“Probably not,” I agreed, as I put my arms around him gratefully. “He doesn’t strike me as the domestic type.”
We cleared the dishes off the table and went through the same ritual of cleaning and laying out of paper that we had two nights earlier. When everything was ready, we put on our white gloves and took the manuscript from its case. Michael watched as I carefully turned each page until we reached the part where we had left off.
But what appeared before us was unlike what we had already seen. For one thing, the paper looked as if it had been folded, and then smoothed out by the process of having been bound into the rest of the book. The lines of the folds were still faintly in evidence, and there were fewer words on the page than on the others. The handwriting of the diary still looked familiar, though, and so did that of the commentary in the margins.
Tonight as I walked to my chamber I heard the voices of my father and William joined in hushed and urgent conversation. The heavy wooden door was only slightly ajar and I hid in the shadows beneath the lintel. I hoped that my father was counseling William about the cruelty toward me and Cecily, which I had no doubt he had witnessed. But instead, I heard a different subject entirely, one that bound my heart up in narrow ropes of fear:
I heard my father’s low murmur, the confident tones of his voice sounding dismal and burdened by sadness, and William’s voice cool, strident, even as his words slithered easily through my father’s despair. I could not hear my father’s exact words, but I did hear some: he spoke of the Monarch’s decision to put aside his wife, that he in good conscience could not support his friend the King, that his loyalty as a subject could not lead him to traduce the will of Holy God.
Their voices dissolved into whispers. Then I heard my father say that only the new scholar appointed by Henry could help keep the King within the bonds of the Holy Church; that this scholar could deduce the ancient Hebraic laws pertaining to the marriage of one’s dead brother’s wife; that as the wife of Prince Arthur, surely Katherine’s marriage to Henry, even if valid in a court of Hebrews, would be considered unsound for a Christian king.
I heard my father say that if it could be proved that Henry had made a marriage according to Jewish law, he could still be pardoned within the realm of the Holy Church; that the marriage to Katherine would be annulled, and the soul of the King would be preserved. I heard William’s voice answer the sound of my father’s hope; he said, The Bookseller — the Jew — will do what is required.
Then I heard the sound of William’s boots as they crossed the floor, and I fled to my chamber before he could see that I had listened at the doorway.
I am troubled at the thought of what will be required of the Bookseller, for I know in my heart, that the man that William has spoken of is Daniel. So he is a Jew. This is the cause for his fear, and rightly so.
This is why he recognizes the fear in my eyes, for although I believe in the True Saviour, Lord Jesus Christ, I know He hath abandoned me. And this, perhaps, leaves only my belief in Daniel’s God, the wrathful and jealous God who metes out punishment such as I have merited for the sin of my pride and my unworthy desire to seek knowledge that is only for those who have been set above me by Holy Writ.
And yet, Daniel hath affirmed my desire to seek knowledge. Who is this Jew who encourages my defiance! He knows of me as the daughter of justice; I wonder only whether he knows that I have become the wife of evil and despair?
In the margins next to the final section were scrawled two notes, which were familiar to me, after years of Hebrew school:
It hath been told thee, O Man, what is good and what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.
and
Daughter) Justice, justice, shalt thou pursue.
16
“So Daniel was Jewish,” I said to Michael. “We were right.”
“But as a scholar at the court of Henry VIII?” He shook his head. “That must have been really uncomfortable, to say the least. From what I can understand of her words, it sounds as if he was there to try to make a case that the levirate marriage made between Henry and Katherine was invalid.”
“Perhaps,” I said sarcastically, “you could define levirate marriage for those of us who didn’t go to law school?”
“It’s a standard marriage regulation rooted in ancient biblical law,” he said. “When a woman is widowed, and she hasn’t had any children, by law, she is supposed to marry the brother of her dead husband.”
“What if the brother was already married?” I asked, puzzled.
“Well, we’re talking about a time when men had more than one wife, before the notions of traditional marriage were invented. This law is definitely pre-Church, and pre-monogamy.”
I rolled my eyes. “That figures. I suppose it was to keep her dowry in the man’s family,” I frowned. “So much for the old biblical saw of ‘pleading for the widow.’”
“Well, right, it did have a lot to do with the dowry, but it was more about the children, and the ability to maintain inheritance through the line of the firstborn. This way, even though the widow was in the brother’s care, the arrangement guaranteed that her children would inherit.”
“I thought she didn’t have any children. Isn’t that the point?”
“Yes. The right of inheritance applies to the children that the widow would have with her dead husband’s brother. Any children she had with him would inherit before any children he had with other wives, because children of a levirate marriage were considered to be the descendents of the woman’s original husband, who was usually an older brother. So, the law of levirate marriage reinforced the inheritance through firstborn sons.”
“And this is relevant because Katherine of Aragon was married to Henry’s older brother,” I finished. “And there were no heirs from that marriage.”
