The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  Mary looked confused, as though she’d heard the words yet didn’t know what they signified.

  John shook his head. He bent to kiss Mary’s hand. She received the gesture numbly. He did the same, swiftly, with Ester, his eyes lighting on hers for only a troubled instant. Then he left, striding swiftly to catch his companions. When the three turned the corner, Ester saw John was addressing Bescós earnestly.

  Ester watched them go. At length she turned back to Mary. If naught else, she’d say what she saw. “Mary. Your father wronged your mother, and he wrongs you now. Yet you mend little by—”

  “You know nothing,” Mary countered dangerously.

  “Perhaps. But Mary—” How much to say? Did warning ever stay any hand from reaching for what it desired? What, indeed, had Catherine imagined Ester might do to correct Mary’s course?

  “You asked once,” Ester said, “what my mother counseled me about love. But it was her life rather than her words that gave the plainest counsel. My mother was so angered by love’s failures, Mary, that she navigated with spite as her compass. But if you’d seen her, though she was beautiful, you’d have understood how easily the blade of spite turns in one’s hands, and cuts one’s own palms. So that one can grasp nothing, Mary. So that life is . . . no longer life.”

  For a moment Mary seemed to be listening. Then she shrugged.

  The ways women comforted one another were foreign to Ester. She’d had no sister, nor any friend bold enough to lay a finger on a troubled spirit for the purpose of salving it. Searching for words, she found only her own mother’s wine-rich voice—and was surprised to hear there, amid Constantina’s midnight litany of betrayal, a portion of mercy. Some women, Ester, like to believe their hearts are made of glass, which must shatter if they so much as think of a sin. Oh Ester, shatter! Even now, Ester could hear the wretched fury cracking her mother’s words. Such women believe their delicate hearts are a sign of virtue. But—Ester, know it!—they’re a sign of nothing more than luck. Ester, hear me. Only the strong-hearted live on, after luck dies.

  What she wished to tell Mary now: a woman must have a heart made of something tougher, or she dies when a first blow comes.

  What she wished to tell Mary: forge your heart.

  But Mary stood apart from her, eyes still trained on the receding horizon of respectability. “Do you think my mother would be very angry with me?” she whispered.

  For an instant Ester returned to the windy evening beneath the trees, the sound of Catherine da Costa Mendes’s labored breathing as she struggled up the park path. The tired gaze through the black velvet mask. Ester said, “Your mother didn’t linger on what she regretted. Nor should you.”

  Mary stared down at the paving stones between her shoes. “I don’t regret it. Only—” She stopped herself, then glanced up at Ester once, searchingly, as though some suffocating weight, a cloak of heaviest lead, were only now settling on her.

  She bit her full red lip and turned for the house.

  The rabbi was waiting for her upon her return. He sat in silence until she’d hung her cloak.

  “To Daniel Lusitano,” he said.

  The rabbi had had Rivka set out fresh paper.

  “My distress grows,” said the rabbi, “with every hour I meditate upon your letter.”

  She lowered herself to the writing table.

  “And so I hope you will forgive the crowding of one missive atop another, as my thoughts crowd like sheep at the pasture gate when a wolf prowls.”

  She wrote.

  “In my own darkness”—the rabbi continued, and she saw he’d rehearsed this letter in his mind—“I see perhaps too vivid a picture of the error that lies before your community in Florence. It is an error not only of soul but also of body, for they that muster for the next world before it has come can only betray their lives in this one. Long have I heard rumor of Sabbatai Zevi and yet I remained foolishly silent, and I can only rebuke myself that it required report of the threat from my beloved student to awaken me. What small help my thoughts may offer is ever at your disposal, and so I set forth the following additional arguments.”

  Her hand slowed on the page. “You should rest,” she said. Could he hear the regret that snagged her voice? “I’m certain he’ll write to you again soon. You can add to your arguments later, without taxing yourself to compose them now.”

  His thin nostrils quivered. “You’d now stand in my way?” he said.

  She’d never seen him angered. He’d registered her betrayal, she saw, even if he didn’t know its nature.

