The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish

  She watched, then, as life trailed ragged from the rabbi like a ship’s wake.

  The fire, no longer needed to warm him, burned down to its last embers.

  The sounds of Rivka’s grief roused Ester.

  Thus was the world altered. With a dull concussion in the chest.

  There were no more individual graves nor headstones in London, the capacity of gravediggers and stone carvers being long outmatched by the pace the city now required. The earth of St. Peter upon Cornhill’s churchyard, they said, had been raised to waist height with the coffins stacked one atop another, then abandoned in favor of mass graves. The dead were sent sliding now into pits, raising clouds of lime dust, hastily prayed over by clusters of the living who didn’t dare approach one another. It made no difference that the rabbi had not died of plague, for all claims of other causes of death were now scoffed at, so often did families seek to mask the cause of death in order to make pretense that their home was not gripped by the pestilence. So Ester and Rivka hired a wagon and brought the rabbi themselves to the pit at Stepney Mount, and averted their eyes from what seemed a hundred bodies, many not even wrapped—limbs and sore-encrusted faces dusted with lime. They said what prayers seemed proper, then slid his frail body, in the shroud Rivka had stitched for him, into the silent, thronged gully.

  They returned together to the house.

  There, slipped through the crevice at the door’s base, Ester found a note from Mary.

  Please come, it said, in a hand too rounded and girlish for one her age and in her state.

  The house, without the rabbi’s labored breathing, stood in powerful silence. Following Rivka, Ester washed her hands and face in the kitchen basin; then lingered, strangely idle, in the front room. She allowed the thought: even should she and Rivka survive the plague, this household would soon be dissolved.

  With a small scissor taken from her pocket, Rivka cut the cloth of her own collar to signify mourning; then Ester’s. In the hollow house, the slow rasp of scissor biting cloth was alarmingly loud. But the quiet in its wake was worse. As Rivka lowered the scissor, Ester saw the realization reflected on her face: they were alone.

  She said to Rivka, “I’m going to the da Costa Mendes house. I’ll return. Before dark.”

  Rivka nodded, lips pressed tight.

  She hurried through the deserted streets. The Jewish houses around Creechurch Lane were abandoned or silent. If any remained behind those windows who might care that the rabbi had died or that Ester and Rivka still lived, they hadn’t shown themselves in weeks. Still Ester couldn’t help gaze into each, as if some familiar soul might peer back through the dark mullioned panes as though from underwater or from beyond this world.

  She entered the gate of the da Costa Mendes house, shut it carefully behind her, and only then looked up to see the white cross painted on the door.

  She hesitated. Then stepped up to it and knocked, avoiding touching the cross as though it were cursed.

  Mary opened the door just wide enough for Ester to see her face. “I’m not sick,” she said. Swinging the door wider, she grabbed Ester’s forearm hard. “The cross is a lie.”

  Ester let herself be pulled through the familiar entryway, and Mary shut the door behind her and locked it.

  It took Ester just one step inside the parlor to know that no one else was present. The fine furnishings were askew, pillows lay in piles on the floor, blankets were heaped on a divan, and used dishes were scattered here and there. Mary had never kept house for herself. Now it appeared she had been sleeping and eating here in the parlor, where the window looked out onto the deserted street. Mary herself was dressed in a stained blue dress that gaped at the placket. Her belly was swollen past the point where it could be contained in her usual bodices and stays. It was clear she’d had none to teach her how to dress in the manner of a woman expecting a child. Without her customary makeup and jewelry she looked like a child herself, settling now cross-legged on a cushioned chair and pulling Ester to the seat beside her.

  “The servants left over a week ago,” she said, still gripping Ester’s arm. “They helped themselves to some of my father’s things along the way.” She shrugged, as though she didn’t begrudge them what they’d taken. Then, releasing Ester at last, she said more quietly, “Thomas left.”

