People of the Book

Saltwater Tarragona, 1492

DAVID BEN SHOUSHAN was not a rude man, it was just that his mind was on higher things. His wife, Miriam, often chastised him for this, for passing within feet of her sister in the marketplace without a nod of acknowledgment, or failing to hear when the mackerel sellers were hawking their fish at half the usual price.

So he was never quite able to explain why it was that he noticed the youth. Unlike the other beggars and peddlers, this one did not cry out, but just sat, silent, his eyes searching the faces of the passing crowd. Maybe it was his very stillness that caught Ben Shoushan’s attention. In all the clamor and bustle, he was the one quiet, centered thing. But perhaps that was not it at all. Perhaps it was merely a beam of thin winter sunlight, glinting on gold.

The youth had claimed a small patch of ground at the edge of the market, hemmed in by the city wall. It was a damp, windy spot at this time of year; a poor place to attract customers, which was why the local merchants left it for the itinerant peddlers or the ragtag of war-fleeing Andalusians who drifted through the city. The wars in the south had set so many adrift. By the time they reached this far, what little they’d had of value was already sold. Most of the refugees who found places on the market’s edges were attempting to sell worthless things; threadbare cales and surcoats or a few worn-out household goods. But the youth had a piece of leather unrolled in front of him, and on it, bright and arresting, was a collection of small painted parchments.

Ben Shoushan stopped and fought his way through the press to get a better look. He squatted, pressing his fingers into the chill mud for balance. It was as he thought; and the pictures were dazzling. Ben Shoushan had seen illuminations in the Christians’ prayer books, but never anything like this. He stooped and peered, unable to believe his eyes. Someone well acquainted with the Midrash had done these, or at least directed the artist. An idea occurred to Ben Shoushan, an idea that pleased him immensely.

“Who made these?” he asked. The youth stared at him, the bright brown eyes blank with incomprehension. Assuming he did not understand the local dialect, Ben Shoushan switched to Arabic, then Hebrew. But the blank stare did not change.

“He’s deaf-mute,” said a one-armed peasant, hawking a much-mended dough trough and a pair of wooden spoons. “I met up with him and his black slave on the road.” Ben Shoushan looked at the youth more closely. His clothes, though travel stained, were very fine.

“Who is he?”

The man shrugged. “The slave told some wild tale—claimed he’s the son of a physician who served the last emir. But you know how it is with slaves, they like to make up tales, eh?”

“Is the boy a Jew?”

“He’s circumcised, so he’s not Christian, and he doesn’t look like a Moor.”

“Where is this slave? I’d like to know more about these pictures.”

“Slipped off one night not long after we reached the coast at Alicante. Trying to get home to Ifriqiya, no doubt. My wife’s taken a liking to the youth; he’s a willing soul and he surely doesn’t give her any backchat. But when we got here, I made him understand that he’d have to sell something to pay his way. The pictures are all he had with him. That’s real gold on them, you know. You want one?”

“I want all of them,” said Ben Shoushan.

Miriam slapped the meat onto the quadrae so hard that David’s slice broke, letting a trickle of juice dribble onto the table.

“Now look what you’ve done, you filthy man!”

“Miriam…” He knew that the source of her anger was not the broken piece of bread. His daughter, Ruti, had leaped to her feet and was already wiping up the spill. David saw the girl’s shoulders drooping as his wife continued her scolding. Ruti hated raised voices. Sparrow, David called her, for she reminded him of a nervous little bird. Like a sparrow, she was a dull brown thing, with dun-colored eyes and a muddy complexion, who often smelled bad from tending the kettles where he boiled the gallnuts, resins, and copper vitriol that made his inks. Poor Sparrow, he thought. Gentle, willing to work, at fifteen she could have been married to some kindly young man and out of reach of her mother’s bitter tongue. But Ruti lacked both fortune and a fair face. And from the observant Torah families, who did not set such store in those things, she was excluded by the taint of her brother’s conduct.

Miriam, tough as an old saddle, had no patience with the girl’s timidity. She shoved her daughter roughly and snatched the clout from her hand, rubbing at the table with exaggerated vigor. “You know better than me how few commissions you have, and yet you go and spend two months’ income on pictures! And Rachela says you didn’t even bargain with the boy.”

David tried to quash his unneighborly thoughts about Rachela, who always seemed to know the business of the entire Kahal in its most minute particulars.

“Miriam…”

“As if we haven’t enough expense coming up, with your nephew’s wedding!”

“Miriam,” said David, raising his own voice in a way that was highly unusual for him. “The pictures are for the wedding. You know I am making a haggadah shel Pesach for Joseph’s boy and his bride. Don’t you see? I can have the quires with these pictures bound into the book, and then we will be able to give a gift of substance.”

Miriam pursed her lips. She tucked a curl of hair into her linen headdress. “Oh, well, in that case…” Miriam would rather suck a gall than back down in an argument, but this information brought with it the ease of removing an ill-fitting boot. She had been troubled about this wedding gift. One could hardly come with a trifle to the wedding of Don Joseph’s eldest son and the daughter of the Sanz family. She had worried that a plain haggadah from David’s own hand would seem a paltry gift to those great families. But these pictures, with their gold and lapis and malachite, these, she had to admit, had quality.

David Ben Shoushan cared nothing for money and less for position; that he was the poorest man in the entire Ben Shoushan family bothered him not at all. But he did care for the peace of his household. Seeing that he had pleased his refractory wife was a relief to him. The idea of the thing satisfied him, too. A decade ago, he might have hesitated at the propriety of images, even religious ones such as these. But his brother was a courtier: he held banquets and enjoyed music and was—though David would never say it to his face—barely distinguishable from a Gentile. Why should his son not have a book to rival the finest Christian psalter? The great Rabbi Duran, after all, had insisted on teaching his students only from beautiful books. These, the rabbi said, strengthened the soul. “It has been one of the virtues of our nation that the rich and important in every generation have tried to produce beautiful manuscripts,” the rabbi had said.