  “I’m ready to write,” she said.

  Her quill moved across the page at the rabbi’s direction. The letter was long, full of careful argument, clarification, gentle insistence, and one flare of passion. To follow this man is to follow the very false god warned against in the commandments.

  His distress was her doing. She wouldn’t pretend otherwise. He was the only one who had tolerated her desire to study, even loved it. And here she was, dissolving the ground he stood on. An impossible price for her freedom. As she wrote his words, she pledged: I’ll repay you.

  And did her body still hum from the morning? Did John’s clear eyes, his living form, float through all the extremities of her body, did the sound of his laughter in the garden linger? She’d banish it. She hadn’t done this great wrong to the rabbi so that she could waste her freedom on distraction.

  When he’d finished, his face was solemn. The effort of the letter had emptied him. What’s more, she understood now what he’d ventured: however carefully phrased, his words could only be understood as a charge to be levied against the esteemed leaders of the Florentine community. Yet for the sake of his student, and for the sake of stemming the tide of Sabbatai Zevi’s followers, he dared.

  “Copy it now,” said the rabbi.

  Her hand moved thickly on the page, composing a letter that would never be sent.

  A knock upon the front door. Before Ester could rise, Rivka had emerged from the kitchen to open it. A muffled exchange, then a familiar figure swept into the rabbi’s study, his cloak still upon him.

  “Manuel HaLevy,” Rivka announced flatly.

  Ester hadn’t seen him since the day in the park, and then from a distance.

  “Welcome,” said the rabbi, lifting his face. “It’s been a great while since we’ve learned together. I trust your business goes well?”

  “Well enough,” said Manuel. “I trust you’re also well enough,” he added, a strange humor in his voice. His eyes took in the rabbi, the remnants of his tea, the fire. They shifted, appraisingly, to Ester.

  She laid her hand atop the letter she was writing, though the ink stained her palm.

  “My brother, you’ve perhaps heard, has been pressed this day,” said Manuel. “He leaves this hour for a warship of the king’s navy.”

  The rabbi let out a sound of surprise. “But could your father not prevent this? Isn’t he a man of some standing, even among the Christians?”

  “It was my father,” said Manuel, “who summoned the agents to seize him. They’re crewing a warship this day, one that goes to the Americas to oppose the Dutch, who menace our interests there.”

  “It’s an enslavement,” said the rabbi, rising slowly from his chair. “No less.”

  Ester looked from the rabbi, who still held to his chair with one hand for support, to Manuel. “What does this mean?” she asked.

  The rabbi spoke heavily. “You may think I know nothing of the world, Manuel HaLevy. Yet when I lived in Amsterdam I yet heard tidings from those that traveled. The life of the impressed man is a life of labor so cruel that the men are shackled when the ship docks, so that they will not escape. A wretched life. And for one like your brother, without seafaring experience, it must be a short one, may God prevent his death. Can this be what a Jew wants for his son or his brother?” Letting go the chair, he took one step toward Manuel HaLevy, then stopped; his face, contorted, trained on a spot that was not precisely where Manuel st
ood.

  Manuel shrugged, as though the rabbi’s fury had no power if not aimed true.

  “It’s because of your brother’s nature,” said the rabbi. “Is it not?”

  Manuel laughed softly. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  From behind Manuel came a burst of Rivka’s thick Portuguese. “So you have no heart? The creatures of the deep will eat his body.”

  Though he’d startled at her vehemence, Manuel didn’t so much as glance at Rivka. “Only God knows my brother’s fate,” he said to the rabbi. “And with a bit of labor my father believes Alvaro might remake himself as a new man. Or else fail to. But in either case he will do so far from my father’s house.”

  Rivka, crossing swiftly to the rabbi, helped him to his chair.

  “Why are you here?” Ester said.

