“Rivka, I’m not like those—”
“You will be!” The harshness of the words seemed to surprise even Rivka. When she spoke again her voice was steadier. “You will be,” she said again. “It’s your due, Ester. You’re Portuguese. When life opens a door you’ll marry. Any would. And you’ll forget the rabbi, as the rest of them do already.”
At a soft shuffling on the stone floor, they both turned.
The rabbi had emerged from his room. He stood in his thin robe, the bones at his throat painfully sharp, a tuft of white emerging from the collar of his undergarment. Softly he addressed Rivka. “It’s for the furthering of my wishes that she reads at night.”
Rivka looked stricken.
“Ester studies at night,” the rabbi continued, “that in the day she might better fulfill my needs for a learned scribe. So great is her devotion to my unworthy house of learning.” He turned his face toward Ester now, and it seemed to her that it was as innocent as a child’s. “But, Ester, I owe my apology. I was careless, and failed to make plain that you must not do this. Read only during the day, please, for not only does candlelight burn the household’s income, but too-prolonged study withers the bloom of health.”
Rivka’s voice had thickened. “You’ve known of her night reading?” she said slowly.
The rabbi’s smile was weightless. “A man of my age sleeps little, even when cared for as though he were a king.” At Rivka’s silence, he continued. “I have not merited such care as you offer me, Rivka. I’m grateful.”
Rivka closed her eyes for a long moment as she stood opposite the rabbi. Then she opened them and, without a word to Ester, retreated softly to the kitchen.
That morning the rabbi tutored pupils, and when alone he sat in his chair, seeming to sleep. Often Ester was on the verge of thanking him for what he’d done. But what words could express her gratitude? Instead she sat by his feet, stoking the fire that warmed him as he slept, rearranging the blanket when it slipped from his shoulders, replenishing the water in his cup, though he barely sipped it. So absorbed was she in these tasks that she nearly forgot Mary’s summons, and was still tugging the laces of her dress with one hand when she opened the door to Mary’s knock.
Mary, black curls carefully arrayed over powdered white shoulders, frowned at Ester’s drab dress. “That one again?” she said. “Well, all the better that we go to the dressmaker!” Turning back to squint at the street, she added, lightly, “Mother accompanied me to two gatherings this week, but says to tell you that you’ll now need a dress suitable for more than errands.”
Ester hesitated. Was this Mary’s way of telling her Catherine’s health was declining? She opened her mouth to ask—but Mary left no space for inquiry. Already she was leading Ester into the absurd coach—for who, in truth, required a coach to traverse the narrow cobbled streets of the city, when a person on foot could weave through a crowd in half the time? Yet Mary adored the conveyance.
As Ester settled on her usual bench, Mary launched into gossip. “Did you hear that Isabella Rodriguez said Pierre Alvarez is courting Rebecca Nones?” Having chosen the forward-facing bench as always, Mary spoke with eyes fixed on the traffic outside the coach’s window. “And did you hear, Pierre Alvarez wore perfumed gloves that made Rebecca sneeze, and because Rebecca hadn’t a kerchief on which to wipe her nose, when no one was minding her she dried her nose on a red-pollened flower he’d given? And after, Rebecca walked about with a red stain upon her nose—and none liked her well enough to brave her temper and tell her of it, not even her gallant Pierre—did you hear of it?”
So Mary spoke always, posing each declaration as a question, soliloquy in guise of conversation. Ester found it simplest to make no answer.
Now with a sudden glad cry, Mary rapped for the driver to stop. On the street were two girls from the synagogue—both well-dressed, though neither so expensively as Mary. Leaning from the window, Mary beckoned them into the coach. As they climbed up, they glanced with surprise at Ester seated opposite—then settled on either side of Mary in poses of eager attention. As the coach resumed its rolling, one of them—a round-faced girl called Emilia, with pretty, lush brown curls—complimented Mary’s gown and hair so thoroughly that even Mary began to look restless. Then, turning to Mary at such close quarters that Mary blinked, the girl said, “How is it, Mary, that you refused Joseph Levita? Isn’t it true his family brought him to visit in the hope of a match with you?”
Mary, recovered, smiled airily. “He was a pimple.”
On either side of Mary, the two girls’ eyebrows rose in disbelief. Le-vita and his family had made an appearance in synagogue a few weeks earlier. Ester herself had seen the young man in question, and he wasn’t ill-favored.
“Is it that he’s Venetian?” The other girl, sallow and thinner than Emilia, cut in. “My father would let me marry a Venetian Jew if he liked the man. Why didn’t yours?”
“Perhaps my father thought he wasn’t good enough,” Mary lilted. She was enjoying the game, but what lay beneath her coy words was murkier. If Rivka’s account of synagogue gossip last week was correct, the Levitas, under closer inspection, hadn’t proved as wealthy as the da Costa Mendeses had first believed. Mary’s father had dismissed the suit immediately, against Catherine’s wishes.
Emilia was staring at Mary. “Then who catches your fancy, if not Levita?” The coach rolled a moment in silence. “Not Maria Olivera’s cousin? Rebecca Cancio saw you speaking to him and his sister last time they came to London.”
Mary busily looked out the window, but the small, involuntary smile on her lips said she considered this one something other than a pimple.
“But he’s already promised to someone in Amsterdam!” Emilia exclaimed—not, Ester noted, without satisfaction. “Didn’t you know?”
Mary laughed lightly. But after they’d deposited the two girls at their destination some few streets beyond the synagogue, she sat back at her window with a loose sigh.
Later, while the dressmaker draped fabrics around Mary in her well-lit workroom, Mary gazed languorously at the nearest window, making only distracted answers to questions about pleating and the positioning of lace. Leaning to reach for her purse, she dragged it across the table by its strings—then put the purse to her lips and slowly bit the smooth wooden clasp open with her small even teeth in a gesture of such drowsy amorousness that even the dressmaker, her sealed lips bristling with pins, averted her eyes.
When it was Ester’s turn to mount the pedestal in her shift and be fitted for a busk and a dress, Mary sat on a cushioned stool and stared at Ester’s body with a childlike curiosity, a wishfulness set loose on her face as though she were a girl too timid to ask a question of an elder sister.
Finally, reaching to finger the linen at Ester’s knees, she said, “Do you think love real?”
It was the first true question Mary had asked her, and so surprising that Ester couldn’t help laugh.
“I mean,” Mary continued slowly, ignoring Ester’s laughter, “do you think love can be made to happen with whichever man our minds choose—so it’s a thing a lady may direct as she pleases? Or is it a thing outside control?”
The dressmaker, a neat and weathered woman with a silver-shot coiffure, had paused. But Mary disregarded her, all her attention now on Ester.
Quietly, the dressmaker resumed lacing a fencework of stays about Ester’s waist.
“Outside control,” Ester said slowly. “And so folly to seek.”