“Why?” countered Mary.
For an instant, impelled by no logic she could fathom, Ester wished Mary to understand all she would lose were she to become a man’s possession. “For one such as me, perhaps to marry is to disdain life.”
“There’s no sense in your words,” Mary said with a wave; yet she was still listening, as though keen for Ester to cast light on something Mary needed to see more clearly.
“There was a woman,” Ester began. “Her name was Julian of Norwich.”
But she trailed off; Mary would never understand. Instead, seeing in her mind John’s serious eyes as he stepped forward to kiss her farewell, Ester began afresh. “You wish to marry, I know,” she said. “And for you that’s well. But Mary, don’t entertain a man so besotted by your father’s fortune that he barely glimpses you amid the silver plate and hangings”—she gestured at the furnishings. “Should your fortune be considered by one of your suitors, it should not be the main, much less the only consideration—”
Mary broke in. “My father’s fortune isn’t why Thomas wants me! Are you so jealous that you can’t see love?”
Ester went on, the words beating back the unfamiliar thing whispering in her. “He’s fond of you, Mary, yes. But while your eyes linger hungrily on him, his look happily to the damask hangings.”
“Do you claim to act as my mother then?” Mary cried.
“No—”
“No, because she’s dead.” There were tears on Mary’s face. Unwise, enviable tears. Ester wanted to touch them.
Instead she spoke softly. “As is mine,” she said. “There’s naught but us to advise each other.”
“Get out,” Mary managed through her weeping. “You may leave, just like that monster Bescós. But—here’s the truth, here it is, Ester! Both of you envy love such as we have.”
Ester felt her own eyes well. “Perhaps,” she said.
Through the rain-slicked streets she walked home, and her lips moved with words that sounded to her own ears like prayer. But if a prayer, then a prayer to a strange god: one who knew, as she did, the bitterness of the world, and lacked the power to alter it. Kill it. Kill the part in me that desires to be touched.
She couldn’t protect Mary. Not without bearing her bodily from Thomas as one would a child. Mary had chosen her own course. And if accepting Mary’s coins made Ester a proprietress at a brothel, what of it? She must steel herself. She must.
Yet even as she thought this, she remembered Mary’s hopeful eyes at the instant Thomas had entered the door this afternoon.
What obligation did one soul bear to another indeed, in such a world as this?
So often now she lay in her bed half a night, constructing thoughts she wished to test against the books on the rabbi’s shelves. And so often these thoughts—built with such care, the bricks with which she hoped to shape her understanding of the world—had dissolved by dawn. She could deceive the rabbi, but at night she could master the darkness no better than he. So she made what use she could of every moment of daylight she was permitted in his study. Just yesterday, in her desire to confirm the phrasing of Descartes’s notion of extension, a question she’d fretted over in the darkness until tears of vexation sprang to her eyes, she’d forgotten that the letter she was supposed to be copying—a fresh bit of advice the rabbi had composed aloud for his former student in Venice—was a brief one. After a long silence—five minutes? more?—the rabbi had lifted his head, his face turned in her direction as though to catch the rays of a weak sun. “How many pages you turn for my simple missive.”
Had she imagined a catch in his voice? But he continued in his usual mild tone. “Perhaps I overtax you?”
Closing Meditationes, she’d agreed it might be time to finish their work together for the day.
Sentiment would undo her—each of its ties was a tether that would hold her from her purpose. Men, perhaps, might nourish both heart and mind; but for a woman there could be no such luxury. Had not Catherine drowned in the London air while practicing the virtues of love and obedience? How readily the rules of female behavior—gentleness, acquiescence, ever-mindfulness—turned to shackles.
So, she thought, there must be declared a new kind of virtue: one that made the throwing off of such rules, and even such deceit as this required, praiseworthy.
Or at least forgivable.
Of late, at moments when she looked up from her writing and saw the fatigue and hunger written on the rabbi’s face—a face she’d known since girlhood—one small weakness flared keenly in her: the wish to be forgiven.
What obligation, in such a world?
The sips of wine she’d drunk at Mary’s had dizzied her. Since morning she’d eaten only a piece of bread and a sweetmeat. When she reached home, she’d give Rivka all she’d earned, though it hurt to set the coins down on the kitchen table. But how could Ester use Mary’s coins for candles and books, much though she craved them? Each week Rivka seemed to work harder, washing the laundry of strangers for extra coins—for Rivka wouldn’t beg support of Diego da Costa Mendes unless the rabbi’s next breath depended upon it. Instead she cooked patiently over the paltriest flame, using and reusing the last ashen bits of coal. She reserved the wheat loaves for the rabbi, and for herself and Ester prepared loaves of barley and rye of a poor grade, though even careful sifting left small stones lodged in the bread. Ester pressed each mouthful carefully with her tongue; already Rivka had cracked a front tooth.
If the growing need of their household was invisible to their former patron, it had been noted by at least one other. Tuesday, when Rivka was out, Manuel HaLevy had come to the house to offer what he termed a small gift of sustenance. Handing a bag of coins to Ester with a smile, he’d swiftly turned the conversation to the qualities of the breeze—which, he said, was damp that day but augured well for the trade vessels. So Ester understood that this new Manuel HaLevy wished to spare her shame. Ester had passed the bag back to his hands, inviting him stiffly to return another day and make this generous offer to Rivka, who managed the household. With an undaunted smile, he’d promised to do so.
She feared the debt that would come with Manuel HaLevy’s charity, should need someday constrain Rivka to accept it.
Early this morning, watching Rivka labor in silence, upper lip curling reflexively about the broken tooth, Ester had paused for a moment over her own kitchen work to imagine Rivka’s existence. No access to reading or writing. No escape to other worlds, nor refuge from the endless river of days. No dream of throwing her thoughts high into the thick-smoked sky in the hope that they might land somewhere brighter.
But how to help Rivka, when the threat of being herself plunged into such darkness struck Ester with dread bordering panic?
She’d reached home. She entered, hung her damp cloak, and stopped midway across the empty room.
There, on the writing table, was a letter, its seal of red wax intact.
Cautiously she stepped toward it. The hand was unfamiliar, but the wax seal told her all: a small thorned rose and the Latin word Caute. A rose, she guessed, to signify both the meaning of the de Spinoza family name—“thorned”—and then the need to be cautious—sub rosa. Her hands fumbled as she lifted the letter. It was addressed to this household, but the name on the letter was Thomas Farrow.
She broke the seal.
She’d been rebuked before. She had tried writing to Mersenne about Descartes’s notion of extension, not knowing the man was years dead; the reply from his housekeeper had been a piece of incredulous fury. But the Latin words inked on this page stung beyond any rebuke she’d yet received.
May 7, 1665
To Mr. Thos. Farrow,