  “Upon my father’s request,” Manuel said, “the sailors agreed to allow my brother some hours to order his things and make farewells. Alvaro asked a servant of our house to bear the news here. But I found it more practical to bear the news here myself. Perhaps I was in need of some air.” He looked at Ester steadily now, his gaze carrying a message she could not read. Then he laughed, breaking the spell. For a moment his mouth formed a tight bud. “I believe my brother hopes for a farewell from you before he departs.”

  There was something about Manuel that arrested Ester. His thick pale lips, those brass-colored eyes under the fringe of dark, glossy hair. The straight nose and high cheekbones, the heavy frame of his face looming above her where she sat. He was a man, yes—but also a boy. She could almost imagine him at an age of bewilderment, watching the world silently through those strange eyes of his . . . slowly arriving at his first resounding conclusions.

  Rising, she tucked the page she’d been writing under a stack of blank pages and took her cloak from its peg.

  “Ester,” said the rabbi. “Carry a note from me to the boy’s father. Say, Alvaro’s nature may sin, yet the sin is not against you. Let the sins of VaYikra be dealt with by God and not by man. Tell him”—briefly the rabbi’s voice rose, then grew hoarse. “Tell him, It is not for us to stone the sinner, for we are not the holy ones who dwelt in the desert, but to trust in God to punish or forgive. Write these words, Ester.” The rabbi’s voice shook. “Write, The exile you force on him will be his death.”

  The HaLevy home was known to her, though she’d never entered it. Its brick front surveyed the street: severe windows, a peaked roof made of slate, not thatch. A showpiece of wealth.

  Her hand had not yet touched the ornate knocker when Alvaro himself opened the door. He was dressed in white like a penitent, his loose shirt only half-tied at the neck and hanging over his hose and breeches.

  He greeted her without words, gesturing her into the house’s entry, so she understood that there was no time for pleasantries. Standing against the wall as though he required its support, his blouse draping his still-boyish body, he might have been a painter’s portrait of a lovesick youth—yet his eyes were desperate. She saw that his spirit was already shackled to the deck of an outbound ship, the solid rock of his life slipping past reach.

  From deep in the house she heard the irregular thump of activity. Then a pall punctuated by a clatter of words from a back room—the sounds of a household furiously rending itself. A thin, white-haired servant emerged from an inner doorway; startled by Ester’s presence, she stared for an unguarded instant. Her face plainly expressed her anguish—though whether the son’s deeds or the father’s troubled her more, Ester could not guess.

  Ester beckoned to the woman and handed her the rabbi’s note. “For Benjamin HaLevy.”

  The woman pursed her lips and disappeared, note in hand.

  “You wished to see me,” Ester said to Alvaro.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “It’s just, I need”—he spread his hands. What he needed none but his father could offer. He lowered his head. “You’ve always been kind to me. Perhaps you know a psalm.”

  She wouldn’t deceive him. Nowhere in her twenty-seven years had tidings reached her of God stepping from the pages of the holy books to guard the paths of the righteous. What hope were words of divine protection for Alvaro then, who’d sinned according to those same books?

  He drew a full breath, held it, then continued. “You know now what I am.” He raised his head and let the full weight of his trust rest on her eyes. “I wished always to tell you. Now you know it. My father’s house is cursed with a buggerer.” At the word his face fell, but he continued. “I’ll ask no blessing, then, for what blessing does one such as I deserve?” For a moment his voice strengthened so she could almost believe the brave words; then she saw Alvaro’s pooling eyes.

  A soft tread in a nearby passageway. The servant to whom Ester had given the rabbi’s note entered. “Here,” she said. Gently she placed the rabbi’s letter back into Ester’s hand.

  “Isn’t there any reply?”

  The woman, her gray hair tied in a dry knob at the back of her neck, shook her head. “None.” Her face worked for a moment, as though she wished to say something else entirely. “None at all,” she said, and then departed, the look of tenderness she cast back over her shoulder unseen by Alvaro.

