“Why are you here?” Ester said.
“Upon my father’s request,” Manuel said, “the sailors agreed to allow my brother some hours to order his things and make farewells. Alvaro asked a servant of our house to bear the news here. But I found it more practical to bear the news here myself. Perhaps I was in need of some air.” He looked at Ester steadily now, his gaze carrying a message she could not read. Then he laughed, breaking the spell. For a moment his mouth formed a tight bud. “I believe my brother hopes for a farewell from you before he departs.”
There was something about Manuel that arrested Ester. His thick pale lips, those brass-colored eyes under the fringe of dark, glossy hair. The straight nose and high cheekbones, the heavy frame of his face looming above her where she sat. He was a man, yes—but also a boy. She could almost imagine him at an age of bewilderment, watching the world silently through those strange eyes of his . . . slowly arriving at his first resounding conclusions.
Rising, she tucked the page she’d been writing under a stack of blank pages and took her cloak from its peg.
“Ester,” said the rabbi. “Carry a note from me to the boy’s father. Say, Alvaro’s nature may sin, yet the sin is not against you. Let the sins of VaYikra be dealt with by God and not by man. Tell him”—briefly the rabbi’s voice rose, then grew hoarse. “Tell him, It is not for us to stone the sinner, for we are not the holy ones who dwelt in the desert, but to trust in God to punish or forgive. Write these words, Ester.” The rabbi’s voice shook. “Write, The exile you force on him will be his death.”
The HaLevy home was known to her, though she’d never entered it. Its brick front surveyed the street: severe windows, a peaked roof made of slate, not thatch. A showpiece of wealth.
Her hand had not yet touched the ornate knocker when Alvaro himself opened the door. He was dressed in white like a penitent, his loose shirt only half-tied at the neck and hanging over his hose and breeches.
He greeted her without words, gesturing her into the house’s entry, so she understood that there was no time for pleasantries. Standing against the wall as though he required its support, his blouse draping his still-boyish body, he might have been a painter’s portrait of a lovesick youth—yet his eyes were desperate. She saw that his spirit was already shackled to the deck of an outbound ship, the solid rock of his life slipping past reach.
From deep in the house she heard the irregular thump of activity. Then a pall punctuated by a clatter of words from a back room—the sounds of a household furiously rending itself. A thin, white-haired servant emerged from an inner doorway; startled by Ester’s presence, she stared for an unguarded instant. Her face plainly expressed her anguish—though whether the son’s deeds or the father’s troubled her more, Ester could not guess.
Ester beckoned to the woman and handed her the rabbi’s note. “For Benjamin HaLevy.”
The woman pursed her lips and disappeared, note in hand.
“You wished to see me,” Ester said to Alvaro.
“Yes.” He nodded. “It’s just, I need”—he spread his hands. What he needed none but his father could offer. He lowered his head. “You’ve always been kind to me. Perhaps you know a psalm.”
She wouldn’t deceive him. Nowhere in her twenty-seven years had tidings reached her of God stepping from the pages of the holy books to guard the paths of the righteous. What hope were words of divine protection for Alvaro then, who’d sinned according to those same books?
He drew a full breath, held it, then continued. “You know now what I am.” He raised his head and let the full weight of his trust rest on her eyes. “I wished always to tell you. Now you know it. My father’s house is cursed with a buggerer.” At the word his face fell, but he continued. “I’ll ask no blessing, then, for what blessing does one such as I deserve?” For a moment his voice strengthened so she could almost believe the brave words; then she saw Alvaro’s pooling eyes.
A soft tread in a nearby passageway. The servant to whom Ester had given the rabbi’s note entered. “Here,” she said. Gently she placed the rabbi’s letter back into Ester’s hand.
“Isn’t there any reply?”
The woman, her gray hair tied in a dry knob at the back of her neck, shook her head. “None.” Her face worked for a moment, as though she wished to say something else entirely. “None at all,” she said, and then departed, the look of tenderness she cast back over her shoulder unseen by Alvaro.
Alvaro stood perfectly still, listening, as the servant’s footsteps faded. The sight of him, motionless in the shadowed entryway, made Ester shudder—and for an instant she was taken by the tall gray waves of the long sea passage that awaited him, the bitter wind, the unforgiving order of a ship at sea. She saw in her mind Alvaro’s still-youthful face, the pale down on the lobes of his ears, the nails of his fingers bitten to the quick—Alvaro, stilled by a fear so deep, it was indistinguishable from prayer. She saw his body heaved over a rail by strangers. Soft limbs spiraling through lightless depths, away from the distant, shimmering surface.
She forced words from her lips. “This blessing,” she said to him. “To dream such glad dreams that you wake laughing.”
She watched him surface to her words.
From deep in the house, a servant’s summons.
To her surprise, Manuel awaited her on the street. As she walked past him with a tight nod, he fell into step beside her.
Down St. Helen’s Street they walked. His manner was serious, as though he’d some important business to conduct. After one brief glance at him, Ester didn’t look again; she’d no notion what his presence signified and didn’t wish him the pleasure of seeing her confusion.
They passed Fletcher’s Hall, and turned onto Bury Street. By now she could not deny she was walking home with him as her escort. He strode beside her in his fine cloak, slowing his steps when necessary to match hers. He clasped his hands heavily behind his back, as though he were an older man, ponderous with his own success.
At the corner of Creechurch Lane she stopped. She was on the verge of opening her mouth to curse Manuel for a killer.
“A day,” he said, “of much turbulence.”
She checked his face for remorse. There was none. Only the fatigued practicality of a young man who’d already accepted the necessities of this world.
“A cruel punishment,” she said, “for a harmless soul. Why must your father dispatch him in such a manner?”
Manuel smiled—indulgently, she thought, as though addressing a foolish child. “You champion him now. Yet I saw you spurn his puppyish admiration.”
Ester shook her head violently—she would not be implicated, if that was Manuel’s purpose. “I never wished him harm. And I didn’t know he wanted to marry me only in order to mask what he was.”
Manuel laughed. It seemed to her that he took a very long while with his laugh, his eyes raised to the upper galleries of the houses and on past them to the city wall and the distant silhouette of the tower. Then he lowered his gaze to evaluate her again in that manner that had struck her before as detached, but now seemed more like the gaze of a merchant carefully watching the horizon, whence approached a ship in which he had made a certain investment. “He was never your suitor,” he said. “I am.”
She laughed.
He said nothing.
“You lie,” she said.
He shook his head, enjoying her anger.
“But you dislike me,” she said.
Only now did his smile soften, and turn rueful. “Perhaps I did dislike you, before. But such feelings are changeable, and the thing I first disdained in you is the very thing in which I now take greatest interest.”
After a moment Ester mustered her voice. “Is this a proposal of marriage? If so, it is a dry one.”