“It was her handwriting,” Helen said. “She wrote Thomas Farrow at the bottom of that page.”
If Ester had masqueraded as Thomas Farrow, then a world of possibilities opened. Had she used that fake identity to carry on a clandestine correspondence? What of the real Thomas Farrow—was it just a coincidence that she used his name, or had she known him?
“Can you ask to see the proofs of Godwin’s article?” she said to Aaron.
“Already have.”
She nodded approval.
“Wilton seems to think the cross-written lines were some kind of schoolgirl swoon,” Aaron said. “But what if everything she said was for real? What if Ester wasn’t being coy, but was telling the truth, as clearly as she dared, about her decision to write under someone else’s name?”
Yes. Yes. Helen could hear the protestations of every scholar in the field: Jews of the seventeenth century had no tradition of confessional literature; they didn’t disburden themselves on paper; any literate women put their literacy to use in running a household. Helen didn’t care. For no reason at all, she was certain: Ester had cross-written on discarded drafts not to be clever, and certainly not to practice penmanship—but because there was a secret she had tamped down until it was a murderous weight inside her . . . and she needed there to be, somewhere in the world, at least one place where the truth existed.
Helen seemed to have abandoned logic, and so she could not explain why the final lines of the cross-written letter came to her now: Where words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain, for they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain.
She spoke the words aloud.
“What do you think that means?” said Aaron.
She shook her head. “Don’t know. But I think she’s telling us something. About her life. Or maybe,” she added after a moment, “about regret.”
She’d turned away from the screen, as had he. His eyes were dark and arresting, they were Dror’s and his own, and she wanted to hold the image in her mind forever.
They turned to the documents. Their pencils scratched uninterrupted on notebook paper; Helen kept her eyes averted from Wilton’s table. After a half-hour, Library Patricia appeared bearing a third and fourth document for Helen and Aaron, no longer seeming to care if Wilton’s group saw—clearly she’d seen the Early Modern Quarterly article too. As they worked, Patricia came and went unbidden like a magical apprentice, bringing and removing documents.
Helen had just turned to her fourth document, another list of household expenses. It was written in Portuguese in Ester Velasquez’s slanted hand. Yet again, no household income was listed. The document was dated May 4, 1665. She scanned it quickly, as she did with each before she set to the work of translation. At the base of the third and final page, beneath the usual tally of expenses and the initial aleph, Helen’s eye caught a line of cross-writing in a different ink, as though it had been added after the fact. No, not even a line. It was a single word, inked thinly and carefully between the lines of the inventory, like a spider hanging barely visible in a corner.
?????
An assault, a rebuke across the years. An outstretched hand.
The inverted letters spelled the single Hebrew word that meant “I loved.”
20
June 17, 1665
London
To the Esteemed Benedictus de Spinoza,
Your brief response to my last missive would persuade any less determined than I that it were folly to continue this exchange. Indeed modesty ought impel me to conclude that you do not consider my crude thoughts worthy of your time. If this indeed be the reason for your refusal to engage in dialogue with me, then I must apologize and retreat. But in my stubborn folly, Sir, I maintain that despite the flaws that surely mar my argumentation, it is my wish to weigh the merits of atheism that makes you refuse to debate with me. It may be that others, be they the enemies of toleration in your land or even spies of the Inquisition, have endeavored to entrap you into such speech. It is natural you might fear that I claim loyalty to some cause hostile to free thought.
Yet I swear, though it bereave my heart, that I labor to shed all loyalty save that to truth. For every loyalty, whether to self or community, does impose a blindness, and each love does threaten to blur vision, as few can bear to see truth if it harm that which is dear to us. In separating you from your community, mayhap the ban issued upon you in Amsterdam offered a manner of freedom. Vanishing from your people’s reach, you shed the unbearable sorrows of the martyrs of your people, which any soul must be stirred by. While you were yet beholding such sorrows, surely some thoughts—those with thorns that prick one’s own people—would seem unutterable.
I am gladdened to believe that you employ your freedom now to loose your tongue and pen, and speak as you could not before. Yet caution follows one everywhere, for this world is not a safe one.
If there be any further freedom than the one granted by excommunication, perhaps it is the freedom not to exist.
Existing, you and I and all thinkers are in danger. Is this why you say less than you believe? You insist you do not argue against the existence of God. Yet I would therefore know what manner of divine existence you claim. The folly of those who cling to notions of divine intervention is evident every instant, for the babe born deformed did not merit the life of pain that awaits it, nor do those who dedicate their lives to purity merit the torment and suffering they are so often meted. Therefore it must either be that God cares naught for suffering, or that God lacks the power to provide more tenderly for creation. Unless immortality exist to balance these equations after man’s death, they remain unbalanced. And as I endeavor to dismiss all for which I can locate no proof, and as I have yet located no proof of life after death, then these thoughts must lead me toward either a theism in which the divine possesses power without mercy or justice, as though a vast infant ruled over the universe dispensing decrees at whim; or rather toward the thought that the force commanding the universe possesses will but no power, for which notion I might be charged with atheism. It is from this stance that I embrace your conception of God as nature. Yet I remain unsatisfied with my understanding of this notion.
In your second missive you offer me a crumb of your philosophy as though to dismiss me with it: you say that God is substance. Sir, I remain hungry. Of what manner and purpose be this substance?
I have seen the blinded eyes of the rabbi HaCoen Mendes. In questioning faith, we scathe all faithful such as he. How cruel, then, must seem the atheist to the martyr.
Yet without willingness to speak honestly, does the philosopher not take irons to the eyes of truth?
T. F.
She set down her quill and read over the words. Would she dare send such a thing? She’d written the words to see how far she ventured to speak her mind.
The rabbi slept in his chair. Even when Ester could find in herself no belief in the God of the psalms or prayers, she believed in the holiness of Rabbi HaCoen Mendes’s spirit. She, in her deceit, must then be his truest enemy.
Yet the change she noted lately in his arguments was undeniable. On his own behalf, she’d long observed, the rabbi dared little, muting his disagreements, ceding to other authorities. Yet on behalf of her imagined Daniel Lusitano, he spoke with his own authority. His face livened; his language was sharper, tearing falsehoods apart. Only in his love for his students, Ester saw—first de Spinoza, and now Daniel Lusitano—could the rabbi thus assert his thoughts. And as she penned his words onto pages that would never be sent, she felt her hand transcribing a wakened, vigorous spirit.
So she justified her own treachery, further proving her baseness.
She slid the page she’d been writing beneath the letter it had rested on, which had arrived two days earlier.
June 5, 1665