Well, he was neither rich nor important, but by the help of the Almighty, these fine paintings had been put into his hands—hands that had already been gifted with the skill to produce harmonious script. He intended that the book he made would be a glory. Most of the time, he found it hard to explain to his wife that his work as a sofer—a scribe of God’s holy languages—made him rich, despite the very few maravedis it earned them. But as he looked at her, smiling slightly as she cleared the table, he was glad that for once she seemed to understand him.

He was at work in the first gray light of morning, waving away Miriam when she came to offer breakfast. Their house, like most in the Kahal, was a tiny tilted thing, just two rooms perched one above the other, so Ben Shoushan had to work outdoors, even in the chill of winter. It was barely ten paces from the street door to the house, and the space was crammed with vats of skins soaking in lime, and others stretched on frames waiting for the few pale beams of sunlight that would slowly dry them. There were skins still thick with their fat and blood vessels, awaiting the careful parings of his rounded blade. But he had a small pile of scraped skins, and these he sorted carefully, looking for those of mountain sheep, that matched the parchments of the illuminations. When he had selected the perfect skins, he set Ruti to work, rubbing them smooth with pumice and chalk. He washed his hands in the chill water of the courtyard fountain, and sat down heavily at his scriptionale, carefully ruling up the readied pages with his bone stylus. His letters would hang from these faint lines. When the ruling was done, he passed his cold hands over his face.

“Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach,” he whispered. Then he took up the turkey quill and dipped it in the ink.

Ha Lachma an’ya…. This is the bread of affliction….

The fiery letters seemed to burn into the parchment.

…which our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him enter and eat…

Ben Shoushan’s stomach growled, protesting his missed breakfast.

Whomever is in need, let him enter and celebrate.

There were many in need this year, thanks to the taxes imposed by the king and queen for their interminable wars in the south. Ben Shoushan tried to rein in his racing thoughts. A sofer must fill his mind with only the holy letters. He could not be distracted by daily things. “Leshem ketivah haggadah shel Pesach,” he whispered to himself again, trying to quiet his mind. His hand formed the letter shin— the letter of reason. What reason could there be in this constant fighting with the Moors? Had not the Muslims, Jews, and Christians shared these lands in contentment—in convivencia—for hundreds of years? What was the saying? Christians raise the armies, Muslims raise the buildings, Jews raise the money.

This year here, and the next year in the land of Israel.

This year here, thanks to Don Seneor and Don Abravanel, may their names be inscribed for a blessing, who have dazzled the eyes of Ferdinand with gold, and kept the royal ears closed to the hateful murmuring of jealous burghers.

This year slaves…

Ben Shoushan thought of the slave who had served the mute youth. How he wished he had been able to speak with him, to find out something of the history of those marvelous paintings. The sofer’s hand moved from ink bottle to parchment as his imagination conjured a lean black figure, walking with a staff along a dusty yellow road toward a settlement of mud-brick houses where a family waited who had imagined him dead. Well, likely he was dead, by now, or chained to a galley oar with a bloodied back.

He went on so, all day until the light failed, battling the distractions of his busy mind to set down letter after careful letter. At dusk, he asked his Sparrow to bring him a clean robe, and he walked to the mikvah, hoping that by a ritual immersion he might clear himself of the daily clamor and open his mind fully to his sacred work. Returning refreshed, he bade Sparrow fill a lamp so he could work on into the night. When Miriam smelled the rich scent of the lit wick, she came flying from the house like a wasp, scolding about the price of the oil. But David spoke to her with unaccustomed sharpness, and she retreated, muttering.

It was in the still of the early hours, when the stars blazed in the black sky, that it happened. His fasting, the chill, the brilliant flare of the lamp: suddenly the letters lifted and swirled into a glorious wheel. His hand flew across the parchment. Every letter was afire. Each character raised itself and danced spinning in the void. And then the letters merged into one great fire, out of which emerged just four, blazing with the glory of the Almighty’s holy name. The power and the sweetness of it were too much for Ben Shoushan, and he fainted.

When Ruti found him in the morning, he was slumped unconscious under the scriptionale. A light frost whitened his beard. But his script, every letter and word of it perfect, covered more pages than a sofer could complete in a week of constant labor.

Ruti put him to bed that morning, but in the afternoon he insisted on rising and getting to his work again. His hand was once again an ordinary sofer’s, his mind the usual unruly tangle of mundane thoughts, but his heart remained touched by the night’s mystical bliss. The feeling stayed with him the following day, and the text progressed steadily and well.

On the fourth day, when the work of what should have been weeks was nearing completion, a light tapping came on the outer door. Ben Shoushan hissed with exasperation. Ruti, skittering in her silent, birdlike way through the clutter of the courtyard, flung back the crossbar and opened the door. When she recognized the woman who stood there, Ruti straightened, her hands fluttering to adjust her head cover. Her eyes, when she turned to her father, were wide and frightened.

As the woman moved to step across the threshold, Ben Shoushan flung down his quill, outraged. How dare she, whom he would not name, how dare she come to his door? His anger acted on his empty stomach like acid, sending a searing pain through his gut. Ruti, startled by his expression, fluttered back from the street door, heading toward the house.

The woman was speaking in that mellow, whorish voice of hers.

Determined not to hear her, Ben Shoushan muttered in Hebrew: “The lips of the strange woman drip honey, but her rear end is bitter as wormwood.” They were the last words he had said to his son—his son! his Kaddish, apple of his eye and root of his heart!—before he left through that very door to go to the baptismal font and then to the altar. David Ben Shoushan had rent his coat that day. Two years gone and still, wherever he turned, the memory of his boy was there, vivid and searing. And now here she was, source of his heartbreak, speaking a name no longer uttered in his house.

“I have no son!” he shouted, turning his back and following Ruti toward the inner door.

Two paces and he stopped. What had she said?