  “I know,” Ester said, sitting. “I saw him go. With John.” She looked up into Mary’s wide, shadowed eyes—and could easily guess the terror of Mary’s nights alone in the deserted house, the city’s anguish sounding unseen all around.

  “Did John ask you to accompany him?”

  Ester began to answer, then faltered. At length she said, “At first. But I fear he wouldn’t wish it now, even had I a travel permit.”

  In the silence that followed, an agreement passed between them: neither would make the other name what she’d lost.

  “Why is there a cross on your door?” Ester asked. “Isn’t it the mark of a plague house?”

  Mary shook her head hard. “No one’s died here, Ester, not yet. But Bescós came.” Mary’s soft face registered fear now, and she hesitated before continuing in a lower voice, as though they might be overheard. “Thomas told Bescós everything. He told him I’d stayed. That I was with child.” Mary began rocking herself gently, forward and back, arms about her belly. “And Bescós guessed that the servants would leave me. He says that now that I’m the sole guardian of my father’s wealth, it will be his.”

  Ester absorbed this. She believed Mary—yet something here fit amiss with her notion of Bescós. She’d taken Bescós for a hateful man, yes . . . even a dangerous one. But she hadn’t thought him a petty thief. There had always been something haughty about the man. Wouldn’t Bescós consider himself above threatening a frightened girl for petty gain?

  “He sent someone to paint the cross, Ester,” Mary said. “I didn’t know it was there until I tried to go out, and a man on the street shouted me back indoors as though I were a rat trying to escape its trap.” Her voice caught. “No one will come,” she said. “All the congregation are gone from London—and they’d stopped wanting to speak to me even before the plague. When I stole out my door to try to find you this morning, the woman who saw me screamed and screamed for help, and said she’d set a mob on me, and I had to run past her—like this, Ester.” She gestured at her belly, at the gaping fabric at her waist. “Bescós said if I don’t start paying him from my father’s silver, he’ll simply wait until I die of plague or hunger, and he’ll come get my father’s wealth then.”

  Ester turned to the window. Through its panes she surveyed the empty street that had been Mary’s solitary view day and night. “Leave your father’s fortune,” she said. “Let Bescós claim it, let your father mourn it. Manuel HaLevy will take us in. You and I, and Rivka, I’m sure of it.” And she was.

  And if Manuel asked her to pledge him something in return? Perhaps she ought. If she couldn’t love Manuel—if she forever mourned John—what of it? For reasons she could not comprehend, John had turned away. All else she’d cherished—her carefully built edifices and spires of thought—had brought pain to the rabbi and benefited none but herself. But a choice to marry could save them.

  Manuel HaLevy had been correct: in the end, life would force her hand, and she’d greet his offer with gratitude.

  Mary stared. Then something akin to a laugh rose in her throat. “Manuel HaLevy is dead. He died over a week ago, of plague. The servants told me, before they left. He fell ill the day he was to leave London. He never passed the city walls.”

  The parlor was too dim. She could see nothing in the shadowed room. She stood.

  Mary took her sleeve. “Stay with me, Ester.”

  Slowly she shook her head, not in answer but simply for the sensation of motion.

  “I can’t live alone,” Mary insisted. “I don’t know how. There are some foods still in the pantry and I don’t know even how to cook them. I’ll either die of plague or I’ll starve, or else I’ll live to birth the baby
and I’m afraid to do that alone. I’m not brave like you.” She stopped herself. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer those letters you sent me. I thought . . . I thought perhaps you wanted to see me only because I paid you to look after me. I thought: first Thomas, then Bescós, all wanting only my father’s money—maybe you were the same. I thought, I don’t have a true friend. And then . . .” She looked up. “I thought you’d gone with John. And even if you hadn’t, I didn’t want any to see me like this.” She gestured at her belly without touching it, as though it were a thing entirely separate from her. Then, a moment later, she wrapped her arms protectively about it once more. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice taking on a solemn hush, “about the rabbi. Is that where you were this morning?”

  Ester nodded.