“Exactly,” Michael said. “And she failed to provide a male heir during her marriage to Henry – though she did have a girl, Mary, who became queen, as did Mary’s half-sister, Elizabeth, who was Anne Boleyn’s daughter.”
“Ah, yes. Anne Boleyn – the second of his wives, and the first to be beheaded.”
“Right,” Michael said. “The whole reason that Anne became Henry’s wife was because the line of male succession was at risk. Katherine of Aragon was put aside, and the Church of Rome along with her.”
I shuddered, remembering our visit from the two priests. “I don’t even want to think about the Church of Rome right now.”
Michael smiled sympathetically. “I don’t blame you. So that’s what happened to Katherine of Aragon. After that, it was one wife after another. The next one was Anne Boleyn, who was also put aside, though rather more dramatically than Katherine.”
“I’ll say.”
“Even though the line of succession through the firstborn male was fulfilled by Edward VI,” he continued, “who was the son of Jane Seymour, both Mary and Elizabeth outlived Edward, and both succeeded him on the throne of England.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know how you remember all of this history.”
“Listen, you think about history all the time. It’s just that you’re more focused on the twentieth century variety.”
“So you’re thinking that Daniel was there to provide some sort of information about the laws concerning levirate marriage?”
“That’s what it sounds like to me,” he said. “I’m guessing that the question at stake here is whether a marital contract based upon an ancient Jewish law could be upheld by the Catholic Church. The problem is that biblical law was always evolving depending on who was making the rules, and what was in their agenda.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there are actually two arguments regarding the actual statute. The levirate law said that a man was entitled to marry his dead brother’s wife to keep the inheritance in the family. But an earlier law says something quite different. I’m referring to a precept in Leviticus, in the Hebrew bible – we s
tudied this in law school – that predated levirate marriage. It was part of the so-called Holiness Code – and it said that marrying one’s brother’s wife was punishable by death. And I’m guessing that Thomas More and William Roper, were looking to Daniel’s knowledge of the Hebrew bible and Talmudic commentaries on both laws in order to ultimately come to the response that Henry wanted.”
“I’m still completely baffled as to how they would have even found Daniel,” I said. “Jews might have managed to live in London after the Inquisition, but they and their practices must have been very carefully hidden.”
“What do you know about the Jews of England in the Tudor period?”
“Just that there weren’t a lot of them.” I thought about it for a moment. “But Robert or Aviva would probably know more. They’re the trained folk. I’m a conservator and an art historian – they’re the scholars.”
“Can you ask them? I’m really interested in the backstory here.”
I was delighted by the curiosity in his eyes. “I’ll do that,” I replied. “Because the manuscript doesn’t tell us.”
We looked at the page again. “I’m intrigued by these notations,” I said, pointing to the first one, “especially if they are in response to William talking about what is required. Daniel is quoting from the book of the prophet Micah, chapter six, verse eight, which is one of the most famous biblical writings. I can translate, actually, because this was the inscription above the door of my synagogue. It reads, ‘It hath been told thee, what is good and what the Lord doth require of thee: to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.’”
“It makes it sound as if Daniel was his own person. That he was serving God, not the king.”
“And the other one is also very famous, from the Book of Deuteronomy – ‘ Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof ’ — ‘Justice, justice, shall you pursue,’ except that he has written the word ‘bat’ in front of it, which means ‘daughter,’ as you probably know.”
“And Daniel referred to Margaret as the ‘daughter of justice.’ So he’s talking about pursuing the daughter of justice?” Michael raised his eyebrows. “Who was married to her father’s apprentice.”
I considered it for a moment. “Maybe he thought he could save her.”
“Although I’m not sure if pursuit meant then what it means now. What we see here might not mean he wanted her for himself; it might mean instead that he was taking the course of action he thought she herself - or even her father - would take. But there’s not enough here to know one way or the other.”
“That makes the possibility of his pursuing her even more intriguing,” I said. “If Daniel was able to get the marriage ruled in favor of an annulment, it would make Thomas More happy. And then, perhaps, he’d gain access to Margaret.”
“As a Jew? With Margaret the daughter of one of the most prominent Catholics in England?” Michael shook his head. “Keep dreaming.”
“Well, if he was a converso, he was living as a Christian, right?”
“He might have been practicing the Jewish rituals in secret. And obviously, More and Roper knew he was Jewish.”
“But they brought him to the court nonetheless,” I pointed out. “They may have only been hiding his Judaism from the other courtiers.”
“They certainly would have had to hide him from the queen,” Michael said. “And any of her supporters. A Jew ruling on the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter would definitely be putting his life in danger.”
“From whom?” I asked. “Other than the queen’s supporters?”
“Catholic clergy, anyone who knew that Jews had been banished from England centuries earlier, anyone who thought the Spanish Inquisition was a good idea. And who knows who else?” Michael said. “And perhaps even Henry himself. Obviously, he was trying to prove that his marriage was invalid, and he was the sort of monarch who didn’t really care whether the means justified the end. I remember in my class on the evolution of biblical law —”
“Ah, now I understand how you know so much about this,” I interrupted.