“The alguazil came with the bailiff in the night. He struggled, so they beat him, and when he cried out, they forced a metal gag into his mouth—one of them held him while the other turned the screws to make it widen until I thought they would break his jaw.” She was weeping now. He could tell because her voice was no longer mellow, but ragged. He still had not brought himself to look at her. “They have him at the Casa Santa—I followed them there, begging to know the charges, to know who has accused him—but they turned on me then, and said I was guilty of polluting Christian blood by carrying the child of a Marrano heretic. I am a coward, for I left the place, ran away. I can’t bear the thought that my child might be born in the dungeons of the Inquisition. I come to you because I do not know where else to turn. My father has no money for a ransom.” Her honey voice, as she mouthed this lie, sounded thin and reedy as a child’s.

David Ben Shoushan did look at her then, at her swollen belly. She was very near her time. The mixture of love and loss he felt at that moment seemed to melt the marrow of his bones. His grandchild, who would not be a Jew. Reeling, as if he had drunk too much wine, he traversed the small courtyard toward the heavy wooden door and closed it in her tear-streaked face.

The young man spoke with difficulty. When they had unscrewed the gag and pulled the metal bulb from his mouth, four fractured teeth had gone with it. His lips were torn at each corner, and when he opened them to speak, a fresh spurt of blood trickled down his chin and dripped onto his stained smock. He tried to raise a hand to wipe his mouth, but the manacles prevented him.

“How can I confess, Father, when you do not tell me of what I stand accused?”

They had brought him here in his nightdress, and he shivered. The room inside the Casa Santa was windowless, its walls hung with black cloth. The only light came from six candles set on either side of a picture of Christ crucified. The table, also, was draped in black.

The Inquisitor’s face was invisible in the recess of his hood. Only his pale hands, fingertips pressed together beneath an unseen chin, were discernible in the candlelight.

“Reuben Ben Shoushan…”

“Renato, Father. I was baptized Renato. My name is Renato del Salvador.”

“Reuben Ben Shoushan,” the priest repeated, as if he had not heard. “You would do well to confess now, for the sake of your immortal soul, and…” He paused for a long moment, the fingertips lightly tapping. “And for the sake of your mortal body. For if you will not declare your sins freely to me, here, you surely shall do so in the place of relaxation.”

Renato felt the contents of his bowels liquefying. He clutched his manacled hands hard against his belly. He swallowed, but there was no saliva in his mouth. His voice was a rasp.

“I know not what it is you imagine that I have done!”

In the corner, a scribe scraped away with his pen, taking down every word Renato uttered. The sound carried Renato home, to the courtyard of the Kahal and the sound of his own father’s stylus on parchment. But his father wrote only words of glory. Not like this man, whose job it was to note down every desperate plea, every moan and cry uttered by the accused.

An exaggerated sigh came from within the hood. “Why do you do it to yourself? Admit, and be reconciled. Many have done so, and walked from here. Better, surely, to wear the penitent’s San Benito for a season or two than to forfeit your life to the fire?”

A groan escaped from Renato. He could smell the acrid smoke of the last auto-da-fé. It had been a humid day, and the stink of burning had hung low over the city. Six had gone to the fire. Three, confessing heresy at the last moment, had been strangled before the flames were lit. The others, burned alive, had uttered screams that haunted his dreams.

An exaggerated sigh came from within the hood. The white hands fluttered. A third man, tall, his head covered in a leather mask, moved forward from the shadows.

“Water,” the priest said, and the masked head nodded. The priest rose then and left the room. The huge man reached for Renato, and roughly stripped his smock. Reuben Ben Shoushan had spent his boyhood as a scholar, hunched over the scriptionale, training to follow his father’s profession. But in the two years since he had become Renato, he had worked outdoors every day, doing hard physical labor in Rosa’s father’s groves, or at the olive press. He would never be a large man, but his arms were strong now, muscled and browned from the sun. Yet naked, with the hooded man looming over him, he looked vulnerable. There were bruises blooming on his shoulders from the blows of the alguazil.

The guard prodded him roughly forward, and they passed from the black room, down the stairs toward the place of relaxation. When Renato saw the ladder tilted over the large stone basin, the bindings still bloodied from the last prisoner’s writhings, the wooden pegs that would be stuffed in his nostrils, he could hold his sphincter no longer. A terrible stench filled the chamber.

David Ben Shoushan dressed with care. He put on his least frayed tunic and arranged the garde-corps so that the long hood fell gracefully over each shoulder. Ruti wiped away tears as she struggled to darn a small hole in her father’s only pair of hose.

“Here, give me that, you stupid girl,” said Miriam, snatching the stocking from her. Ruti’s hands, coarsened by her work with the skins, were not as skilled at fine work as her mother’s. Swiftly, Miriam caught the fabric together with stitches so small they were barely visible. “We have need of haste here!” she said, flinging the stocking to her husband. “Who knows what they are doing to my boy!”

“You have no boy,” said David, roughly. “Do not forget that. We sat shivah for our son. I go to do what I can for a stranger who has fallen into grave misfortune.”

“Tell yourself what brings you peace, fool,” said Miriam. “But stop your preening and go, I beg you!”

David walked the narrow alleys to his brother’s house with the bile rising in his throat. He had never felt his poverty weigh so heavily. Every Jew, and every converso, knew that the Inquisition was as much about filling the royal purse as purifying the Spanish church. For payment of a rapacious fine, most prisoners could walk—or hobble, or be borne on a litter, depending on how long they had been held—from the doors of the Casa Santa. But would Joseph wish to spend such a sum on an apostate nephew, one whose own father had declared him dead?

David was so bound up with his own shame and sorrow that he was before the gates of his brother’s fine house before he recognized the commotion under way inside. Joseph, who prided himself on his refinement, usually kept a tranquil home, his servants discreet and unobtrusive. But this day the courtyard rang with the sound of harried voices. David reviewed the date in his mind—the wedding was not until the following month. So this bustle could not be part of preparation for that celebration. His brother’s gatekeeper recognized him and ushered him within. He saw Joseph’s best gelding being brought from the stable, and the horses of guards and servants being packed for a journey.

