She gave a curt nod.
“Be careful,” Alvaro added, staying her as she started past. “Mind you don’t miss the closing of the gate, you’ll be caught outside the walls.” His voice dropping to an earnest near whisper, he continued in a mix of Portuguese and English. “Last I was there,” he said, “a boy came swinging a spar.” As he spoke he flushed, his slight figure inclining toward her as though he were in need of comfort. “He swung it hard, so my head felt its wind. He and his companions said Jews excel at murder. That we helped slice off the head of their last king.”
Manuel was watching Ester closely.
She addressed Alvaro in Portuguese. “Obrigada. For the warning.”
Alvaro’s flush flowered into full red. He nodded and looked to his well-stitched black shoes, strapped into matching pattens.
But Manuel was smiling softly at Ester now, as though he’d just heard a pleasing joke. “They wanted him to drop his breeches,” he said in English, not bothering to translate, “so they could see what a Jew looked like.”
Alvaro paled.
“I ran,” Alvaro said simply, and Ester saw he’d long been resigned to the pleasure his older brother took in shaming him.
“Obrigada,” she said to Alvaro again. “You’re good to warn me.”
“He ran like a puppy,” sang Manuel.
Alvaro was a puppy. She held back from nodding. And his elder brother was a cur too free with his bite. “And you wouldn’t run?” she challenged Manuel. She let a small, teasing smile form on her lips. Hadn’t she sworn to herself all her life never to act in this manner? She looked at Manuel HaLevy and it didn’t matter. She wanted to see—wanted Alvaro to see—that smirk swept from the elder brother’s face.
“Perhaps you should stay and lower your breeches for them,” she said. “I’d wager that if you did”—she let her gaze slide to his waist, then below, then rise to meet his inscrutable eyes—“you’d look no different from the English.”
He let out a sound of surprise. Then his brass eyes fastened strangely on hers. She matched his gaze, no flush of heat marring her composure: a skill gleaned from her mother, though Ester had never before felt compelled to use it. It hardly mattered whether she’d guessed correctly that the London community didn’t yet submit its sons to the rite; Manuel’s expression had turned like something fermenting—as though he were assessing Ester anew. He looked as though he wanted to wound her for shaming him as a Jew, and he looked as though he wanted her eyes to travel the same route down his body once more.
Abruptly the recollection of her mother’s red-lipped visage, reflected in the mirror in her own palm, unraveled her resolve. She turned and began walking away.
“I heard about your brother,” Manuel said from behind her. “Not a very committed son of Israel himself, was he? Running off from the rabbi’s house to brawl like an animal among the dockworkers?”
She walked on without a glance back.
The streets narrowed, then widened abruptly and thickened with people. A boy swung out of a doorway and trotted down the street, carrying a roll of cloth. Neatly dressed maids with parcels walked ahead, whitsters hefting baskets of soiled linens. A horse and coach in the street, passing her so narrowly her cheek felt the heat off the animal’s flank. Sudden laughter in the doorway of a tavern, from its dark windows an oily smell that at once warmed Ester and turned her stomach.
Why now would she embrace her mother’s ways, when she’d so long and so fiercely guarded against them? Even a girl like Mary, petty and vain, knew the dangers of risking her reputation.
As though taking a cautious sip of strongest liquor, she permitted herself a single image. Her mother’s green dress. And her voice: a burning draught. Ester. You’re just like me.
She’d insulted Manuel HaLevy today because he angered her—yet, she admitted, also to pique him. For though Ester disliked him, still her body had woken to his challenge—just as every caged part of her, her thoughts, her breath, her pulse, seemed to wake now to this city from which she’d hidden herself. London, which had consumed her brother; London of her mother’s drunken, eviscerating whispers. The very language spoken on these streets fired Ester strangely—as if a thing long shuttered in her spirit had, quietly and all at once, quickened.
With the quickening, memory. How could one love such a mother—and how not long for her? Those in the synagogue who’d claimed they wished nothing to do with Constantina had ever lied, for didn’t they -savor their gossip of Constantina’s famed tempers? Didn’t they gladly visit the home of Samuel Velasquez—and not only because of his standing as a merchant, but because of the opportunity to admire Constantina’s lush beauty in the elegance of her home, and be pre-sent for those moments of delight and danger when her spirits lifted? For when Constantina Velasquez’s face and figure lit with happiness—when she laughed and played delicate melodies on the parlor spinet as her own mother had taught her, or sang a sinuous verse in her rare, light, throaty voice—then she no longer seemed ill-suited to the world but instead was the very heart of it, so that to turn away was impossible. And if it was true that Constantina’s temper sometimes plunged, or that she mocked those who should not be mocked; if it was true that her disobedience sometimes took the form of coquetry—dancing when the mood took her, lifting her skirts to a shocking height, even setting a hand lightly on a man’s chest, as if for emphasis, as she spoke to him, and continuing to converse with a faint smile as though she didn’t notice the man coloring—still, most took their cue from Samuel’s silence and said nothing until they’d left the house.
The most famed example of Constantina’s rebelliousness Ester herself recalled, though she herself had been but a child: eight days after giving birth to Isaac, Constantina had barred the door of the bedchamber with splayed arms and refused to allow the infant to be circumcised. Women were sent to persuade Constantina: naturally in Portugal they’d lacked the freedom to circumcise their sons, yes. And now indeed there was strangeness in rejudaizing the young—but wasn’t circumcision the mark of their new safety? Constantina merely turned her dark eyes on them and laughed in their earnest faces. More than one of the women cried with bewilderment upon leaving the Velasquez house, and had to recompose herself before returning home to make prim report of a mind distressed by the rigors of childbirth.
Only the herem issued by the Mahamad, barring members of the Velasquez family from setting foot in the synagogue until the deed had been done, ended the matter. Samuel Velasquez took his infant son bodily from his wife. He left for the synagogue disheveled from their struggle, Constantina’s fury pursuing him down the stairs: “Naturally you agree with the Mahamad! Now that you cling to Judaism like a babe to a teat you’re not half the man you were—you should never have let them do it to you either!” While the door’s slam still reverberated, Constantina seized paper and quill. In swift, sharp strokes she penned her letter, and moments later dispatched the wary maid to the synagogue with instructions to deliver it to the most dignified-looking rabbi she could find, and watch his face while he read it. “And make certain my husband sees,” Constantina cried as the maid exited.