Mary’s nostrils were wide. Her eyes traveled from Bescós to Thomas. But Thomas was occupied with the sweetmeats Hannah had brought—these displayed with obvious carelessness on a silver salver, as though to make plain the servants’ opinion of the quality of the persons Mary had brought to her father’s residence.
Thomas selected a large candied nut. “Excuse Bescós for behaving badly,” he said. Then, hesitating before placing the sweetmeat on his tongue, he added, “Or, don’t excuse him.” His eyes were bright as though something at last had pricked him. Seeming not to note Mary at his side, he chewed, then picked up another nut and, waving it widely as he spoke, addressed Bescós. “You jest about my study at Oxford, my friend. But what I learned from Harvey is no jest, though perhaps it wasn’t the lesson Harvey aimed to teach. My head was never fit, true, for his teachings about the humors or the circulation of the blood. But my head is good enough to remember this: I held the man in respect, and I saw the world abuse him.” He gestured with the sweetmeat. “Harvey was correct, all now say, about the workings of the body. And yet what of it? His life was misery. He was called crack-brained, his papers were looted in war. Forty years of work lost. It wrecked his faith in man. So”—Thomas waved the sweetmeat once more—then abruptly dropped it back onto the tray, and showed Bescós his empty palms. “This is the lesson I choose, of all Harvey’s teachings: if the world cannot respect such a man, then the effort to be respectable is worthless.” Locating the bottle of canary at his knee, Thomas reached for it and began to raise it to his lips, then paused midway. “It’s not only sloth that makes me as I am, Bescós, though you know well my love of sloth. Look closer and you’ll see I am as principled as any Jesuit—I simply obey a different religion.” For an instant he met Bescós’s eyes. Then, with a snort, he squeezed Mary’s knee and, as she shrieked, lifted the bottle to his mouth.
“Go,” Mary said airily to Bescós. “Go now.”
Bescós stood. Amusement flickered on his face as he addressed Mary. “You’re rid of me. But tell me—next time Thomas visits, shall your father also be present? For surely it’s mere happenstance that Thomas hasn’t yet been granted the honor of a meeting—and nothing to do with the fact that his beautifully rich Jewess is deceiving her father?”
“Leave her be,” Ester said.
Bescós turned to her. “Ah. More speech from the princess of womanly decorum.”
“If I was ever schooled in it,” Ester said, “it did not adhere to my spirit.”
“Perhaps,” he said with a cool stare, “you have a spirit like a hot coal, so all it touches shrivels from it.”
Mary let out a muffled sound.
Thomas stood. This time he had a hand on Mary’s shoulder. “Come, Bescós, what harm are we to you?”
Ester saw Mary’s face alter. Out of all the rest, the word “we” seemed to have entered her spirit.
“You’re merely out of temper, my friend,” Thomas said. And he gave a loud laugh to show they were all in fellowship and no insult would be taken. “And you’ll come to see this is natural love.” He squeezed Mary to his side, but without looking at her. “But when you return to your merrier temper you must bring your bride here to drink with us.”
At the mention of his beloved, Bescós slowed. “She’s too good for you,” he said. But then, a gentler humor returning to his face for the first time, he added, “I’ll bring her to you, Thomas. So she can see the poor company I was forced to keep before discovering hers.” He turned to the others. With an inscrutable look he said, bowing, “My apologies.”
“Now here’s my friend, returned to himself,” laughed Thomas. “Come aloft, then.” And together the two men walked toward the door—Thomas with an expression of relief that made Ester stiffen.
There were men who possessed a force of vitality and certainty that emboldened all who kept company with them, whether for good or for ill. Her brother had once been such, and Manuel HaLevy. Bescós was another.
For all that he might deny it, Ester saw that Thomas had chosen Bescós as his planet to follow. And what might appear to the eye to be moving in a straight line and of its own accord was, in fact, traveling a long orbit around a more powerful body, at every moment gauging its distance to the object of its admiration.
Mary would not be able to see this. She would believe only the most direct evidence of her senses: Thomas kissed her. Thomas groped about the tabs of her bodice, relentless until he gained entry. Therefore he loved her above all others and would do all in his power to protect her.
John was studying Mary. Concern like Ester’s own lit his face, as though he too could see what wasn’t visible to the naked eye.
“On the next fair Lord’s Day, then?” Thomas was saying over his shoulder to Mary, who sat moored on the couch. “And no fear, our combustible Bescós shan’t come, he’ll repair to wooing of his own.” With this he cuffed Bescós’s shoulder—but carefully, Ester noted. “And when you’ll see him next he’ll be in merry fettle.”
Mary hesitated, then nodded.
To John, Thomas said, “You’ll play companion to our companion?”
Her eyes found John’s. What excursion was being planned? She hadn’t been listening to Mary’s chatter earlier.
John smiled at her bewilderment. “If she’ll have me,” he said. To Ester he whispered, “The river.”
Ester felt herself pink.
Rising from the couch, Mary laughed loud. “Oh, she’ll have you, I believe!”
Ester straightened the tray of sweetmeats on the table.
“See how they shy to look at each other,” Thomas sang out.
Ester closed her eyes to the rain of laughter. She heard Mary kiss Thomas noisily on the lips, and his hum of satiety, and the light admonitions with which Mary accompanied Thomas to the door in Bescós’s wake.
The rain outside was easing; she could hear its faint spatter from the drainpipe outside, and the shuffle of boots on wet stone. Mary, lingering at the door, called her farewells to Thomas.
John had stayed. She could feel him standing a few paces from her. The house was quiet.
“I’m sorry for his words,” John said softly. “Bescós. I’ll speak reason to him.”
He was looking at her, his cheeks as pink as she felt her own to be. “I believe his grievance is with others, not with Jews, though today he seized on the subject.”
“Yet what does harm,” she said, “is not what truly merits a man’s anger, but what he seizes on instead.”
John hesitated. Then he nodded, once, as though pledging himself to something.
“The next fair Lord’s Day, then,” he said. He bowed and kissed his own hand and, stepping toward her, kissed her lips, lightly, as she’d seen Englishmen do with a woman who was their equal.
Mary shut the door behind him. Ester busied herself tidying the cushions.
“Perhaps now,” Mary lilted, “you won’t be so lonely.”
Gently, she set a cushion down. She ought to speak reason to Mary once more, she knew. Thomas could bring only danger. Mary’s virtue would become a shuttlecock batted about to the delight of all, if it were not so already—for if Mary thought the servants were fooled by the presence of a companion such as Ester, then Mary estimated her servants amiss.
Yet how to speak reason, when it seemed now to elude Ester herself?
She addressed Mary in Portuguese. “Loneliness . . .” she began. But how to say it—how to stem this thing in her with words—this warmth filling her so steadily it threatened to expand beyond the confines of her body? This wish to be saved from the path she’d chosen. “Loneliness”—she spoke each word of the lie like a hammer stroke—“doesn’t trouble me.”
With an agitated motion, Mary tugged a wall hanging into place. “I envy you then,” she said, “and pity you. I envy you that you won’t ever feel the pains that a woman with a heart feels. And I pity you that with such disdain for life you won’t marry.”
She hadn’t expected such words could sting. “I don’t disdain life,” she said quietly. “It’s only . . .”
Mary turned. “What?” she said softly.
“I don’t believe marriage will offer me what I desire.”