At least once each month now the rabbi required her to venture into London to arrange for the binding of the books the Amsterdam community continued to send, or else to purchase new texts with the income the rabbi’s nephew provided. Ester had long feared a day when the rabbi might realize his folly—for the number of books in his library grew at greater pace and far greater expense than the needs of the household might justify. The rabbi himself could study only some few hours before fatigue overtook him, and the students knocking on his door had lately diminished to a mere rill, the HaLevy brothers being two of only five pupils who arrived at the threshold at intervals through the day, if at all. Yet outside this matter of amassing books, the rabbi’s mind seemed intact—and, Ester reasoned, one who had spent his life so meagerly surely merited the chance to indulge himself in such extravagant purchases of texts now, when at last he was provided with the income to do so.
With each of Ester’s forays into London, the city seemed to grow and brighten, its streets threading into a dense map that she’d walked first with caution, and now confidence. She lingered at booksellers’ tables to inhale; how strange that she could ever have forgotten the smell of books—as though her years of mourning had blotted her senses. Now, the squared Latin and English letters delighted her; she relished the feel of each word as her mouth silently shaped it. All about her, strangers slid their fingers along lines of print, their touch curious, reverent, even tender. How intimate the love of books had always seemed to Ester; yet among Jews the holiest books could not be touched by human hands. No woman could approach the Torah, and even a man could touch its scrolls only with a wood or silver pointer. Here, though, among the Gentiles, even the holiest words could be caressed. When the rabbi’s errands first brought her to the booksellers’ stalls at St. Paul’s, she hadn’t dared approach the Christian texts. It had taken her weeks to embolden herself to lay hands on one—and then a second, and a third, opening each book’s quires and standing long minutes before the pages. At first, as though the words might burn, she’d read without allowing her fingertips to graze the printed letters. Then, she’d touched. We have thought fit, by this book, to give an account of our faith . . . What strange voices these were, questing inward, as though truth were to be found not in the instruction of the community but in a single spirit and mind. With effort she deciphered the careful sentences of an English Christian named John Jewel. She turned page after page of a text called Summa Logicae—and though the meager instruction in Latin she’d once gleaned from her brother’s lessons was inadequate to the more difficult passages, still she sifted the fragments of each argument until she felt she could glimpse the shape of the whole. And here was a book written by a pious Christian woman known as Julian of Norwich, whom the Christians—could such a thing be true?—had walled into their church to live out her life there, bringing her food and necessities so that parishioners could come lean into the small window in her stone prison to confess and receive her wisdom. On page after page, the woman gave account of her own visions.
At the bindery, an establishment warmed as much by the bodies shuffling its narrow aisles as by the low fire in its hearth, she stood alongside strangers at tables piled with parchments, loose quires, and pieces of leather binding. Expensively bound volumes were stacked high here and there, waiting to be claimed by those whose gilt initials adorned the spines alongside the names of the authors. There was a peculiar political work by Van den Enden—a description of the ideal society, passages of which she committed to memory. A copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, with a heavy swirl of ink on its frontispiece, lay awaiting collection for weeks; when she visited it, she took to parting the book’s thick girth with the wedge of her fingernail, and whatsoever page it might fall to, she studied that passage to glean what she might. So too did she linger with a set bound in dark green leather, the edges of the pages marbled in reds and purples. Descartes. Galileo, William Alabaster. William Shakespeare.
And when the rabbi sent Ester about London for ink and paper or quills, she rushed to each errand, then bundled the rabbi’s purchases under her arms and wandered where she pleased. How different these excursions were from the rounds she made with Mary to dressmakers and cordwainers—hours so thick with Mary’s gossip that Ester barely glimpsed London’s riches passing outside the window of the da Costa Mendeses’ coach. But set loose on her own in London, she watched a brightly painted barge and a worn herring-bus being unloaded by a crew of men; passed a tall Moor with dark lips that opened to a bright and still brighter smile as she neared him, until they both laughed aloud before parting without a word. She stopped at the cart of a fat, whiskered woman and bought from her a plum, not for its small bitter heft but for the opportunity to memorize the Englishwoman’s gestures and the satisfied way her mouth gathered itself when she’d finished speaking. She watched two apprentices squatted together beside the river, saw them shimmy their closed fists and fling forbidden dice at the bare earth between their kissing knees. Nearby, three men watched, and banged together their metal mugs of posset, hob and nob, as they toasted a long list of sins soon to be restored to England with the return of the king: dicing, bowling, bear-baiting—each sin saluted by the men with a three-voice chorus of “a very rude and nasty pleasure.”
Back on Creechurch Lane, she labored hour after hour at the writing table as Rivka came and went from the room. Her quill, working under the rabbi’s unseeing gaze, answered his quiet words with a dry creaking of its own: the small noise of some lowly creature doing its delicate work, scratching to gain entry. To the Esteemed Yochanan Yisrael, she wrote. To the Honored Rabbi Abraham ben Porat. At the rabbi’s direction she sent a query to a kabbalist in Hameln concerning the numerology of a verse of B’reishit; pages of dictation addressed to obscure young scholars who had directly or indirectly requested the rabbi’s advice; a question to the Council of Four Lands in Jaroslaw regarding their ruling in a case in which Ashkenazic Passover dietary law had been violated—and through this she understood that the rabbi consulted even the Tudesco rabbis, and held no bias against them, unlike those Sephardic rabbis of Amsterdam who forbade any congress with the hordes of impoverished Ashkenazim.
The learning that spooled from Ester’s hand made her feverish—yet there was no fever in the rabbi, only a patient concentration that seemed not to dislike Ester’s presence but to welcome it. Inking his words, she felt the rabbi’s mind: clear, absorptive, and without pride—his reasoning featuring neither the brilliant rhetoric nor the sudden accusatory turnings that distinguished the speeches Ester recalled from Amsterdam’s celebrated rabbis, Aboab and Abendana. Instead, Rabbi HaCoen Mendes issued opinions in gentle terms that offered a humility so simple it seemed to Ester—the fresh ink trailing the progress of her hand across the paper—something like glory.
Though, of course—so the rabbi concluded his missives—those he advised could surely think of better arguments themselves, and must remember to reply to their aged friend in London and share their own wisdom with him.
When the rabbi’s letters were finished for the day, he requested that she read him commentary. She pronounced for him sentences of winding logic in Aramaic, puzzling out their meaning while the rabbi considered. “Do you hear the argument the other side makes?” he might ask, after a long silence. “Do you see why they debate such a preposterous conjecture, though the situation will never arise in this world?” She heard, and saw. And remembered: so young, her shoes hardly brushing the wooden floor of their house in Amsterdam, her breasts not yet budded, the spring air damp and riveting on her skin. “What is the purpose of study?” the rabbi had asked. She’d said, “That the spirit be clothed in reason, which is more warming than ignorance.” The rabbi had corrected, gently, “Yet the text we studied said knowledge, Ester, not reason.” And she’d countered, “But reason is more warming, for it seeds knowledge. But knowledge can grow nothing outside itself.”
The rabbi had smiled then, though with a furrowed brow. “You have a good mind,” he’d said after a moment.