face.
“Greetings to you, Uncle,” said the matron in Portuguese.
The rabbi stood. It seemed to take him a long time, and longer before Catherine da Costa Mendes understood what was required and stepped forward and laid her gloved hand in his, not unkindly, for him to kiss.
The rabbi sat. “Welcome to this home your family so graciously provides us.”