Joseph himself emerged from the house at that moment, dressed for the road, deep in conversation with a weary-looking, travel-stained man. It took David a moment to recognize the traveler as the secretary to Don Isaac Abravanel. At first, Joseph was so engrossed in his talk that his eye passed right over his brother, where he stood amid the stir of busy servants. But then his glance returned to the still, hunched figure, and his face softened. Joseph Ben Shoushan loved and revered his pious younger brother, even though their relative importance in the world had placed a barrier between them. The older man held out his hand to the younger and drew him into a close embrace.

“Brother! What brings you here with a face like a funeral?”

David Ben Shoushan, having rehearsed his request all the way to the villa, suddenly found himself tongue-tied. His brother was clearly preoccupied with his own momentous business, and his brow, too, was furrowed with concern.

“It is my…it is a person who has suffered—that is, who has fallen into a misfortune,” he stammered.

A flicker of impatience, quickly stifled, passed across Joseph’s face.

“Misfortunes beset us from all sides!” he said. “But come, I am about to take bread before my journey. Come eat a hasty meal with me and tell me what I may do.”

David reflected that his brother’s “hasty meal” would have been counted a banquet at his own meager table. The meat was fresh, not salted, and served with fruit, hard to find in winter, and the lightest pastries. David could bring himself to taste none of it.

When David had unburdened himself, Joseph shook his head and sighed. “Any other time, I would ransom this young man. But his fate overtakes him on an evil day. This day, I fear we must think first of the Jews—forgive me, brother—and let those who have left our faith face the consequences that their own choice has brought upon them. I go now, in the greatest haste, to Granada, with every crusata I can scrape together. Don Abravanel’s secretary here”—he nodded to the gentleman, who was slumped, exhausted, against the pillows—“has ridden to me with the gravest news. The king and queen are preparing an expulsion order—”

David sucked in his breath.

“Yes, even as we have feared. They have taken the capitulation of Granada as a sign of divine will that Spain be a Christian country. It is, then, their intention to thank God for their victory by declaring Spain a land where no Jew may remain. The choice is to convert, or depart. They have hatched this plan in secret, but finally the queen has confided it to her old friend Don Seneor.”

“But how could the king and queen do such a thing as this? It is Jewish money—or at least Jewish money raising—that has secured them the victory over the Moors!”

“We have been milked, my brother. And now, like a dry cow, we are to be dispatched to the slaughterhouse. Don Seneor and Don Abravanel are preparing one last offer—bribe, let us be frank—to see if this can be gainsaid. But they are not hopeful.” Joseph waved his lamb shank at the exhausted man in the corner. “Tell my brother what the queen has said to Don Isaac.”

The man ran a hand over his face. “My master told the queen that the history of our people shows that God destroys those who would destroy the Jews. She replied that this decision did not come upon us from her or from her husband. ‘The Lord hath put this thing into the heart of the king,’ she said. ‘The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord, as the rivers of water. He turns it wheresoever he will.’”

“The king, for his part”—interrupted Joseph—“puts all the burden for this upon the queen. But those nearest the royal couple know that the very timbre of the queen’s words echo her confessor, may his name be rubbed out.”

“What can you possibly offer them more than what we have rendered up to them in the past?”

“Three hundred thousand ducats.”

David buried his face in his hands.

“Yes, I know; a staggering sum. More than a king’s ransom; ransom of a people. But what choice have we?” Joseph Ben Shoushan stood then and offered his hand to his brother. “You see why I have nothing to spare for you this day?”

David nodded. Together, they walked back out into the busy courtyard. The armed outriders and servants were already mounted. David accompanied his brother to his horse. Joseph mounted, then leaned down from the saddle and spoke into his brother’s ear. “I do not need to tell you, I am sure, to say nothing of our conversation. There will be panic when this news gets abroad. No need for tears and wailing if we are able to turn their majesties again toward us.” The horse, fresh and restless, strutted in place, fretting to be gone. Joseph tugged sharply on the reins and reached for his brother’s hand. “I am sorry about your son.”

“I have no son,” David replied, but his words came out as a quavering whisper, lost in the ring of iron on stone as the party passed swiftly through the gate.

For four days, Renato moved in and out of consciousness. He woke with his cheek pressed to a stone floor strewn with urine-soaked straw and rat feces. When he coughed, there were clots of blood, but also long ribbons of clear tissue that fell apart in his fingers. It was as if his insides were sloughing off; his body falling apart from the inside. He was thirsty, but at first he could not reach the water jar. Later, when he was able to grasp it between shaking hands and pour a trickle into his mouth, the pain of swallowing made him pass out again. In his dreams, he was once again bound on the sloping ladder, the water cascading into his mouth, his own involuntary swallowing pulling the narrow length of linen farther and farther into his gut.

Renato had not known that such pain was possible. Silently, for speech was impossible, he prayed to die. But his prayers went unanswered, for when he woke, he was still lying there, the red eyes of the rats glinting at him in the dark. By the fifth day, he was awake more than unconscious, and by the sixth, he could drag himself into a sitting position, propped against the wall. All he had to do now was wait, and remember.

It had been after the fifth ewer of water, when the linen was well down his throat, that the Inquisitor had come into the place of relaxation. They had set the ladder upright then, as he gagged and choked and writhed in panic. And then Renato saw it, at last, the evidence against him, and finally he knew what it was he had to confess. The priest held, between two fingers, as if it were a piece of ordure, a long brown leather strap, a small square box. Inside it was the word of God, inscribed in his father’s impeccable hand.

“You false conversos are a dry rot, eating away at the heart of the church,” the priest said. “You pray your filthy prayers in secret and then pollute our church with your lying presence among us.” Renato couldn’t reply, either to confess or to repudiate the charges. Speech was not possible with the cloth wadded tight in his throat. The priest stood there as they inverted the ladder, poured another ewer of water, and then finally, with sudden, shocking force, tugged forth the cloth, which had penetrated to his gut. Renato felt as if his entrails were being pulled up through his throat. He had passed out, and when he came to himself, he was alone again in the cell.

