The world was changed. She lingered to feel it. She sat at the edge of her pallet, legs crossed inside her shift, feeling the breathing warmth of her own body. Her palms and fingers flexed, and were miraculous. Her hands belonged, she thought, to her. The warm, smooth soles of her feet met absurdly, like clapping hands. She clapped them. Then rose, washed her face in the basin, and let the diamond-drops slide from her face down her neck. She dressed and descended the stair and stepped out of the house into the noon light like a creature emerged from a chrysalis long outgrown.
A breeze pressed at her skirts, riffled the hair she’d carelessly pinned at her neck—she laughed in London’s sooty, braying face. And walked to Mary’s house in a cool blaze of words: a rebuttal she might compose to Solomon Sivani’s pompous assertions about the nature of time in the Torah, which she and the rabbi had discussed more than a year ago. And then perhaps a letter to Lodewijk Meijer—for months ago, standing at a bookseller’s stall outside St. Paul’s, she’d read a preface authored by Meijer, and still recalled some of its phrases. She’d return to that same stall tomorrow; perhaps that volume or another was still there; perhaps through serving as Mary’s companion she might dream of mustering the coins to purchase it: de Spinoza’s Principia Philosophiae Cartesianae. The passages she’d read had seemed to her cautious in the extreme, with no trace of the heretic’s rumored audacities—but perhaps upon closer inspection she’d find some hidden fire in those pages. The thought carried her through the grand carved doors of the da Costa Mendes home, where a maid held out a hand for Ester’s cloak. As Ester gave it over, her own work-roughened hand brushed the maid’s, and Ester looked up into the blunt fatigue on the maid’s doughy face. Swiftly, before pity could overtake her, Ester turned away. To feel guilt over her own escape would drown her. She’d found a spar of wood to cling to, a thin chance at life; she couldn’t falter at the sight of yet another drowning stranger.
In the da Costa Mendeses’ sitting room, fragrant steam wisped from a china pot on a low mahogany table.
“You’re here at last.” Mary’s voice was bright with tension. The nervousness animating her powdered face made odd contrast with the dainty dress she wore: a rich blue threaded with pink silk ribbons at the bosom, cascading with lace below.
Thomas, lounging on the broad velvet seat beside which Mary stood, turned and offered Ester a wide grin. Then his gaze slid across the room, where Ester saw the cause of Mary’s distress. Standing in the tall window’s sharp light were Thomas’s two companions from the day before. Bescós stood with a teacup in his palm, surveying the tableau of indolent Thomas and straight-backed Mary. Beside Bescós stood John, looking at Ester now with a query in his mild eyes, his cup cooling untouched on a side table.
Thomas raised his cup. “To the beauty of our hostess,” he said. Ester sensed it wasn’t the first time he’d made this toast.
Mary attempted a smile, and failed.
Atop the virginal, beside a matched pair of celestial and terrestrial globes, lay a square of tent stitch—the needlework resting on the polished wood as though forgotten there by a casual hand. It was work of maddening delicacy, floss silk pulled through the thick white satin, with tiny silver spangles and seed pearls accenting the nearly finished design: a pattern of flowers, butterflies, caterpillars. Ester hadn’t known Mary’s restlessness could birth such elaborate handiwork.
Thomas, oblivious to this display of fine feminine needlework laid out for his benefit, was engaged in dragging an embroidered stool near with the toe of his fashionable boot, an exertion that would have proved unnecessary, had he merely leaned forward to take hold of it with his hand. Succeeding at last in maneuvering it to his satisfaction, Thomas propped a heel on the stitched cushion. Ester could see the sole had been patched.
Mary stepped forward, her eyes narrowing at Ester, her message clear. Turning to the pair at the window, her voice pretty yet each word a dagger, she said, “Ester and I didn’t expect your company as well as Thomas’s.”
Bescós laughed full and long. “Neither did Thomas,” he said. Then, without budging from the window, he fell back to surveying the room’s rich tapestries and elegant decorations. Indeed, Ester herself was struck by the wealth of the household. Only once, meeting Mary for an excursion, had she entered the da Costa Mendes house, and even then she’d ventured no farther than the house’s threshold. At all other times, Mary had collected her at the rabbi’s doorstep. Now she couldn’t help but stare as well: silver and tapestry, mahogany, richly framed art.
“We followed Thomas here,” said John, “so that we might fetch him back to the theater in time.” His speech sounded so softly in the room, it put Ester in mind of a Quaker preacher she’d once heard on a London street—a man who seemed to meditate before choosing each phrase, perched though he was on a crate amid the city’s traffic—as though he believed each utterance could do harm or good.
As John spoke he shook his head apologetically at Mary. “He departed our company at the inn with his mind already bright with wine. And he’s needed on stage in little more than an hour. The players have had to proceed already once without his part. Should he be absent once more, his position at the theater will be forfeit. So, we followed.”
Thomas, listening with a sleepy half smile, bit his thumb at John. His cheeks pink with whatever he’d drunk at the tavern, he caressed his short beard and returned to a survey of the room’s tapestries. Now and again he glanced over at Mary, who stood beside the virginal—but whatever designs he had on her seemed, for the moment, second to his study of her father’s furnishings. Thomas watched wealth, it struck Ester, the way some men watched a sunset.
There was a step in the hall: a matronly servant entering with a deliberate bustle. She crossed before the company to the teapot, lifted its lid, and said to Mary stiffly, “You’ll want more water, then?” Without awaiting an answer or bothering to shield her hand with a cloth, she took the hot pot to her bosom. “I suppose your father will be wondering, Mary, what guests stayed to enjoy his household’s hospitality, him being absent?”
Mary lay a finger along the etched metal surface of the terrestrial globe, rolled it slightly forward and back, then spun it, hard. The force of the motion set the stand’s metal legs rocking, raising an outsized din from the virginal, whose brass strings thrummed in a dire voice as though at some dreadful injury. The low notes died last.
“My father courts his new love,” said Mary, “as you well know, Hannah. He won’t return this fortnight.”
At these words the servant let out a small, pained sound. Whatever disapproval she might feel concerning the daughter’s behavior, it was clear her distress at the father’s exceeded it. She departed without another word.
Mary stepped quickly to Ester. Grabbing her arm, Mary hissed, “Take them to the garden.”
Ester glanced at Thomas. “Are you certain?”
Mary’s face gave the answer. She pointed to a passageway to the left.
Without fanfare Ester addressed the pair by the window. “To the garden,” she said.
Bescós pushed off from the wall with a short, sharp laugh.
She led the two men down a brief hallway and out a door that opened onto a tiered, well-kept patch of flowering shrubs, its merry pinks and winding ivies hemmed by thick walls. Exotic plants with delicate blossoms unfamiliar to Ester curved in modest rows; hedges of briar rose shaded the path. This must have been Catherine’s garden, abandoned by its maker during its winter sleep. Some invisible hand had kept up its faithful tending this spring. With a start, Ester realized whose. The pruning was inexpert: one hedge sheared too closely, another trimmed halfway up and then forsaken. Ragged, fitful weeding, the mute language of a daughter’s devotion.