And, perhaps, Helen. Yes, Aaron thought: Helen had guessed.
And even now, as his adrenaline drained, as he stood before Helen Watt with his hands loose at his sides and his heart still pumping hard, Aaron was beginning to fear what he’d done. A stunning sobriety broke over him, washed him cold from head to foot. The arrogance that had always granted him a safe landing from every exercise of boyish temper had finally blown a hole in his career that could not be patched. Darcy would hear of his behavior. The question of whether to continue his studies might not even be in his hands. What in him had desired this, had inexorably pushed toward and past this brink?
Helen was talking. “Do you imagine, young Mr. Levy, that if I had been involved with a Jewish man I’d necessarily have some sort of blind possessiveness—that condescending colonialist viewpoint you and your cohort make your careers describing?” Her blue eyes were ice. Instinctively, he folded his arms across his chest to warm himself.
“I was,” she said. “I did love a Jewish man, Mr. Levy. Does that make me less capable of honest scholarship?”
Aaron concentrated on her words only with effort. They made no sense to him, just as it would have made no sense if she had told him she’d had a former life as an acrobat or circus clown. He wanted this conversation over. He had no idea how he’d gotten into it, he had no desire to hear whom or what Helen Watt had loved, if she was even capable of such a thing. He wanted only some quiet in which to marvel at what he’d done, and what it might mean.
“Well,” he said to Helen, “life is complex.”
She stared.
“Perhaps,” he muttered, “perhaps if he hadn’t broken it off with you, maybe—”
With a white hand, she gripped her cane. She stood with difficulty to her full height, somehow taller than Aaron remembered, and held herself there. “What makes you think, Mr. Levy, that he broke off with me?”
With a sensation like startling from a dream, Aaron woke to the knowledge that he had gone dreadfully wrong. He wanted to vomit.
“He didn’t leave me,” she said, with a peculiar intensity. “I left him.”
Aaron leaned hard against the wall as though it might open and offer an exit. He didn’t want to ask her why she’d left, or when, or what it mattered. He didn’t want to know. But he couldn’t draw his eyes away from her flushed, living face.
And so. With a few words she seemed to have chosen not to take it to the grave, after all, but to place its bare outlines in the hands of Aaron Levy—a youth without the maturity to see or care. A pointless, empty choice.
Over the years, in a process so gradual she’d barely felt its motion, she’d come to understand that beneath it all, Dror had been trying to tell her something. That he’d loved her enough to want to offer her a way out. It was she who’d wavered, who’d stolen, who’d run. It was she who’d chosen to believe in Muriel’s jealous words; in the soughing cypress tree that told her she was alien; in the jarring, distorted reflection of her own pale face in the barracks’ dented mirror.
Dror had followed her from his quarters. He’d called Helen’s name despite stares from all directions, he’d caught her arm despite the uniformed soldiers straining to hear—and he’d said to her in a low voice that was only for her, “This is who I am. This is my world. If you’ll have me despite everything, I’ll marry you in an instant.” He’d held her eyes as though the two of them weren’t on a stage before the entire base—before the entire empty, ringing desert. “I love you,” he said. “I haven’t said those words until now, because I’ve wanted to say them to only one woman in my life. I’ve wanted to be sure.” His face was fierce with concentration, his dark eyes fastened on her with unspeakable tenderness. His hands encircled her as she faced him. “Can you understand that?”
His hands on the small of her back. His face, broken open, shocking.
He stepped forward to seal her fast in his arms. Yet as his embrace closed on her, his trust seemed to take on physical weight, bearing down on her—and her heart raced hard and then harder, until it was loud in her ears and she feared it—a foreign-tongued stranger speaking too fast, too urgently, whether of love or terror she didn’t know. She’d broken away and left him there.
“Why?” Aaron Levy said, his mouth so dry the word barely sounded.
Helen looked at him for a long time, her face suffused by some combination of emotions he felt unqualified to understand. She turned, then, and gestured simply at the framed sketch above the mantle.
The faded silhouette of Masada offered itself, its mute lines clear testimony for those who knew to read what was written there. A stark choice. Self-immolation or slavery. Freedom or life, but not both.
“Because,” Helen said, “if we had been there, he would have cut my throat.”
Part 3
14
February 6, 1665
21 Shvat, 5425
London
With the toe of her shoe, Ester tipped away the loose half-cobblestone someone had used to anchor the pamphlet against the day’s unseasonably warm gusts. She picked it up from the rabbi’s doorstep and read it. A Proclamation from the London Mahamad.
Softly, she laughed. She needed no proof to know it was Mary who’d laid it at the door during the hour Ester had been out arranging to send a letter. As blithely as Mary changed dresses to suit her needs, so now had Mary fashioned herself as the Mahamad’s unofficial courier, delivering its decrees to the Jewish homes clustered on Bevis Marks and Bury Streets and Creechurch Lane—a task that, by no coincidence, obliged Mary to visit the door of every Jewish house, pausing where she wished to collect gossip or to make show of her charms to any who might have an unmarried cousin or nephew. Ester could imagine the distracted haste with which Mary would have deposited the pamphlet at the rabbi’s household, without troubling to knock. None of what she sought was to be found here.
Ester read the first page of the pamphlet, the Portuguese ornamented with the occasional Hebrew phrase. Be it known that the Jews of London shall not cavort at brothels in the manner of London society. Nor shall their women appear outside their domiciles with their flesh exposed, nor shall they allow strangers to see their hair but instead shall keep it covered on the byways of the city.