Because he had not known what else to do, David Ben Shoushan had returned to his scriptionale and gone right back to work on the Shefoch Hamatcha, near the conclusion of the haggadah. But his mind, like his ink vats, boiled in a poisonous stew. His hand trembled, and his letters were unlovely. From inside the house, he could hear Miriam, her grief warring with her rage, as she poured out torrents of abuse on the name of his brother and shouted at poor Sparrow, who, he gathered, was trying unsuccessfully to comfort her. He had said nothing of his brother’s large mission, or the fate that now hung over all of them. His thoughts swirled from Reuben in the house of oppression, to their own plight beset by enemies, to poor little Sparrow. Rise up, my love, and come away. He had to find her a husband, and swiftly. If they were to take the uncertain road into exile, she would need more protection than he could give her. His mind ran through the list of possible candidates. Avram, the mohel, had a son of the right age. The boy stuttered, and had a squint, but his character was good enough. But Avram might not be able to overlook the taint that Ruti carried as sister to a converso. Moise, the shochet, was a strong man with strong sons, who would be better protectors, but the boys were all headstrong and ill-tempered, and as well, Moise liked money, which David would not be able to provide.

It did not even occur to David to consult Ruti herself about this, or any other matter. Had he done so, he would have been most surprised by the result. He did not realize it, but his love for his daughter marched hand in hand with a kind of contempt for her. He saw his daughter as a kind-hearted, dutiful, but vaguely pitiable soul. David, like many people, had made the mistake of confusing “meek” with “weak.”

For Ruti had a secret life of which her father could not conceive. For more than three years, Ruti had been immersed in the study of the Zohar, the Book of Splendor. Alone, in secret, she had become a practitioner of the Kabbalah. These studies were forbidden to her, on account of both her age and her gender. Jewish men were supposed to be forty years old before they approached the dangerous realm of mysticism. Women were never thought worthy to undertake it. But the Ben Shoushan family had produced famous Kabbalists, and from the time she was a child, Ruti had been aware of the Zohar’s power and importance in her father’s spiritual life. When her father’s small group of trusted scholars had met at the house to study, Ruti had struggled to listen as they discussed the difficult text, keeping herself awake while feigning sleep.

If Ruti’s soul had a secret life, so too did her dumpling body. She could not study from her father’s books: he would never have permitted it. But she had seen the volumes she needed at the bindery, when she had taken her father’s work there. Micha, the binder, was a young man grown too soon old, with pale jowls and sparse hair that he tugged at nervously whenever his wife entered his workshop. She was frail and drab, often ill, worn out by the bearing of children, several of whom always seemed to be trailing after her, crying.

Ruti remembered the new way the binder had looked at her when she told him what she wanted. At first, she told him her father had asked to borrow the books, but Micha saw through that deception at once; everyone in the Kahal knew that David Ben Shoushan, poor as he was, owned a remarkable library. He guessed what she was about, and he knew the weight of the taboo that she was violating. If she was prepared to break such weighty rules as these, he reasoned, then perhaps there were other areas of transgression into which she might be tempted. In return for the use of the books, he had lain her down upon the soft scraps of hide fallen from the binder’s workbench. She had breathed in the rich scents of fine leather while the binder’s hands, skilled at working flesh, touched her hidden places. She had been terrified, the first time she agreed to this transaction. She had quivered when he had lifted up the rough brown wool of her smock and spread apart her dimpled thighs. But his touch had been subtle, and soon delightful; opening her up to a pleasure she had never guessed existed. When he put his tongue between her legs and lapped at her like a cat, he had brought her to a physical ecstasy akin to the spiritual one she felt on the rare nights in her cave when the letters lifted for her, and soared.

She came to think of it as right, somehow, that these two forbidden ecstasies should be linked: that her femaleness, which should have barred her from this study, actually made it possible for her; the yielding up of her now-willing flesh providing the means to acquire delight of the soul. It was because she knew the power of lust and the pleasures of the body that she had found a way to understand, if not forgive, her brother’s betrayal of his family and his faith. She believed if her father had been less exacting and less rigid, had hinted to Reuben earlier on the mysteries and beauties of the Zohar, her brother would not, could not, have fallen into the thrall of another faith.

But Reuben had been raised by the letter of the law. Every day, he hunched over the scriptionale, doing only the most routine of work, with his father always finding fault. She could still hear her father’s voice, always calm, never raised, constantly critical: “The space in the middle of the letter beit should be exactly equal to the width of the top and bottom lines. Here, on this line, see? You have made it too narrow. Scrape it off and do the page again. Reuben, you must know by now that the lower left corner of the tet is squared, the right corner rounded. You have reversed it here, see? Do the page again.” Do it again, and again, and again.

Never once did her father open the door for Reuben to the glory that swirled in the dark ink. Her own mind was incandescent with it. Any tiny letter was a poem, a prayer, a gateway to the splendor of God. And every letter its own road, its own special mystery. Why had her father not shared some of this with her brother?

When she thought of the letter beit, it was not of the thickness of lines or the exactitude of spaces. It was of mysteries: the number two, the dual; the house, the house of God on earth. “They will build me a temple and I will dwell in them.” In them, not in it. He would dwell within her. She would be the house of God. The house of transcendence. Just a single, tiny letter, and in it, such a path to joy.

In time, Ruti’s heart had opened to the bookbinder, and affection had grown between them. When the bookbinder had suggested some clandestine code they could use when either of them desired the touch of the other, she had proposed the letter of union, beit. She would see it scrawled on a corner of one of her father’s bills, and know that Micha’s wife was gone from the house. She would add it to the notes of instruction her father sent to the bindery, to say without words, if other customers were present, that she had time and would not be missed at home if she tarried. She wondered if Reuben had also had a secret signal with his beloved, a mark on a tree, or a cloth placed just so. It would have to have been something like that, for Rosa, like most Christians, could not read.