  Alvaro stood perfectly still, listening, as the servant’s footsteps faded. The sight of him, motionless in the shadowed entryway, made Ester shudder—and for an instant she was taken by the tall gray waves of the long sea passage that awaited him, the bitter wind, the unforgiving order of a ship at sea. She saw in her mind Alvaro’s still-youthful face, the pale down on the lobes of his ears, the nails of his fingers bitten to the quick—Alvaro, stilled by a fear so deep, it was indistinguishable from prayer. She saw his body heaved over a rail by strangers. Soft limbs spiraling through lightless depths, away from the distant, shimmering surface.

  She forced words from her lips. “This blessing,” she said to him. “To dream such glad dreams that you wake laughing.”

  She watched him surface to her words.

  From deep in the house, a servant’s summons.

  To her surprise, Manuel awaited her on the street. As she walked past him with a tight nod, he fell into step beside her.

  Down St. Helen’s Street they walked. His manner was serious, as though he’d some important business to conduct. After one brief glance at him, Ester didn’t look again; she’d no notion what his presence signified and didn’t wish him the pleasure of seeing her confusion.

  They passed Fletcher’s Hall, and turned onto Bury Street. By now she could not deny she was walking home with him as her escort. He strode beside her in his fine cloak, slowing his steps when necessary to match hers. He clasped his hands heavily behind his back, as though he were an older man, ponderous with his own success.

  At the corner of Creechurch Lane she stopped. She was on the verge of opening her mouth to curse Manuel for a killer.

  “A day,” he said, “of much turbulence.”

  She checked his face for remorse. There was none. Only the fatigued practicality of a young man who’d already accepted the necessities of this world.

  “A cruel punishment,” she said, “for a harmless soul. Why must your father dispatch him in such a manner?”

  Manuel smiled—indulgently, she thought, as though addressing a foolish child. “You champion him now. Yet I saw you spurn his puppyish admiration.”

  Ester shook her head violently—she would not be implicated, if that was Manuel’s purpose. “I never wished him harm. And I didn’t know he wanted to marry me only in order to mask what he was.”

  Manuel laughed. It seemed to her that he took a very long while with his laugh, his eyes raised to the upper galleries of the houses and on past them to the city wall and the distant silhouette of the tower. Then he lowered his gaze to evaluate her again in that manner that had struck her before as detached, but now seemed more like the gaze of a merchant carefully watching the horizon, whence approached a ship in which he had made a certain investment. “He was never your suitor,” he said. �
�I am.”

  She laughed.

  He said nothing.

  “You lie,” she said.

  He shook his head, enjoying her anger.

  “But you dislike me,” she said.

  Only now did his smile soften, and turn rueful. “Perhaps I did dislike you, before. But such feelings are changeable, and the thing I first disdained in you is the very thing in which I now take greatest interest.”

  After a moment Ester mustered her voice. “Is this a proposal of marriage? If so, it is a dry one.”

  He tipped his head toward her, eyes still fastened on hers. “Would you like it to be?”

  Her throat was tight. “Don’t young men woo with talk of love? Or am I so outside the world of love that I’ve failed to note that men in this land propose like actuaries?”

  “Perhaps others do,” he chuckled. “I can tell you only what I propose. I would, in marrying you, promise you neither fidelity nor obedience, nor any part of my heart but that which you earned through a change in your own demeanor—and your demeanor, I need not tell you, alarms all men who are not of intrepid constitution.”

  She spoke past her confusion. “My demeanor, as you call it, will not change. Nor will I marry you.”

  He nodded briskly. “Yes, I understand that’s your belief. But time will press you to marriage, and that time will come soon. HaCoen Mendes hasn’t much more life to live.” At her sound of protest, he raised his voice, insisting. “You know it. After he dies, you’ll be left without money or protection. You’re a quick student, I’m certain. You’ll marry, and the man you choose will be me.”

  His smile maddened her—how lightly he sported with her fears, with the precariousness of her position. “Do you expect me to be a gull for this prank of yours? Why would any believe that Manuel HaLevy, son of one of the wealthiest Jews of London, has no greater dream for himself than to marry a woman whom he does not love, and who is, besides which, without wealth or any desire to please a husband? Or can it be that you, alone among mankind, enjoy plunging your face into thorns, rather than roses?”