She hurried down the narrow London streets now, remembering: days of luxuriant study at the polished wood table of their home in Amsterdam, while her mother clipped past without acknowledging Ester’s presence and the maid Grietgen cleaned gently around her. Rising from the rabbi’s texts, Ester might pore over her father’s copy of a French treatise about the soul and matter, and the extension of matter in space. The contrast riveted her: the difference between the thinking of Christians and the increasingly complex rabbinic texts Rabbi HaCoen Mendes brought for her to study. The Christians, it seemed to Ester, wished to fathom the mechanism of the soul: by which levers did it pull the body into motion, and by which was it pulled by the divine? Yet the rabbis had little concern for such deliberation. What, they wished to know, were the minute instructions for doing God’s will? How must the economy of devotion be paid in laws of kashrut, in decorations of house and body, in the number of repetitions of a prayer . . . how were laws for behavior to be observed under this and that specific circumstance?
The difference between the two manners of thought seemed to hold the key to something she couldn’t name. Must the two—the Christian and the Hebrew, the soul and the measurable, tangible world—remain disconnected? Or was there some middle terrain where a person—even someone like Ester’s own too-thin self, with her always-cold hands, her ribcage that felt too narrow to contain all the air she needed to gulp—might understand the purpose of life more readily? And what of the arguments of the apostates—why did the rabbis ban such speech, rather than welcome it in order to refute it?
And how to answer the older maid’s soft huff of disappointment: “Didn’t your mother teach you what to do with the stained cloths? Or is she too busy with that bottle of hers to notice her daughter’s a woman?” The sheen of blood on her fingers, the smell of it—a confused humiliation suffusing all. To forget the maid’s words, she pulled the text closer and followed the rivulets of the rabbi’s teachings into fresh streams of argument that promised to carry her past the Herengracht, past the torpid waterways of the city toward some conclusion of such brightness it made her reel. At times she could barely speak in response to the rabbi’s questions. Other times she could hardly find enough breath for all the words she needed to utter, though the rabbi listened with great patience. On those days the new thoughts so brimmed in her that she felt the white plaster ceiling and the timbers and the brickwork walls couldn’t contain her—should she raise her head to speak once more, she’d shake the house down.
But at last Constantina realized what the maids had known for months. And even Samuel Velasquez couldn’t deny Constantina’s logic: Ester being now of an age sufficient for marriage, her education ought be ended.
The teeming bright world, shuttered. The rabbi, along with the French and Latin tutors, came to the house now to teach only Isaac—and though Ester endeavored to listen as she did her embroidery and the other tasks now assigned her, these lessons served mainly to remind her of what was lost. Isaac’s attention roved the room so that the long-suffering instructors had to teach the simplest texts and grammars over and again. Ester entered sometimes with an offer of tea or ale, or even stood at the threshold, waving her hands silently to wake her brother to attention—but Isaac ignored these signals with a sleepy shrug. The books Ester had studied were returned to the synagogue, and on the occasions when she was able to seize a few moments to read her brother’s simpler ones, she was distracted by every footfall, fearful the very act of studying the smooth lines of Hebrew letters, or even her brother’s prescribed doses of French or Latin, might ignite the ever more fragile mood of the house. For Ester’s womanhood seemed to have stung her mother, and Constantina regarded Ester now with a gaze full of obscure meaning. And when Samuel Velasquez, with the aim to cure Isaac of his waywardness, took the youth on a trade voyage, Constantina found at last, in the emptied house and a swift-emptying bottle of wine, the freedom to disburden herself.
Shall I tell you, Ester, the truth about love?
Listen now to what I learned from my own mother about the unmaking of her heart. And the making, Ester, of mine.
That summer a silence settled in Ester’s mind, brittle and expectant—it stretched for days, weeks, begging to be broken.
Then, as though summoned by that silence: a burgeoning roar.
The night, the glowing roof. The fire’s brilliant leap from the tip of their house into the black sky. As if the flames had at last gained their freedom, the sky pulling them into its embrace.
Up, and up.
A year, more. Hollow, wishless months of needle-pricked fingers and a dull pain in the center of her chest, her voice stoppered. Isaac’s face shuttered and locked. The words I’m sorry, which spilled from her so steadily while her mother was alive, were now unutterable, though she knew her failure to make apology for her presence stiffened the backs of the synagogue matrons who housed and fed them. With each week those matrons’ whispers gained volume: What now? What of the blond-haired son who had carried the fatal lantern—surely it was the judgment of God that acted through his young hands, yet what to do with a youth with such a curse upon his head? He might be a capable dock laborer, but dock work was for Christians or Tudesco Jews, not the son of a Portuguese family. And what of the girl—see her there, mending with her dreadful tight stitches, gone from being the indulged daughter of a respected man to a burden on the community. Why doesn’t she cry over at least her father—poor man, to live and die alongside such a wife?
How great was the matrons’ relief, then, when Rabbi HaCoen Mendes sent word through his Tudesco housekeeper that he’d take in the orphans. And how much greater when the blind rabbi—himself a burden on the community, unseemly though it was to say so—declared his willingness to accept Menasseh ben Israel’s call to carry the light of learning to London. Though Menasseh’s plan was of course unlikely to succeed, all would benefit should London indeed become a refuge for Jews. What’s more, a welcoming London might even draw off the ill-bred Tudescos, whose vulgar ways lately threatened all that the Portuguese congregation had built in Amsterdam.
So the beadle had announced prayers for Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s success, the wealthy men of the synagogue had donated elaborately bound books for his mission—and the rabbi, like the orphans in his trust, was removed from the community’s care.
So much expiated in one ship’s plashing departure.
She walked. Old manure blanketed the London cobblestones. She passed soot-darkened brickwork, cats hale and lame, a stone edifice carved with a chipped angel. A hoof-marked yard tangled with withered vines, a fire-damaged house. Each step, a move deeper under the skin of the city. Walking, she recalled herself as she’d once been: the soft long layerings of her skirts, the wide winged collars parting at the small bones of her throat. The girl she was in Amsterdam before the fire seemed to her a figure in a framed portrait: downcast eyes fleeing the timid gaze of a neighbor boy with a shyness that now struck Ester as the most repellent of foolishnesses. She was ash now—that girl her father had escorted to synagogue and released with pride into the decorous crowd. Samuel Velasquez’s dignified tread, the smell of his wool cloak—the recollections a heavy pain in her throat.