Reuben had lived for the moment, at the end of every day, when he was finally released from the scriptionale to go and run errands. Ruti had watched the way he sprang up, suddenly alive. And she had noticed how a certain errand increasingly brought a smile to his face and a special spring to his step.

When he had been sent to buy olives or oil from Rosa’s father, how could he not have noticed the daughter who was also ripening? Ruti could guess exactly how it had come about, though her brother would never have thought to taint what he believed were her innocent ears with confidences about his physical passions.

After the conversion, the marriage, and the estrangement, Ruti and her brother had met by chance in the marketplace. She knew she was supposed to ignore him, as if he were just another Gentile stranger to be passed with lowered eyes. But her heart could not be schooled so. She let the crowd carry her toward him, and under cover of the press of bodies, she reached out and grasped his hand. How different it felt, how coarse it had become, released from the pen to serve the pruning hook. She squeezed it, pouring all the affection she could into the gesture, before hurrying away.

The next time, a couple of weeks later, he was ready for her. He pushed a note into her palm, imploring her to meet him. He had named the place; south of the town, Esplugües. Esplugües means “caves,” and this dry white hillside was riddled with them. One in particular, deep and hidden, had been a favorite retreat of their childhood. Later, he had brought Rosa to it during the secret days of their courtship. He did not know it was the same cave Ruti used now for her clandestine studies. Their first meeting was strained: much as she loved him, she could not help blaming him for the pain and disgrace he had brought upon her family. But her brother was a good man, she knew that in her heart, and most of the kindness she had felt as a child had come from him, not from her querulous mother or her abstracted father. Soon, they met there weekly. On the day he told her news of the baby, due in the springtime, he wept.

“It is only when you are to be a father yourself that you finally know what it is that your own father feels for you,” he whispered. Ruti pulled his head into her lap and stroked her brother’s hair. His voice was muffled. “Does he never speak of me?”

“Never,” she said, as gently as she could. “But I believe that not an hour goes by when he does not think of you.” She ran her hand over the bleached, pitted stone. The place reminded her of bones, an ossuary forged of the remains of unloved dead. The hectic flesh of her ruddy palm was so impermanent, after all. They would all be dead, soon enough, their bones sucked dry, porous as lace. And who would care then that her brother had let a priest dribble water on his forehead and say a few Latin prayers? Ruti, in this very cave, had felt the presence of God. She had trembled before an immanence that would scorch away the water and suck the very breath from the priest’s mouth.

It was at that moment that an idea occurred to her. How harmless it seemed, to give her brother that memento of shared hours between a father and a son, standing together before God.

“I could bring you something,” she said. And the next week, she did.

David Ben Shoushan looked around impatiently for his daughter. “Sparrow!” he called. “I need you, girl. Do make haste, for once, and stop your dawdling.”

Ruti tossed the scrubbing brush into the pail and rose from her hands and knees, rubbing at the place where the tiles had bitten into her flesh. “But I haven’t finished the floor, Father,” she said softly.

“Never mind that, I have an errand that won’t wait.”

“But Mother will be—”

“I will manage your mother.” There was something furtive in her father’s manner that Ruti had never experienced before. His eye was on the street door. “I need you to take this packet to the binder. He has my detailed instructions already. He knows what to do with it. The book must be ready to present to Don Joseph when he returns. They are expecting him in time for Shabbat. Now go, daughter, and be quick. I don’t want to give the rogue an excuse for tardiness.”

Ruti moved to the well. Quickly but with care, she washed and dried her hands before she took the packet, wrapped in a piece of cloth. Her father’s hand, usually so steady, was trembling. As she felt the shape of the fabric-wrapped metal, she recognized it at once. She had polished it often enough, nervous lest she drop it or damage the silver filigree. It was the one precious thing in the household. Her eyes widened.

“What are you staring at? The work does not concern you.”

“But this is the scroll case from Mother’s ketubah!” she exclaimed. The ketubah itself was the most beautiful Ruti had seen. David had made it himself, the young sofer entranced by the idea of this bride, whom he hardly knew, writing every letter of every word of the marriage contract as a perfect tribute to the woman he believed then would be his soul mate. When his own father had seen the work, he had been so proud of his son that he had spent more than he had intended to buy a fine case for it.

“Father,” squeaked Ruti, “you can’t be meaning me to give this in payment to the binder?”

“Not in payment!” David’s own guilt and uncertainty made him terse. “The haggadah must have worthy covers. Where else would we get silver to embellish it? The binder has found a smith from outside of Tarragona who will do the work for nothing because he wants to recommend himself to the Sanz family. He is waiting at the bindery, so go now. Be off with you!”

He had first thought of selling the ketubah case as part of the ransom for his son. But the case was inscribed with the word of God, and to sell it to a Christian who would melt it down for coin silver was shameful, probably sinful. Yet at the heart of his faith was a fundamental teaching, that the saving of human life should take precedence over all other mitzvot, or commandments. Then he saw the way. He could use the silver to embellish the haggadah, so that the sacred would remain sacred. Surely then so fine a gift would open the hand of his brother. How could it not do so? David had convinced himself of this. It was the one slim hope to which he clung. With extreme annoyance, he noticed that Ruti was still standing before him, holding the packet out as if to give it back to him.

“But Mother cannot possibly have agreed to this…. I…I…am afraid she will be angry with me.”

“Most assuredly, my Sparrow, she will be angry. But not with you. There is a reason for this that is not your concern, as I have said. Now hurry before that rogue uses your lateness as an excuse to delay the work.”

As it happened, her father need not have worried on that score. Whatever else Micha may have been, he was a proud craftsman, and he knew that the illuminations and text presented to him by Ben Shoushan held the promise of a book of exceptional beauty. It could make his reputation among the wealthiest Jews in the community. Such opportunities didn’t come his way every day, and he had set aside all his lesser commissions to attend to this one.