He blushed a little. “It’s true. This is a classic case study. Anyway, in order to marry Katherine, Henry received a dispensation from the Pope, so that it was legal for him to marry his dead brother’s wife. Normally, he would have been prevented from marrying her on the grounds that she was intimate with his brother – a law of the Church that hearkened back to the original statute in Leviticus.”
“I see,” I said. “So because the Pope gave Henry this dispensation, the marriage was considered valid. So the law of inheritance would apply.”
“That’s right. But I get the sense that by finding a way around the Papal dispensation, and declaring the marriage to Katherine as invalid, More was trying to find a way to annul the marriage without Henry having to leave the Church,” Michael said. “And More would have been gravely concerned about this turn of events. Henry was his childhood friend. But it’s likely that he feared not only for Henry’s soul, but for the souls of the English people if the Church of Rome was abandoned by their sovereign ruler. Which, of course, it eventually was.”
I nodded. “Thomas More was executed because he didn’t believe that Henry could be the supreme head of any church. And Henry thought that was treason.”
“More wasn’t alone. There was also a bishop – his name was Fisher – who blatantly sided with Katherine of Aragon, and wanted to retain the sovereignty of the Holy Roman Church in England – and he was also executed for treason. After Henry was excommunicated by the Pope, the king declared his own religious sovereignty, created his own church, brought in his own people.” Michael smiled a little. “I mean, it’s weird, but it sounds a little like the sort of behavior you see every day on Wall Street. Hostile takeovers, mergers and acquisitions.”
“Except that people’s lives and souls aren’t at stake.”
“Oh, that’s right. On Wall Street no one needs to worry about having a soul.”
I laughed. “In twenty years, when you’re in private practice doing corporate litigation, I’m going to remind you of this conversation.”
“God, if it comes to that, I want you to shoot me.”
I laughed. How easy it was to imagine still being together in twenty years, I thought.
“Anyway,” I said, “there’s one connection to the museum. And today, I think I finally got some information from the donor that I can use.”
“Another letter?”
I nodded. “It seemed a little clearer than the last one, which was really strange. But it says that she hid her daughter in a convent, or anyway, that the priest there agreed to take her. So I’ve asked Robert – you know, the guy I told you about, who’s helping me while Aviva is out on leave – to do a little research based on the girl’s name and her birth year. In the database we have a category flag for people who were hidden children, or who knew of hidden children, because, unfortunately, some of these children never went back – or were never returned - to their parents.”
“Why?” Michael asked.
“Well, because no one expected the parents to survive or return, hidden children were sometimes adopted by Christian families in Poland and Germany, and some of them were so young that they had no memory of their birth parents, so that even if their parents were lucky enough to survive, their children didn’t remember them, and didn’t want to go back with them.” I sighed. “So, I’m hoping to figure out who this donor is, thinking she would have told us about her daughter, even if she didn’t get her back after the war. At least,” I said, “it’s some specific information to go on.”
Michael nodded. “That’s good. I really hope you can find out who sent this to you. I’d like to know more about how she managed to hold on to this book.”
“Well, at least we know a little more now about why it’s important to the museum. The connection to Judaism, through Daniel, is there.”
“At least Aviva’s mind will be at rest about that,” Michael agreed.
“I don�
�t see Aviva being at rest about too many things at the moment.” I had told Michael the night before about what was going on with Jacob and Angela. “Especially with the baby about to arrive.”
“Is she going to work right up to the end?”
“I think so. I don’t think that’s what she intended, but she told me she can’t stand being at home right now. She’s scared.”
“Understandable. What do you think is going to happen with him?”
“I don’t know. Aviva said that their rabbi was going to put some pressure on him to get a new job, to stay away from Angela. But I don’t know if that’s realistic. I’d like to think she’d be strong enough to ask him to give her a divorce.”
“But he’s really in control of that, isn’t he?” Michael asked.
“Yeah. What a system.” I frowned. “Ancient times, modern times,” I waved a hand above the manuscript, “when it comes to marriage, women get the worst of it.”
“That’s only true for some women,” Michael said, looking at me. “When two people love each other, it doesn’t have to be that way.”
I considered his words for a moment. My mind went immediately to the two wedding photographs on the table in my grandmother’s apartment – the small one of her and my grandfather taken in the Displaced Persons camp, and the other, the portrait of my parents, on the steps of the bimah in the synagogue. And I thought about how no one opposed those marriages – in the case of my parents, there was nothing to oppose – my father was a nice Jewish boy. And in the case of my grandparents, there was no one left in either of their families to judge them one way or the other.
I looked at Michael again. I wanted to think that he was right, but I didn’t know how I could live with my family’s disapproval. I wondered if my grandmother had managed the news on her own, or if she had left a message for my parents via the ship-to-shore operator. I could just imagine it. “Call me immediately,” it would say. “Your daughter is dating a shaygetz.”
The Bookseller's Sonnets Page 18
