This week had brought two more replies to Thomas Farrow’s missives. Each time the letter carrier’s knock sounded, Ester had been close by to answer, slipping the letters into her pocket until she’d leisure to read. Although she’d not yet received the reply she most hoped for, an exchange seemed to be beginning at last with Van den Enden, and with Lodewijk Meijer. Both their replies, to be sure, were still cautious, demanding further information: “With whom have you studied this matter?” “Are you in agreement with Hobbes in questions of providence?” The brusque tone of her own letters, Ester was certain, had given rise to such chary answers. Yet it was impossible to discipline herself to speak otherwise. Even in Latin she’d no patience for sentences that simpered like a bent neck, and that required study to determine where lay the cloying ambition, where the hinted insult. Mine is by nature but a shadow of your more perceptive mind, and so I pray you forgive this query and understand it to be that of a mind that has not glimpsed the light yours has apprehended . . . she could not bring herself to indulge in such serpentine speech.
Slowly she turned the pages of Philosophical Transactions. Like air, like water, such conversation belonged to these men of the Royal Society for the taking—while for the sake of her own halting correspondence she must deceive and betray, and labor for each flare of light to read by. And yet here were men parading their hypotheses and conclusions as though thoughts did not need to be clothed, but could walk about in the world naked and fearless. Her envy warred with her wonder over such folly—for should the king die, or should his fondness turn from one style of Christianity to another, these words lettered on the page might loft their authors’ heads on pikes.
At a soft sound, she slapped the volume shut in her lap.
Bescós stood, his eyes upon her—in her absorption in her reading she’d failed to note his entry. Slowly he finished drying himself, using a towel the servant Hannah had surely provided at the door. He rubbed the back of his neck. Then his dark hair, rain-slicked where the hat hadn’t covered it. The beard that trailed down his neck to the base of this throat.
The smile on his lips was no smile. “Such a melancholy Jewess.”
He lowered himself onto the cushion beside her. The frame of the divan creaked as it took his weight. She could smell his wet hair, feel the heat off him, see the pores of his skin.
She weighed the bound pages in her hands as though they were naught to her. “Yours?” she said.
He glanced, and she saw the surprise register. “The proceeds of the Royal Society?” He gave a short laugh. “Thomas’s.”
The possibility that Thomas might read such material hadn’t occurred to her. Had she been a fool to sign her letters to his name, certain he’d be unknown to the thinkers she addressed?
But Bescós continued. “Thomas would as soon adorn the privy with those pages as read them. Yet his father, as much a fool in his own way, sends such publications with the fervent hope some further education will persuade Thomas to leave the theater and revive the family name. I’ve little doubt Thomas carried it here in order to hand it over to me and be rid of it.” A faint amusement crossed his face; then vanished, replaced by impatience.
There was something about Bescós today. He was distracted, as though waiting for the pans of a set of scales to stop moving so he could read the outcome.
Abruptly, then, distaste weighted the corners of his broad mouth. “A man tires of such silence as yours. Have you no polite chatter to offer a guest? Is there no lady of the court or stage you wish to insult while claiming to praise her? No tale of culinary adventure with which you wish to regale me?”
She kept her voice level. “I speak but poorly the looping language of coquettes, if that’s your meaning.”
“Yet you fancy you speak this language?” he gestured, mockingly, at the volume on the cushion beside her. “Why,” he said, “does a woman read what she cannot comprehend?”
Outside, two flickers in quick succession. She braced herself for the sound.
“I know a maiden of fine quality,” he said. “She understands her place in this world, and she’d sooner clothe a monkey in lace than trouble herself with such a tome.”
Some dissatisfaction was working on Bescós, though it seemed to Ester that the source of his discontent was not the maiden herself. Was it better to ignore his dangerous mood or attempt to disarm it?
She said to him, “Does her father permit the marriage?”
Too late she saw that she should have kept silent—that in presuming to understand him she’d crossed some forbidden divide. She felt the sudden weight of his attention, trained on her now as it had not been before.
“Her father,” Bescós said flatly, “wishes her to reach an age of greater maturity. While she possesses more maturity in a strand of her hair than he in his whole head. But I see you think yourself entitled to inquire into the affairs of your betters.” With a swift motion, he took the volume from Ester’s lap, his great hand pushing hers roughly aside. He flipped the pages. “I have easily found the principle,” he read aloud, “and ’tis this, that this Comet moves about the Great Dog, in so great a circle, that that portion, which is described, is exceeding small in respect of the whole circumference thereof, and hardly distinguishable by us from a straight line.”
He turned to her. “You fancy yourself able to understand such words?”
She feared to answer.
“You do,” he said. “I see it. They say the Jews steal ideas as well as silver and blood, and now you show me it’s the truth. Yet do you believe this notion printed here? That your eyes might deceive you, and the straight line they show you might in truth be part of a circle beyond your comprehension?”
She said nothing, unsure whether further answer might provoke him.
“I believe in my eyes,” he said, watching her. “And all the senses God gave me, each one of which proves His word.”
She saw that he spoke of God not with passion, but ownership. God, for now, would be the servant of Bescós’s restlessness.
“I like not these men of science,” he said. “They deny God by worshiping the mind in his stead.”
She knew she oughtn’t. “Yet,” she said, “is man not endowed with a mind so that he might better understand God’s work, and even help prevent unnecessary suffering among God’s creatures?”
“Ho!” He clapped his hands together twice, loudly. She cringed at the sound. “When I was a boy,” he said, “my father sent me to the priests to learn. Do you know what they taught?”
Her gaze found refuge in the rain, still beating against the window.
“They taught that there is no such thing as unnecessary suffering. God’s punishments are medicinal.” He leaned closer, as though inviting her confidence. “The priests schooled us too about Jews. They said you think suffering unnecessary because you don’t believe it purges the soul, and you believe in no afterlife.”
She spoke softly. “I don’t know the theology you speak of.”
He brushed away her denial with a lazy wave. “No matter,” he said. “The priests will argue it most persuasively with you in their time.”
She saw he picked up and set down a threat like a plaything. Was he dangerous, or simply a man who wished to appear so? “There’s no Inquisition in this country,” she said sharply.
His smile completed her sentence: for now. “Your friend John,” Bescós said, “is of a sudden strangely fond of the Jews. But then, he’s fond of all hunted things, and is fond most of all of scolding the hunters for their cruelty. Yet I’ll tell you what I tell him: the king of England is a Protestant as a butterfly is a caterpillar—that is, only for a time.”
She rose, her face hot, and stepped away from Bescós. “You should leave this house.”
“I think I won’t,” he said. “I find I enjoy your manner of conversation after all.”
A knock at the door, and Hannah hurried to answer, passing Ester and Bescós with a wary glance as though they were yet another scandalous pair in need of supervision.
John entered. “Ester,” he called, even as he handed his wet things to the servant. His voice was light, his happiness at seeing her evident. Yet she was too discomposed to answer, or to do more than glance at his confused face. And before he could inquire about her mood, a flurry of laughter approached from the back of the house, and on its tide Mary and Thomas—Thomas with a bottle in one fist and the other about Mary’s waist. Greeting his companions as though it were his own home he welcomed them to, Thomas gestured all to sit. “What’s news?” he called.
“John’s only now arrived,” said Bescós, “so he’s been deprived of a most learned conversation. Mary’s companion and I have been discussing the recent comet. And the gentle correction of the Jews’ errors at the hands of the Inquisition.”