The haggadah sat on the workbench, bound in the cover he had fashioned of the softest kid, embossed with intricate tooling. There was a blank space at the center of the cover.

The silversmith was a young man, just out of his apprenticeship but gifted in design. He took the packet eagerly from Ruti, unwrapped it, and examined the ketubah case. “Very fine. A shame to undo such work. But I promise your mother I will fashion something worthy of her sacrifice.” He had a small parchment with him, which he unrolled on the workbench. He had drawn a design for the cover’s central medallion, which showed the wing of the Sanz family emblem entwined with roses, the symbol of the Ben Shoushan family. He had also designed a set of beautiful clasps, also ingeniously formed of wings and roses.

“I will work all night, if necessary, so that the book will be ready by Erev Shabbat, as your father desires,” he said. He wrapped the book and the case carefully and took his leave then, anxious to cover the miles from Tarragona in daylight, before the brigands began their nightly work.

Ruti ran her finger over a section of stitched quires, pretending to examine the sewing, stalling until the smith left the workshop. She had seen the letter of union, their secret beit, scribbled on a parchment scrap on the workbench.

The binder turned from the doorway. He licked his lips. She felt his hand on the small of her back as he propelled her toward the alcove. Inside, the familiar, rich scent of leather aroused her, and she turned to him, circling her plump arms around his thin hips, tugging away his apron and then working loose the garment beneath. The taste of him was sharp and salty in her mouth.

She could still taste him as she stood outside the street door of her house. She was late for the evening meal, but she was afraid to go in. She expected her parents to be at war over the missing case. But when she finally plucked up her courage and entered, as she knew she must, she found her mother nagging, just as she always did, about her father’s everyday inadequacies. There was no tempest, just the usual low tide of bile. Ruti kept her eyes on her bread and did not look at her father, although she wanted to. She wondered what lie he had told and wanted very badly to ask him. But some things on earth were possible, and some were not, and Ruti knew the difference.

When Renato was to be put to the question for the third time, he was too weak to stand. The alguaziles had to drag him, one on each side. He sat in the black-draped room, smelling the scent of candle wax and the rank stink of his own fear.

“Reuben Ben Shoushan, do you confess that you did have in your possession those things required for a Jewish man to pray?”

He tried to speak, but the sound from his raw throat was a whisper. He wanted to say that he had not prayed as a Jew, as the phylacteries suggested. He had walked away from Hebrew prayer when he left his father’s house. It was true that he had loved Rosa before he had loved her church. But the priest who had baptized him explained that Jesus often worked his will just so, and that the love he felt for Rosa was but a particle of the Lord’s love, given to him as a foretaste of the sweetness of salvation. He had wrestled, in his mind, until he could believe that Jesus was indeed the Messiah for whom the Jews had waited. He had liked the priest’s hopeful account of heaven. Perhaps most of all, he liked the idea of a wife whose body would be free to him at almost any time, rather than the hard discipline of abstinence that awaited him for half of every month with a Jewish bride.

He had kept the phylacteries not because he missed Jewish prayer, but because he missed his father, whom he loved with all his heart. When he rose, and before he slept, he clasped the leather straps to him, not to pray, but just to think for a moment of his father, and the love with which he had inscribed the parchment within. But to love a Jew and his works was itself a sin to these priests of the Inquisition.

And so he nodded.

“Let the record show that the Jew, Reuben Ben Shoushan, has confessed to Judaizing. Now, admit that you have corrupted your wife with these things. An informant says you have been seen praying together.”

Renato felt a new surge of fear. His wife. His innocent, ignorant wife. Surely he was not to be the cause of her suffering. He shook his head as vigorously as his depleted state allowed.

“Admit it. You taught her your vile prayers and forced her to pray with you. There was a witness.”

“No!” Renato rasped, finally finding his voice. “They lie!” He dragged the words from his shredded throat. “We prayed the Pater Noster and the Ave Maria. Only those. My wife had no idea I had brought Jewish things into our house.”

“Did you have these things with you when you contracted the sacrament of marriage?”

Renato shook his head.

“How long, then, have you been a Judaizer?”

He opened his cracked lips and whispered, “Only one month.”

“You claim you have been a Judaizer for only one month?”

He nodded.

“Then who supplied you with these things?”

Renato winced. He had not foreseen this.

“Who supplied you? Name the man!”

Renato felt the room begin to spin and clutched his chair.

“Name him! I give you one chance more.”

The priest signaled, and the masked hulk moved toward him. The alguaziles grasped Renato and tugged him from the chair. He held his peace as they dragged him from the room and down the dimly lit stairs. He held his peace as they tied him to the ladder and inverted it over the basin. Dry sobs wracked his body as he heard the well water pouring into the ewers. Still, he held his peace. It was when they picked up the linen and forced open his jaws that he cried out. The pain of the one word seared his throat.

“Sparrow!”

When an alguazil made an arrest in the Christian quarters, he took care to do it at dead of night. That way, their victim would be at his lowest ebb, confused, unlikely to put up significant resistance or raise a fuss among neighbors who might complicate the business. But the Holy Office of the Inquisition did not send its own soldiers into the Kahal. It was concerned with the rooting out of heresy among those who pretended to have accepted Christ, not with those who persisted in their old, erroneous faith. The crimes of Jews who meddled with Christians and tempted them from the true religion were a matter for the civil authorities, and they sent their soldiers at any time they chose.

So it was afternoon, and still light, when a preemptory banging shattered the peace of the Ben Shoushan house. Only David was within; Miriam had gone to the mikvah, and Ruti to the bindery to see if her father might collect the finished work that evening in time to deliver it to his brother, whose return was expected. David had noticed, with annoyance, that she was late returning from the errand, as usual.

He shuffled to the door, crying out as he went against whatever uncouth caller had the effrontery to pound so on his door. As he flung the bar back and saw who stood there, the imprecations died in his mouth. He took a step backward.