  Mary hesitated. “May the Holy One comfort you,” she began uncomfortably, “among the—” She stopped, unable to recall the remainder. With a small, helpless giggle she subsided.

  The world had reshaped so quickly, there was no room left—so it seemed to Ester—to do anything but act. In the rabbi’s household there remained perhaps a few days’ food and fuel, and after that nothing—no income, no salvation in the form of a purse from Manuel HaLevy. She thought with apprehension of the cross on Mary’s door. Yet in this house there was also food, and silver and fine furnishings that might yet be traded for some means of escape. If they were careful, they might come and go as they needed.

  “Rivka as well?” she said.

  Mary nodded, relief suffusing her face so that for a fleeting instant she resembled paintings such as Ester had sometimes seen in rich homes in Amsterdam—of a young woman dreamy and ripe, anticipating the birth of her babe.

  Mary stood, the pale skin of her belly bulging through the gap in her skirt. “Come today,” she said. “This evening, before the curfew.”

  By sunset it was accomplished. Rivka, who’d replied to Ester’s explanation of Mary’s predicament with naught but pragmatic questions, set immediately to gathering her few necessities, then followed Ester—locking the door of the rabbi’s house behind them and departing without backward glance, as though she couldn’t bear to stay another moment within those walls without the sound of his frail breathing.

  Rather than find a cart whose very wood might be permeated with plague seeds, Ester brought her possessions by hand, taking care to avoid being seen coming and going from the da Costa Mendeses’ door. Her own belongings, bundled beneath her arms, required only one passage between the da Costa Mendes house and the rabbi’s. Returning alone for the rabbi’s books, Ester carried his library two stacks at a time.

  Over and again she passed through the hushed streets, the tender pages and worn covers marking the exposed skin of her forearms with deep red grooves and slashes—like a mute alphabet spelling accusations she couldn’t refute. Finally, on her sixth and final passage, she brought the papers. The rabbi’s body lay in a pit, yet she could still preserve his writings. Unable to bear sorting the pages she pulled from drawers and shelves, she swept all together: household accounts, notices from the book bindery, the rabbi’s sermons, all in a jumble. And somewhere among them, the rabbi’s letters to his pupil in Florence—letters she now understood were intended for her, to pull her back from the folly of her own notions. She brought, too, her own writings. Yet it seemed to her now, as she hurried down long alleys in the fading light, that her very questions and propositions were themselves written in an alphabet of scored flesh and damaged spirit. Such cruel wounds, from such small markings of her quill on the page.

  That night, Ester lay awake on one of the fine mattresses of the da Costa Mendes house. In a bed beside hers, Rivka lay quiet—whether asleep or not Ester couldn’t say. In a nearby room, Mary tossed noisily in her bed.

  She could not yet grieve the rabbi’s death. Her mind failed, somehow, to comprehend it. Beneath the mattress where she lay, stowed there hastily this evening, were his papers and her own—a mute presence whose demands on her she couldn’t fathom. Her spirit shrank, too, from the scalding thought of John.

  Yet she circled back again and again, without understanding why, to one single comprehensible fact: Manuel HaLevy was dead. She could not break away from the thought of him. She could almost feel his astonishment at his first moment of faltering . . . his great body suddenly weak, hot with fever, not responding to his command that it rise, stride, shake off what dogged it. She could see his pale eyes, understanding at last that he too would yield. And although she hadn’t loved him, that first night in her new lodgings she cried hot tears for his robust body, racked and stilled. And for the protection he had so long offered her. And for that protection which he had so fervently, even courteously, requested from her in exchange: the surety of a wife who would not succumb.

  23

  April 4, 2001

  London

  He lingered in the shower, took his time over coffee in the dining hall. He ran an errand he’d meant to run for weeks—stopping at the supply store near the Tube entrance to buy new toner for Helen’s printer. Waiting to pay, he even let a mother, jabbering on her mobile while her toddler poked at a pen display with the sticky end of a lollipop, into the queue ahead of him.

