The Day of Atonement (5 page)

“I am glad to hear you say so.” I removed a handkerchief from my pocket and began to wipe my brow.

“And,” said the priest, “our friends must know how to value us.”

The priest’s meaning was clear. An Englishman, secretly Catholic, within the circle of the Factory—this was a prize the Inquisition must claim.

“I seek only to engage in trade,” I told him, still wiping at my forehead, my nose, even running the handkerchief under my wig, moving it askew so I looked disordered and, I felt sure, slightly deranged. More importantly, I looked vulnerable. “I have no desire to be caught in intrigues.”

“No intrigues,” the priest said. “Certainly not. Never an intrigue. We would never do anything to harm the prospects of a gentleman if he is of use to us.” The priest nodded as he spoke, as if urging me to agree. “I shall report what I know to my superiors, and you must
understand the flow of power here in Portugal. Priests and Englishmen talk, and if the wrong man whispers in the wrong ear, secrets might be difficult to contain. If, on the other hand, you were to declare your willingness to aid the Church, that would be a different thing entirely. A favor done for the Church now and again could help you rise quite rapidly, I assure you.”

I stared ahead blankly, like a man who had wandered mistakenly into a forest darker and more tangled than he had imagined. I allowed nothing of my real thoughts to show, but I considered how this news would move through certain channels in the Palace of the Inquisition. The Inquisitors would whisper and wonder and speculate how this new Englishman might be of use. One priest would speak of it to another until the news came to the man I sought, and he would look up. His eyes would grow wide. He would smirk, never suspecting that it was a trap that scented the air.

Only a few hours in Lisbon, without even setting foot on land, and I had set things in motion. These people—my enemies—already danced upon my string. Unless I dangled upon their rope. That was also a possibility.

I put my face in my hands as though I were overwhelmed, confused, full of regret. Only three and twenty, and I was in waters well out of my depth! I knew not what to do, and wished—oh, how I wished—someone would save me! “Might we not forget this conversation ever took place?” I begged.

“That cannot happen,” the priest told me as he opened the cabin door. Halfway out, he turned back. “Go about your business. You will be contacted when it is convenient, but until that time you may take comfort in the knowledge that you will have the blessing of the Church.” Then he closed the door behind him with dramatic finality.

With the priest gone, I let my false expression fall away, a burnt egg sliding from a pan. I was now in danger, and I welcomed it. The expectation thrummed through me. My skin tingled with the thought of it. All those priests and Inquisitors swarming about me, looking to
squeeze me like a lemon, filled me with eagerness and a kind of calm expectation and, indeed, gratitude.

Gratitude, I decided, was most appropriate. Keeping my voice just above a whisper, I spoke the words of the
Shehecheyanu
, the ancient prayer of thankfulness at auspicious times. In London, I had become a Jew in truth, converting, learning the ancient rites of my people. I had not done so out of devotion, but out of defiance. Always, in the back of my mind, I had dreamed of this moment, when I would do what had been forbidden to my ancestors and forgotten by my parents. How long, I wondered, since Hebrew had been spoken aloud in Lisbon? Perhaps this was the first time in twenty or thirty or forty years. What ghosts did I raise with these words breathed into the musty darkness? The act of defiance, secret and small though it was, pleased me.

Lisbon was the last place upon the whole of the earth I should be, but here I was, and there was no undoing what I had set in motion. I began to gather my things in preparation to leave. There was nothing to do now but to remove myself from the protection of Englishmen and find my way in a city full of villains. They had tried to destroy me once, and they would certainly attempt to do so again. Let them make their best effort. The priests and the Inquisitors, the factors and the traders—they would all discover the man to be much more dangerous than the boy. This time the schemes and the plots and the secrets were mine.

Ten years earlier, I made the bleak journey from Lisbon to Falmouth. Once the ship sailed out of Portuguese waters, the captain himself had fetched me from my hiding place in the hold and delivered me to one of the smallest cabins. He ordered that meals were to be sent to the room every day, but I was otherwise left to mourn in solitude. That was a mercy. I craved no company and no conversation. I wanted no one to see my tears. I lay upon the thin and scratchy mattress that smelled of mold and sweat, and I tried to dwell upon nothing but the rolling of the ship. I didn’t want to think about those I had left behind, those I had abandoned. I felt alone and desperate and terrified and nauseated with guilt. I wanted to feel nothing at all.

Everyone I knew was gone. Perhaps my parents might be executed or they might be set free to live in poverty and want. Regardless, I would never see them again. Nor would I ever see my friends. How would my days pass without wily Inácio by my side? How could I imagine
wanting to live without Gabriela? Only in being torn apart from her had I understood the depth of what I felt. Now that was a raw wound, gaping and unable to heal. Even if I could someday return to her, she would no doubt be married. I still had her scarf, and I clutched it, pressed it to my face as I tried to recover the faint floral scent of her skin. Life in Lisbon had been cruel, but it was the only life I had ever known, and it was finished.

After we reached England, I continued the journey with one of the ship’s officers, a thin man with a limp, a blotchy complexion, and a perpetual reddish stubble upon his chin. Mr. Hastings, as he was called, had business in London, and before the ship had departed Lisbon, he accepted payment from Charles Settwell to see me from Falmouth to the capital. He was not a friendly man and spoke to me only to introduce himself and to say he did not much relish the company of children. He said this several times in the course of no more than five minutes, so I suspected it must be true. I nodded when he talked, but said nothing, and that was evidently to his liking.

