Ash: the girl who had once existed, with her vague moralities, her posture bent in apology, her desperate trust that virtue might guarantee safety. And her desperate hope too that all within her that was unruly, raging, sensuous—all that terrified and drew her—could be quashed.
Along the narrow street, youths hauled sacks of sand, an ink vendor cried his wares, saltpeter men hauled stained sacks through a stable door. A girl leading a milch-ass knocked on a door and, when there was no answer, leaned her forehead to the door with a bleary call for any with babes in need of milk. Above the street, signboards mutely announced their wares—one carved in the shape of a mortar and pestle, another in the shape of a barrel of ale, another painted with a picture of crockery, that the unlettered might know where to enter with their coin. And now the road sloped downward beneath her shoes—first the slightest dip, barely perceptible. Then a steeper slope, as though not only her feet but the whole city were rushing toward the river. As she neared the water, something in the air seemed to loosen. Elsewhere in the city the Puritans’ grip might be easing slowly; here, by the river, the impatience for release seemed to pulse faster. A crane loomed over the heavy chop; a skiff discharged its passengers at a stair; in the long, commanding calls of the river men and the gulls, a barely restrained defiance. Here and again between buildings, the river now appeared, gray and leaden and powerful.
The foot traffic thickened suddenly, and as it did, the way before Ester narrowed. She was in a crowd, passing alongside strangers into a corridor of stone, and without warning she was jostled and swept onto the great looming bridge—or rather, into a dark, narrow passage that became a tunnel. The bridge was lined with solid walls of shops on either side, and the merchants’ homes, stacked above, jutted and met to form a roof over the thoroughfare of the bridge. The crowd slowed as it pressed deeper into the dim corridor between lamp-lit shops. She could neither hear nor sense the river beneath her feet. There were men and women within a hand’s breadth, jostling her with silent familiarity. She shrank from them—she’d not been touched by so many people, she was sure, in all her life. Yet there was nowhere to retreat—and there was something, too, that astonished her, something dangerous and free in the touch of this crowd. She might have been a flea, so little was she noted. A flea—not a Jewess. Not the survivor of a fire that was whispered of throughout Amsterdam.
Ahead now a horse went wild, kicking its rear legs high. There was a man’s warning shout and a burst of alarmed cries before it was subdued. A lath-thin woman, her strawberry-gray head balding, pressed her shoulder hard into Ester’s; a man with tousled blond hair seemed not to notice how he knocked Ester with his elbow; on her other side two women carrying babes gossiped as they shuffled, not minding how intimately they brushed against her.
When Ester had seen London’s bridge from a distance, she’d imagined a wide clearing, a vantage point from which one could grasp the view of the city. But the bridge offered no vista; instead it was the artery through which all of London pulsed, stopping terrifyingly now and again—the crowd around Ester thickening rapidly in the lull—only to continue. Pressed forward, Ester kept pace to avoid falling. She was in a crush of English strangers and her breath came quick with fear—but their unfamiliar smells and rough fabrics and stout limbs carried her, and the heat of their bodies warmed her.
A clearing between two shop buildings formed a brief window, and through this the river came into sight, and all of London on either side of the bridge—spilling past the city walls, piled along the banks as far as she could see. For a moment the heavy pounding water wheels below the bridge sounded clearly, and she saw the gray river, half dammed by the bridge, swirling high against the pilings on her right. Opposite, on the bridge’s downriver side where the water poured out of the narrow arches through which it had been forced, the level of the river was lower by a grown man’s height. So hard did the water rush, furrows of swift furious glass, it seemed impossible that this bridge—a city to itself—was not swept downriver.
Pressed once more by the crowd, she walked on, but no sooner had her eyes reaccustomed themselves to the dim passageway than a pale white glow appeared ahead—the end of the bridge.
All about her, men and women were strangely marked by the growing light—their faces half shadowed and half lit, sculpted and beautiful. It seemed to Ester that inside this dark tunnel of a bridge they’d shaken off the wariness that had cribbed the city. They thronged about her, their passions and hopes plain to see, their lives and their deaths patent. In that instant she forgave them fully for each thing that had made her fear them and their city. A strange tenderness seized her. For a heartbeat she was certain the bridge was in motion, shuddering as it prepared to tear away from its moorings and carry them all out, far beyond this city. But it was only the vibration of the rushing water, and the summoning din from the riverbank. She could hear the cries, once again, of gulls and boatmen, the clanging and thud of river commerce. She could smell the cool rolling road of water sluicing beneath all of them.
For the first time, she felt it: this was the freedom her brother had sought.
There was life in London. There was life in her. And desire. A flame leapt in her, defiant of the bounds in which she’d prisoned it.
How could desire be wrong—the question seized her—if each living being contained it? Each creature was born with the unthinking need to draw each next breath, find each next meal. Mustn’t desire then be integral—a set of essential guideposts on the map of life’s purpose? And mightn’t its very denial then be a desecration?
The thoughts were heretical, and they were her own. A frightening, alluring hunger surged in her, she knew not even for what—a fever for truth, for the touch of truth, the touch of warm bodies, the crush of unknown arms. She wanted to press her mouth to the mouths of the strangers beside her—to learn from their mouths the language they spoke. Somewhere across this bridge, beckoning her, were books that would be hers to explore and question—and yes, argue against—for in her new daring now nothing seemed impossible, and she allowed herself to admit even this: that she thought the sages scant in their exploration of what she most wished to understand—the will that set the world in motion and governed it. Shutting her eyes, letting the crowd steer her, she saw behind closed lids the books that awaited her, the thinkers’ collected voices inked onto each crowded page. An ecstasy of ink, every paragraph laboring to outline the shape of the world. The yellow light of a lamp on leaves of paper, the ivory-black impress of words reasoning, line by line. Yet in the confused picture in her mind, the hands caressing and turning those lamp-lit pages were not her own, but a stranger’s. She didn’t know which she wanted more: the words or the hands, the touch to her spirit or to her skin.
And then, pale daylight. She was across, the sound of the water behind her, the clatter of stone and hooves and wheels ahead.
Glancingback at the gate through which she had emerged, she saw a spectacle she could not at first comprehend. Above her, set on black pikes atop the bridge’s gate, were objects that might easily have been rocks, stumps, some natural decaying thing. As understanding assailed her, she stumbled to a halt. The hair tarred back, slack cheeks shiny and corroded like charred paper. Blackened heads, preserved in tar: traitors to the government. She’d heard rumor of this—the English government’s reminder to all of the price to be paid for disloyalty—yet now her stomach heaved and she could not look away, nor pass beneath them.