  But delay though he did, by late morning he found himself at the usual long table in the rare manuscripts room, facing the final batch of documents.

  Grimly then, notched pencil digging into his knuckles, he worked his way down the evenly inked lines. He understood, of course, why he hated to finish the cache: like a gambler spinning the roulette wheel, he’d come to rely on the eternal promise of the next round of letters.

  But as he made his way down the lines of the fourth-to-last document—and then the third-to-last—he acknowledged the folly of the trust he’d placed in these papers. There would be no grand revelation, no smoking gun, no hidden three-century-old wisdom to galvanize his drifting life. Ester Velasquez was not going to pop out from behind the curtains and save him from himself. Even if she’d actually written under the name of Thomas Farrow, they’d never be able to prove it. Not if the rest of the documents were like this.

  The sole labor that remained for Aaron then, in these dwindling hours of reading, was to listen. No more, and no less. Which was, as he should have known all along, a historian’s only true charge.

  He tried now to listen to what Ester was actually saying, rather than what he wanted her to say.

  There wasn’t much of it. In silence, he translated another list of household expenses, this one without any extraneous doodles in the margins. He read a missive from the rabbi to his student in Florence, but it was brief and mainly repeated the rabbi’s earlier opinions about Sabbatai Zevi and the dangers of misplaced fervor.

  When Patricia lay the second-to-last document on the wedge before him, he realized he was clenching his fists.

  It was a single sheet of paper, and the writing covered only half the page.

  June 28, 1665

  15 Tamuz, 5425

  With the help of G-d

  To the Esteemed Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca,

  From my sickbed I send to the honorable kehillah of Amsterdam my greetings. Each hour now brings me closer to my end. The angels who escort the sun on its passage across the sky do not slow to lengthen my final days, nor do I ask this. Such work as I have had sufficient merit to do in this world is now ended, whether or not I have succeeded in it.

  My household here in London sees to my needs and reads psalms for me, and I am blessed to lack neither comfort nor a soul to whom to make my confession.

  I have a request of you. It is my hope that you will find merit in me to grant it. It is my wish that you should prevail upon the Dotar to provide a dowry for Ester Velasquez, should the day come for her to wed. Little has been given her and much ripped from her in her life. When she has attained the honor and stability of the marriage canopy I believe she will prove herself a woman of valor. Should there be questions about the girl’s mother, I ask that the Dotar grant this wish nonetheless, as
a duty to the dead. In this broken world, I request that you escort and comfort my departing soul through this good deed, which will bring you merit in the world to come.

  For my sins I beg G-d’s forgiveness.

  In faith in the coming of the Messiah and the merciful reign of G-d, which will break on us like a dawn, illuminating every mystery that now confounds our sightless souls.

  Rabbi Moseh HaCoen Mendes

  א

  He sat back.

  The quiet in the hall was absolute. A faint shaft of light rested on the wooden floor beside his feet. His eyes stung.

  After a moment he stood. It was two o’clock. Just another twenty minutes until he’d have to leave to meet Helen in her office. In truth she seemed to have lost her taste for the rare manuscripts room this past week. He wondered if she, too, was dragging her feet about reaching the end of the cache. She hadn’t looked quite her usual fierce self lately—and the rabbi’s deathbed letter was unlikely to cheer her.

  On with it, then. Librarian Patricia watched him approach.

  “I’ll take the last in the series.” He tried to sound jauntier than he felt.

  She wasn’t fooled. The look she gave him was almost, but not quite, sympathetic. “The ivy letter isn’t ready.”

  “Which letter?”

  “The final document. It’s a folded letter, with an unbroken wax seal.” She pursed her lips. “The seal is an ornate image of climbing ivy. Quite lovely, in fact.” Her eyebrows lifted just a millimeter; her smile this time was faint but real.

  “When will it be ready?” he said.

  “My colleague upstairs has removed the seal and is preserving it for display. The letter itself is now in the humidifying chamber. She expects it will be ready in another week.”