“Perhaps. But Mary—” How much to say? Did warning ever stay any hand from reaching for what it desired? What, indeed, had Catherine imagined Ester might do to correct Mary’s course?
“You asked once,” Ester said, “what my mother counseled me about love. But it was her life rather than her words that gave the plainest counsel. My mother was so angered by love’s failures, Mary, that she navigated with spite as her compass. But if you’d seen her, though she was beautiful, you’d have understood how easily the blade of spite turns in one’s hands, and cuts one’s own palms. So that one can grasp nothing, Mary. So that life is . . . no longer life.”
For a moment Mary seemed to be listening. Then she shrugged.
The ways women comforted one another were foreign to Ester. She’d had no sister, nor any friend bold enough to lay a finger on a troubled spirit for the purpose of salving it. Searching for words, she found only her own mother’s wine-rich voice—and was surprised to hear there, amid Constantina’s midnight litany of betrayal, a portion of mercy. Some women, Ester, like to believe their hearts are made of glass, which must shatter if they so much as think of a sin. Oh Ester, shatter! Even now, Ester could hear the wretched fury cracking her mother’s words. Such women believe their delicate hearts are a sign of virtue. But—Ester, know it!—they’re a sign of nothing more than luck. Ester, hear me. Only the strong-hearted live on, after luck dies.
What she wished to tell Mary now: a woman must have a heart made of something tougher, or she dies when a first blow comes.
What she wished to tell Mary: forge your heart.
But Mary stood apart from her, eyes still trained on the receding horizon of respectability. “Do you think my mother would be very angry with me?” she whispered.
For an instant Ester returned to the windy evening beneath the trees, the sound of Catherine da Costa Mendes’s labored breathing as she struggled up the park path. The tired gaze through the black velvet mask. Ester said, “Your mother didn’t linger on what she regretted. Nor should you.”
Mary stared down at the paving stones between her shoes. “I don’t regret it. Only—” She stopped herself, then glanced up at Ester once, searchingly, as though some suffocating weight, a cloak of heaviest lead, were only now settling on her.
She bit her full red lip and turned for the house.
The rabbi was waiting for her upon her return. He sat in silence until she’d hung her cloak.
“To Daniel Lusitano,” he said.
The rabbi had had Rivka set out fresh paper.
“My distress grows,” said the rabbi, “with every hour I meditate upon your letter.”
She lowered herself to the writing table.
“And so I hope you will forgive the crowding of one missive atop another, as my thoughts crowd like sheep at the pasture gate when a wolf prowls.”
She wrote.
“In my own darkness”—the rabbi continued, and she saw he’d rehearsed this letter in his mind—“I see perhaps too vivid a picture of the error that lies before your community in Florence. It is an error not only of soul but also of body, for they that muster for the next world before it has come can only betray their lives in this one. Long have I heard rumor of Sabbatai Zevi and yet I remained foolishly silent, and I can only rebuke myself that it required report of the threat from my beloved student to awaken me. What small help my thoughts may offer is ever at your disposal, and so I set forth the following additional arguments.”
Her hand slowed on the page. “You should rest,” she said. Could he hear the regret that snagged her voice? “I’m certain he’ll write to you again soon. You can add to your arguments later, without taxing yourself to compose them now.”
His thin nostrils quivered. “You’d now stand in my way?” he said.
She’d never seen him angered. He’d registered her betrayal, she saw, even if he didn’t know its nature.
“I’m ready to write,” she said.
Her quill moved across the page at the rabbi’s direction. The letter was long, full of careful argument, clarification, gentle insistence, and one flare of passion. To follow this man is to follow the very false god warned against in the commandments.
His distress was her doing. She wouldn’t pretend otherwise. He was the only one who had tolerated her desire to study, even loved it. And here she was, dissolving the ground he stood on. An impossible price for her freedom. As she wrote his words, she pledged: I’ll repay you.
And did her body still hum from the morning? Did John’s clear eyes, his living form, float through all the extremities of her body, did the sound of his laughter in the garden linger? She’d banish it. She hadn’t done this great wrong to the rabbi so that she could waste her freedom on distraction.
When he’d finished, his face was solemn. The effort of the letter had emptied him. What’s more, she understood now what he’d ventured: however carefully phrased, his words could only be understood as a charge to be levied against the esteemed leaders of the Florentine community. Yet for the sake of his student, and for the sake of stemming the tide of Sabbatai Zevi’s followers, he dared.
“Copy it now,” said the rabbi.
Her hand moved thickly on the page, composing a letter that would never be sent.
A knock upon the front door. Before Ester could rise, Rivka had emerged from the kitchen to open it. A muffled exchange, then a familiar figure swept into the rabbi’s study, his cloak still upon him.
“Manuel HaLevy,” Rivka announced flatly.
Ester hadn’t seen him since the day in the park, and then from a distance.
“Welcome,” said the rabbi, lifting his face. “It’s been a great while since we’ve learned together. I trust your business goes well?”
“Well enough,” said Manuel. “I trust you’re also well enough,” he added, a strange humor in his voice. His eyes took in the rabbi, the remnants of his tea, the fire. They shifted, appraisingly, to Ester.
She laid her hand atop the letter she was writing, though the ink stained her palm.
“My brother, you’ve perhaps heard, has been pressed this day,” said Manuel. “He leaves this hour for a warship of the king’s navy.”
The rabbi let out a sound of surprise. “But could your father not prevent this? Isn’t he a man of some standing, even among the Christians?”
“It was my father,” said Manuel, “who summoned the agents to seize him. They’re crewing a warship this day, one that goes to the Americas to oppose the Dutch, who menace our interests there.”
“It’s an enslavement,” said the rabbi, rising slowly from his chair. “No less.”
Ester looked from the rabbi, who still held to his chair with one hand for support, to Manuel. “What does this mean?” she asked.
The rabbi spoke heavily. “You may think I know nothing of the world, Manuel HaLevy. Yet when I lived in Amsterdam I yet heard tidings from those that traveled. The life of the impressed man is a life of labor so cruel that the men are shackled when the ship docks, so that they will not escape. A wretched life. And for one like your brother, without seafaring experience, it must be a short one, may God prevent his death. Can this be what a Jew wants for his son or his brother?” Letting go the chair, he took one step toward Manuel HaLevy, then stopped; his face, contorted, trained on a spot that was not precisely where Manuel stood.
Manuel shrugged, as though the rabbi’s fury had no power if not aimed true.
“It’s because of your brother’s nature,” said the rabbi. “Is it not?”
Manuel laughed softly. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”
From behind Manuel came a burst of Rivka’s thick Portuguese. “So you have no heart? The creatures of the deep will eat his body.”
Though he’d startled at her vehemence, Manuel didn’t so much as glance at Rivka. “Only God knows my brother’s fate,” he said to the rabbi. “And with a bit of labor my father believes Alvaro might remake himself as a new man. Or else fail to. But in either case he will do so far from my father’s house.”
Rivka, crossing swiftly to the rabbi, helped him to his chair.