She shook off the assault. In its wake, a reverberating emptiness.
It was clear, wasn’t it, that seeing the papers had undone her. Why else this return of long-dead things?
The soft ticking of the electric heater. A postgraduate she’d never met, perhaps forty years her junior, stood opposite her desk. He was watching her, and his concentration was complete, as though he were hearing everything: all that she’d told, and all that she hadn’t.
She had not yet invited Aaron Levy to sit, she realized. “The Interregnum period,” she said, in answer to the question he hadn’t asked. Her voice came out more weakly than intended. She gathered herself and continued. “The first document I saw dates from the autumn of 1657.”
He gave a hum of recognition. 1657. The early days of the readmission of Jews to England, after nearly four centuries of official expulsion.
“The university’s ability to acquire the papers,” she said, “will depend on the whim of the vice chancellor, the disposition of the university librarian, and of course on the Eastons’ cooperation. It’s the Eastons I’m least certain of. While a rabbi’s letters hiding out under their staircase will certainly be a curiosity the Eastons will enjoy recounting over wine, that isn’t the history they’re interested in juxtaposing in this gallery of theirs. They’re being polite about it, to be sure. But I’ve seen their sort of cooperation before. It doesn’t last. And—”
“What’s in the documents?” he cut in.
“The documents, as I’ve said, are from the period of—”
“Yes,” he said, suddenly animated, “but what have you read?”
“It appears to me,” she said, slowing her speech to underscore his interruptions, “that one Rabbi HaCoen Mendes, apparently elderly, came here from Amsterdam and set up housekeeping with a small retinue in London in 1657. As far as what I have read, Mr. Levy, it’s a copy of a letter this Rabbi HaCoen Mendes sent to Menasseh ben Israel.” She paused to let the name sink in, and was gratified to see Aaron straighten in surprise. “A remarkable letter,” she continued. “Written just before Menasseh’s death. Also, a leather-bound prayer book, printed in Amsterdam in Portuguese and Hebrew in 1650.” She hesitated. “I can already say it’s significant material. The letter alone, even if it proves to be the only legible document in the entire set, addresses Menasseh in quite personal terms, not to mention confirming several things about the reestablishment of the English Jewish community that have been the province of sheer speculation. I believe this to be a most fortunate discovery.”
His arched eyebrows said Understatement.
She pushed on. “This finding is to be kept confidential until the university has finalized the acquisition. I’ve let the appropriate people know in no uncertain terms that they ought to do this and do it quickly.” Though it had meant asking Jonathan Martin’s help—then standing by silently as he verbally preened his feathers about the funds and political capital at his disposal. “Provided the acquisition is successful,” she said, “the university’s conservation lab will work on the documents, after which we should be able to study them through the library.”
“So,” he said slowly, “we don’t have access to the papers until they’re acquired and processed by the lab?”
“On the contrary.” She breathed. “It seems I’ve obtained permission for a three-day review of the documents in situ, before they’re removed to be assessed.”
He looked at her curiously. Slowly, then, his gaze moved past her, to the hearth. Then above it, to the framed sketch that hung there, its lines hasty but clear: the profile of a flat-topped mountain standing alone in a rock-strewn desert.
It was a silhouette her colleagues on the history faculty didn’t comment on—to them, surely, it was merely an anonymous mesa in some anonymous desert. But a Jew—an American Jew who’d no doubt been to Israel on one of those self-consciously solemn tours of heroism and martyrdom—would recognize Masada. And would assume that any non-Jewish British professor who cared to put the silhouette of Masada over the hearth was guilty of a romanticized philo-Semitism—or, worse, the barbed sentimentality of those who poeticized the martyrdom of the Jews.
When Aaron turned back to her there was amusement in his expression. Let him believe what he would, she told herself. Even were she to explain every last piece of it, he’d never understand why someone like Helen might keep a sketch of Masada across from her desk where she was forced to face it every day . . . a framed reminder to chasten her, should she indulge the notion that she might have embraced a different life. And a reminder too of the sole faith that still offered her a semblance of comfort, so long after she’d stopped believing in comfort—the faith that history, soulless god though it was, never failed to offer what must be understood.
And because history cared not at all if the negligent left its missives unread, she insisted on caring. She, Helen Watt, picked up each piece of evidence—she’d devoted her life to picking up each piece of evidence, retrieving the neglected minutiae of long-ago lives. Reconstituting a vessel shattered by a violent hand.
Still, an unpleasant sensation lingered, as if she’d just given something intimate over to Aaron Levy—as if he could somehow sense all that the sudden appearance of these documents seemed to have shaken loose in her. She kicked the feeling away. She was not such a fool—not yet, at any rate—as to be so easily unseated by a resemblance . . . nor to think it gave a stranger the power to sully what mustn’t be sullied.
“Do you follow what it is that I require?” she said. “I’m in need of an assistant capable of working efficiently and to high standards.”
She braced for the obvious question: what was her rush? Even a postgraduate would know that three days’ time was too little for real scholarship—and that ultimately it was Sotheby’s opinion, not theirs, that would persuade the university to purchase the papers. Nor could a scholar of Helen’s age, less than a year from mandatory retirement, plausibly have illusions about altering the course of her career by pushing for rogue access to documents that hadn’t yet been catalogued. She readied her rebuttal: it was the documents and the documents alone that mattered—and it was for the documents’ sake that Helen Watt had demanded these three days. Manuscripts had lain undisturbed more than three hundred years. They awaited the touch of human hands. Now that the discovery had been made, delay was unconscionable.
Unconscionable.
A clear, rational word.
Behind it, though, floated another truth. Uneasily, she forced herself to acknowledge it: the only real urgency here derived from an unwell woman’s need to avoid delay. From this ominous feeling that had begun in her the instant she’d first seen the documents: the astonishing sensation that her mind—her one refuge amid all the world’s tired clamor—was tinder.
To her surprise, though, Aaron seemed to have decided not to challenge her motives. “I’ll do it,” he said. His head tilted, he gave another lofty smile, adding, “I believe I can free up the next three days.”
She almost laughed, so evident was his need to declare his importance.
Slowly she set her two hands on her desktop. Her right hand, for the moment, was still. Enemy hands—she let the phrase ring loud in her mind.
She rose. His eyes fell to her cane, which she reached for with intentional vigor: nor was her failing health his concern.
When his eyes met hers again, she felt his deliberate indifference.
She let him pass, then closed the door firmly behind them. He walked toward the street and didn’t slow to accommodate her. Her cane sounded a hollow rhythm as she followed him, his step light, his tall frame taking possession of the hall.
They would work together in pursuit of whatever it was their lot to discover. He didn’t like her. But neither did he pity her. At least there was that.
2
November 15, 1657
9 Kislev, 5418