Ester’s face would not submit to her will.
“Hear me, Ester. I cannot be mother or shepherd to another soul. The world has crowded all but the last breath from me. I’ve no pity to spare for you, though you might merit it.” Catherine breathed. “I’ve no pity left,” she murmured, “for any on this earth.” A moment later she added simply, as though to explain something to herself once more, “It’s spent.”
“What of your husband?” Ester said. “He can help Mary.”
“My husband,” said Catherine, “will hardly think of Mary after I die. He remembers her but little now, while I am still living to remind him. So I require another to look after her—and I cannot entrust the task to a girl with her own prospects.”
A high laugh escaped Ester. “I have prospects, though it must surprise you. I have a suitor. And yet I’ve told the rabbi I refuse to marry.”
Catherine pursed her lips. “Then you’re a fool. How will you live?”
Ester said quietly, “I wish to study.”
There was a small sound of surprise from Catherine. After a moment, she lifted her walking stick and continued up the rise.
Slowly they climbed. To one side, behind bushes, the rustle of some struggle on the grass—a dim cry of ecstasy or dismay. The park was transformed; lanterns had been lit by figures gathered on the edge of the green, but the safety they promised was still distant, and the calls of those who held them were remote and the names they called as unrecognizable as if in another tongue. Ester moved through the dark, matching Catherine’s slow pace; whatever fate might bring, they would be at its mercy.
Abruptly, Catherine stopped. “I have seen it,” she said, “though perhaps never so brazenly as you might wish to imagine. A woman may in some circumstances acquire what she desires without the protection of a man.” She regarded Ester. “If you find a way to live as you wish, unnatural though it might be, you’ll carry on your shoulders the weight of a thousand wives’ wishes. Though aloud all may curse you as a very devil.”
The boughs overhead had nearly dissolved against the sky. In the dark, Catherine’s face and her mask seemed indistinguishable.
“Then look for any window that opens, Ester.” A soft, rasping cry for breath. “Any crack through which you may lever yourself.” In the silence, then, a rustle of cloth: Catherine, leaning hard on her walking stick with one arm, was raising the other. Cool, trembling fingertips brushed Ester’s cheek, once, before falling away.
They reached the verge of the park, and left it behind.
From the da Costa Mendeses’ coach window, her shoulder jostling gently against Catherine’s, Ester watched the city settle into night. On the bench across from them, as they bumped through the streets, Mary peered curious and sullen, first at her mother, then Ester. Outside, the winds that had whipped London into unrecognizable form had subsided at last, and all was still.
When she entered, the rabbi was by his fire as though he’d not moved in all the hours since her departure. Rivka had piled his hearth high and the room danced with an orange light not customary for this hour.
“God has preserved you,” the rabbi said hoarsely. “I could not rest.”
She closed the heavy door softly behind her. Slowly she hung her cloak on a peg.
With effort the rabbi stood from his chair. His form was skeletal, and it unfolded painfully. “What angel saw you safe past the thieves and cutthroats?”
“I won’t marry,” she said.
There was sorrow on his face. “It’s as I thought,” he said. “Ester. I’ve wronged you.”
She said nothing.
For a long time there was no sound other than the hollow rushing of the fire. Then the rabbi groped for the walking stick that leaned against the wall. “As you are silent, so will I be.”
Slowly he began his progress across the room to the hall, to his dim bedroom.
She wanted to follow at his heels, light a lamp he didn’t need, set the pillow beneath his head. Instead she lit a rushlight in the hearth and, holding it before her with wintry hands, climbed the stair.
15
December 17, 2000
London
She lifted the page closer to read the too-faint printout.
Here I begin.
She had, right here on her desk, a piece of autobiographical writing by a seventeenth-century Sephardic Jewish woman. Aaron had been correct, of course: this was a remarkable find, she’d known it the moment she’d heard his final telephone message yesterday morning.
Only that message could have compelled her out of the torpor she’d fallen into upon her return from Dr. Hammond’s office. As always, she’d taken the first appointment of the morning so as to be past his chastisements early; she’d planned to drive straight from his office to the rare manuscripts room. Instead, leaving Dr. Hammond’s office, she’d been seized by an insurmountable fatigue that left her scarcely able to focus on the road. She drove clutching the wheel, only half aware of the other cars drifting around hers—a sudden fragility caging her as though she must not, at all costs, be jostled into reconstructing Hammond’s words—or worse, the expression with which he’d said them. Without meaning to, she drove not to the university but to her home. She climbed the impossibly steep steps and unlocked the narrow door to her flat, every movement leaden. In truth, she hadn’t slept properly for weeks. Was her fatigue the crack Dr. Hammond had perceived in her armor, his cue that today was the day to press his point at last, insisting that she comprehend? She entered her flat. Gained the kitchen and then the long, cool hallway. Reached, finally, the bedroom, where she lowered herself onto the bed she’d slept in for forty years. What if—her thoughts turned slowly, shadows moving in the depths—she didn’t go to her office today? What if she simply chose not to face the mountain of exhilarating, terrorizing documents she now knew she wouldn’t have the strength to climb? Shutting her eyes, she let the clock’s tick slowly fill her hearing to the brim; and under its weight she finally capitulated, and slipped into the sleep so many nights had denied her.
It had taken that third message—the one in which Aaron impatiently recited several lines from a document he urgently wanted her to see—to rouse her. She’d steeled herself into her shoes, into her car, through traffic. Greeting him at her office, she’d barely been able to speak, let alone find the proper words to acknowledge what was plain: Yes. He was right. Yes. This cross-written document he’d just discovered did violate everything that was known about the lives, literacy, and worldview of seventeenth-century Sephardic women.
She owed Aaron Levy, at the least, a strong show of appreciation. Instead, right here in her office, seated opposite him, in full awareness of the potential of the discovery they were making together, she’d lost him.