Mr. Hastings fulfilled his responsibilities perhaps with less scrupulousness than desired, but with more than might have been expected. He made certain I had a place to sleep and enough to eat. If Hastings dined on beef and beer while I made do with hard cheese and brown bread, it was of no consequence. I ate little and that without relish. It was true that sometimes I was sent to pass the night in the stables while Hastings took a room, but I little cared for comforts. In any case, the stables were preferable when Hastings brought a woman back to our lodgings, although the sounds of his rutting were always mercifully brief. That Hastings had me pay, from my own purse rather than the funds Settwell had provided, for our room and food and, occasionally, his female companionship, was unsurprising. I could not expect him to care for me out of kindness. He was an Englishman, and I understood that most Englishmen did nothing if they did not see profit in it.

Hastings and I passed our days riding in silence in a bouncing
coach alongside a curious admixture of passengers—people belonging to classes and representing occupations whose existence I had never previously suspected. England, I understood at once, was as unlike Portugal as China or India. It was not merely different, but deeply alien. Servants upbraided their masters. Women dressed down their husbands in public. Customers were at the mercy of the shopkeepers from whom they wished to buy. The journey to England from Lisbon was less like crossing an ocean and more like venturing into the land of fairies.

Before I had ever set eyes on it, I supposed London to be a city like Lisbon, but when it came into view, the size and the filth and the congestion confounded my imagination. It was spring, but still cold, and the air was thick with black smoke belched out from countless chimneys. Everything I touched was coated with a brown and oily scum. Two or three breaths of London air made my lungs ache. From a distance I saw both its massive buildings and the sprawl of lesser structures made of stone and brick and decaying wood. From the coach’s window, I observed not only beggars but whores too, who plied their trade openly and without shame. There were also other kinds of women upon the street—noblewomen and fashionable ladies without veils to cover their faces and in gowns that exposed no small part of their bosoms. There were merchants and peddlers and gentlemen and the poor. I saw no priests, no monks, and no nuns. The coach paused in the streets for the passage of drunks and defiant laborers and pigs and cows and sheep herded by their scowling minders, but never for a traveling relic or holy procession.

Once we reached the center of the city, Mr. Hastings took a portion of my remaining funds and hired another coach, giving the driver a particular destination. During this last part of the voyage, Mr. Hastings wrung his hands as he looked out the window. “I’m almost free of ye,” he said. “I hope you’ll report I treated you kind.”

I nodded. I did not like to speak anymore—not with these strange
people in this strange country. I hated the way words felt in my throat, dry and rough as though moving against a tender grain. I understood Hastings wanted some assurance I would not complain about him, and I was willing to give it. I supposed I might have been treated better, but I did not much care, and I saw no reason to make trouble upon first arriving in a foreign land whose laws were a mystery and whose customs were a riddle.

At last we arrived at a street full of people who looked, for the most part, impoverished. We left the coach and walked past innumerable peddlers, men and women selling food and clothes and trinkets, all shouting their wares at once. There were odd-looking men with beards and long coats. I heard English and a strange sort of Portuguese and a language that sounded like German. The air smelled of bread and cabbage and fish. Brisk business was conducted everywhere.

Suspecting the answer, I spoke my first unsolicited words to Mr. Hastings. “What are these men?”

Hastings wrinkled his nose. “Jews,” he said, keeping his voice low as if this were a secret.

But it was not a secret. I could see that much. Jews. Actual Jews. Not New Christians, but my ancestral people, undisguised and undiluted, out in the street and speaking their own languages. There were men with long beards, who held books written in a strange script I knew must be Hebrew, though I had never before seen the letters. I had heard that Jews lived openly in England, but knowing and seeing were two different things.

Hastings, oblivious to my wonder, asked for directions and then led us to a large house off the main street. Here things were less chaotic and the poverty less oppressive. The officer knocked and a serving woman of middle years answered the door. Hastings briefly explained his business, and we were ushered inside, directed to a sitting room, and told we would have to wait. The woman said that the master of the house was out and would return in an hour or two.
Hastings handed her a letter for her master and accepted, in return, an offer of wine. I asked for nothing and refused all offers with the fewest words good manners would allow.

The room was unlike anything I had ever seen, even in the houses of English merchants in Lisbon. There were no tiles upon the walls, no gilt or silver-plated ornamentations. There was only a settee and a few padded chairs upon a fine-looking rug, a cabinet with some china inside, and a few paintings upon the papered walls. The room did not appear poor, but it did strike me as plain and utterly without the desire to impress.

We waited for only three-quarters of an hour. I heard the front door open and a deep voice and some whispers. Then, after a few minutes, a tall man in fine English gentlemen’s clothes entered the room and bowed to Mr. Hastings. He held the open letter in one hand. This man was quite old—at least fifty—but he was fit and broad in the shoulders and carried himself with energy. When he shook Hastings’s hand, his forearm, thick and coiled with muscle, protruded from his coat sleeve. Unlike most English gentlemen, he wore his own hair, which was dusty brown, streaked with gray, and pulled back in the style of a cue wig. He had a distinguished face that had aged well, with a square jaw and intense dark eyes. Despite his many years, there was something commanding about him. It wasn’t the authority of station but something else entirely, a kind of easy confidence, and I found it instantly fascinating.

After exchanging a few pleasantries with Hastings, the man extended his hand to me.
“Olá, Senhor Raposa. Eu sou Benjamin Weaver, e eu sou amigo do Senhor Settwell. Bem-vindo à minha casa.”
His Portuguese was strangely accented but I understood him.

I took the man’s hand without enthusiasm. “Sir, I speak English.”

Benjamin Weaver smiled thinly. “Quite well, too.” He turned to Hastings. “My thanks to you for seeing the boy here safely.”