The ground was marshy and her feet were soon soaked. She hadn’t worn pattens and neither had he, but neither turned back.
They reached an open field. Flitting over it, resting on branches, stilting amid the grasses, was a stunning array of birds: dun and white, speckled, gray-throated, and rust-winged. A breeze faintly combed small dark pools on the ground. Trees lined the field’s edges, with trunks mantled in pale green moss. A hushed, witnessing world.
On one side, a few paces from her, the field’s border was marked by a low fence of pleached saplings: a living thing, the young trees braided together by some human hand and grown about one another to an entirely new shape. She went to it and laid a hand on the twined wood to feel its springy resistance.
“I didn’t know England could be this,” she said.
John was grinning. “All England is this!” he said.
She laughed in his face.
“No, I meant real England,” he said, unhappy. “Not London. London is . . . brilliant and clattering and foul. It has the jewels of the world’s learning and also the world’s dirt, all in balance. But though I love the city, it’s a dream from which a man wakes. From which I’ll wake.” A shadow passed over his face, but then its bright ardor returned. “This is England, Ester.”
Farther down the field, a young deer appeared: velvet nose, flecked brown coat, watching them through one shining black eye.
“Walk straightly toward it,” John whispered, and they did, they stepped slowly toward it, his hand on her elbow, both of them tottering and catching each other as they crossed the mud, until they could see the deer’s eyelashes and hear its soft breath. Only then did it turn and move off slowly, as if it wished them to know it wasn’t frightened of them.
In that heartbeat she felt she understood Mary’s desire to give a man all.
She turned to face John.
He looked startled. Then, as she prepared to speak, he set his lips on hers. A quick kiss.
“You meant to say?” he whispered.
His face was absurd, full of happiness and longing. She raised her hands to her own face, feeling the same expression mirrored there.
But she wasn’t the kind of woman he thought she was. He had to know.
“With you, I feel set loose,” he said. His countenance was alive—it seemed to sift light like the river water, shining with hidden currents. Blinding her. “I like to be in your company,” he said. “I like it very much.”
Why? What could he desire in her? She stood on her toes and set her hands on his shoulders, and she kissed him to find out. He answered more softly than she’d expected, a kiss that tugged inside her. To push it away, she said, “You don’t know who I am.”
“But I do! I know your soul. Ester, am I too bold to think that you and I are people who understand such things?”
Her speech stumbled. “If you knew my soul—if you knew it, John, you’d know it’s lived so great a time without light, it no longer believes in what can be seen by it.”
But he was laughing, as though her very stumbling delighted him. “Ester, you damn yourself as though you’re the very devil. But I’m not Bescós.” He spoke slowly to be sure she heard him. “You are no less pure for being a Jewess.”
She felt ages older than he—centuries. She felt her own words turn her to dust. Yet she made herself say them anyway, to rip that veil of trust from his face. She said, “I’m not at peace with this world. I—I find what freedom I have here.” She tapped her temple.
“Tell me.”
Her voice wandered. “I think . . . about the world. About . . . God, and questions.”
His brow furrowed; he seemed on the point of asking her something. Then his expression lightened. “I understand,” he said softly. “I understand enough, Ester, to know that anything you’ll tell me cannot trouble me, because I see your spirit.” He laughed, startling her. “Ester, if you believe I’ve spoken thus to other women, it’s not so. I felt something the day I first saw you. I felt liberty, such as I never felt before. A premonition of a new sort of joy.”
She didn’t know what such words cost him. Or whether he understood their power to save or destroy. All she knew was that against such dizzying gentleness she was a cribbed, fearful creature. She hardly realized she spoke aloud. “Yet will you love a woman, if she prizes truth over softness?”
“If you love a truth, Ester, I’ll love you the more for it. And if I know not this truth, I’ll learn it. And if I can’t learn it, then Ester, I’ll tolerate it. That’s the love I bear you! But what manner of truth is it that gives you such misery? Speak it and share its weight.”
Silently she sifted words. “A truth,” she began at length, “for which I’ve traded my honor.”
His face flooded with color. It took him a moment to speak. “You’re not a virgin?”
“You misunderstand.”
A woeful expression took him. “Then I owe you an apology. Ester, I’ve insulted you.”
“You haven’t!” she cried, impatient. “What I say to you, John, is that I’ve lied about what I am.”
He was silent. Then, slowly and with an expression of relief, he nodded. “Yet to be a Jew in this world, I understand, is a danger. If a Jew speak the truth of his faith in the wrong moment, though that faith harms none, he brings down untold wrath. It’s an argument I’ve tried to engage with my father in matters of the law, for it seems to me that the penalties for untruth ought not be enforced on those whose very nature puts them in jeopardy, should they speak true. Ester, hear me. If a Jew tell a lie because the truth of his faith cannot be tolerated by those around him, shouldn’t one then prosecute the world rather than the Jew?”
Meadow and tree and ivy—the lushness surrounding him as he spoke was impossible. If he forgave her, thinking she spoke of hiding her Jewishness, would he forgive when he learned that what she hid was her sex?
She would later rue her cowardice at not pressing on until she’d spoken all. But it was too late—she had succumbed to hope, and with it, timidity.
“Will you remember,” she said quietly, “that you spoke thus?”
He said, “I won’t forget.”
Her vision starred with tears.
“I know you, Ester,” he said, “though you think I don’t.” His arms were about her. “You’re honest. And I see that unlike most women and even some men, you’ve the strength to watch over yourself—though that strength must have come at great cost.”
There was something in his admiration—something too rapid, even boyish—but she could get no purchase on it. She wished to tell him every road she’d stumbled down before alighting in this green field. She wished to explain to him that she was not a woman accustomed to crying.
And she thought: don’t trust love unless you can see what it costs the lover.
And she forgot the thought.
At a shout from the riverbank they turned. Thomas was running toward the shore from a distance, cursing the boatman, who was making a great show of tugging the rope to turn the skiff downriver.
“We come, man!” Thomas shouted. “You’ve sped the clock.”
As they approached, the man untied the famished-looking horse, then threw the boat’s rope heavily to Thomas. His voice was slurred. “You’ll return’t to my man at the stair where you found me,” he said, “and you’ll go direct, or I’ll have twice my pay.”
“You’ve been paid for an hour and we’re here not half that,” said Thomas.
The boatman muttered something—all Ester heard of his complaint, as she reached the shore, was and through standing over this boat. He ambled away, leading his horse.
Ester climbed into the boat, followed by Mary.
“Take your near-dead nag,” shouted Thomas. He made a rude gesture behind the man. Then, stepping with one foot onto the boat, he seized an oar and mimed as though to use it as a club—a gesture lost on the boatman, whose back was already turned.
“Thomas,” said Mary.