The men moved into the courtyard. One spat into the well. Another turned, slowly and purposefully, letting the tip of his sword’s scabbard catch on the edge of the bench that held David’s delicate writing implements. Ink bottles tumbled to the ground.

“Give us Ruth Ben Shoushan,” the tallest of the armed men commanded.

“Ruti?” said David in a small voice, his eyes widening in surprise. He had been sure the men had come for him. “There must be a mistake. You can’t want Ruti.”

“Ruth Ben Shoushan. Now!” The man raised a booted foot with an almost languid motion and kicked over David’s scriptionale.

“She…she is not here!” said David, his scalp prickling with fear. “She went out on an errand for me. But what can you possibly want with little Ruti?”

In reply, the solider drew back his fist and struck the sofer in the face. David reeled, lost his balance, and fell backward, landing hard on his buttocks. He wanted to howl in pain, but the air had been forced from him, and when he opened his mouth, no sound came.

The soldier reached down and tore off his head cover, then grasped the knot of silver hair in his fist and pulled him up off the ground.

“Where did she go?”

David, wincing, cried out that he didn’t know. “My wife sent her and I—”

Before he could finish his sentence, the soldier wrenched on his hair, flinging him to the ground. A boot landed hard against the side of his head.

His ear roared and rang. He felt a burning on the side of his face, then wetness.

Another kick landed against his jaw. He felt the bones grind against each other.

“Where is your daughter?”

Even had he wanted to reply, his broken jaw would not open to form words. He tried to raise an arm to protect his fractured skull, but it was as if a lead weight had been tied to it. His left side would not move. He lay there, powerless under the blows, as the blood leaking into his brain spread further, and extinguished the light entirely.

Rosa del Salvador had not slept properly in days. Her huge belly would not let her find a comfortable position. Her face throbbed from the blows her father, in his rage, had landed on her earlier in the evening. Even when exhaustion dragged at her and she dozed, a terrible dream always came. Tonight the dream had been of an old horse from her childhood, a black gelding with a white star on his forehead. He had been the blindfolded horse who worked the oil press, plodding in patient circles. One day the horse had fallen lame, and her father had sent for the knacker. Rosa remembered how the man had put the iron bolt to her old friend’s head, right on the star, and given the great hammer blow. As a little girl, she had cried for the death of the horse. But in her dream, the horse did not die, but reared, screaming, with the metal bolt embedded in his head and blood flying from his tossing mane.

Rosa awoke, sweating. She sat up in the dark and listened to the night sounds of her family’s masía. The farmhouse was never really silent. There was always the creaking of the old beams, the ragged snores of her father in his wine-drenched slumber, the scratching of mice among the amphorae where the grain was stored. Usually these sounds soothed her, but not tonight. She rubbed her hands over her belly. These dreams, surely, were curdling the blood that should nurture her child. She feared that the child inside her might be turning monstrous.

Why had she let herself love a Jew? Her father had warned her. “Don’t trust him. He says he will give up his faith for you, but they never do. In the end, he will blame you, and the bitterness will poison your later years.”

Well, if only that was all that had happened. A commonplace misery, such as a marriage gone sour in old age. Now it was likely that neither of them would see their old age. Without ransom, which her father refused to pay, her husband faced the stake. She had begged her father to buy her husband’s life, and received blows for it. Her stubborn choice in marriage had put them all at risk, he said. The entire family was now suspected of being secret Jews. Any jealous neighbor who wished for one less competitor in the oil market, any greedy man who eyed their fine groves, could make an accusation against them. It could be some trifling thing: that her mother had choked on a piece of ham, that her father had changed his shirt on a Friday, that she, Rosa, had lit candles too early in the evening. Her father feared it, that was plain. Every evening he tormented himself, running through lists of his competitors, of customers who might have a grievance, of relatives with whom he had not been open-handed enough in their times of need. He would berate her mother for having once, long ago, bought kosher meat because it was selling cheaper at market than the cuts of the Christian butcher. At such times, Rosa tried to be anywhere in the masía that would keep her from falling under his eye. Once, when he beat her, he had cried out that he wished she would miscarry, that her infant, with its Jew-polluted blood, might be born dead. Rosa’s great guilt was that, as the blows fell, she, too, began to wish for it.

Agitated, she eased herself up off her pallet and reached for her mantle. Air, that was what she needed. The heavy farmhouse door creaked as she pressed against it. The night was mild; the scent of loamy earth carried the first hint of spring. She threw a blanket around her shoulders but did not take a lamp; her instep knew the path to the grove that she had traversed all her life. She loved the trees, the gnarly strength of them. The way they could be blasted by lightning or charred by a brushfire, and look quite dead, then send forth a new green shoot out of the old wood and keep living, in spite of everything. She would have to be like an olive tree, she decided. She ran her hand over the rough bark.

She was there, in the groves, when the alguazil and the bailiff came on horseback up the path that led from the town. She watched, hidden in the tree shadows, as the lamps flared in the house. She heard her mother’s cries of fear, her father’s shouts of protest, as the bailiff took note of the contents of the farmhouse. Everything they owned would be forfeit to the crown if the charges against them were proved. She shrank to the ground, pulling the dun-colored blanket tight to hide the whiteness of her bed gown, covering herself in earth and leaf litter, afraid lest the torches move toward the groves. But her father must have told some lie about her whereabouts to the alguazil, for he did not even make a cursory search. She watched, helpless, as her parents were led away. And then she ran, with her strange, slow, pregnant gait, through the groves, across the neighbor’s fields. She could not go to them for help; she could not know if they were the Inquisition’s informants. Beyond the neighbor’s fields, the land rose abruptly toward Esplugües. She could hide there, in the cave where she and Renato had met in secret courtship. Why had she gone to him? Why had she brought this misery upon their heads? The bulk of the baby compressed her lungs so that she could barely breathe as she climbed. The sharp stone scraped her bare feet. She was cold. But fear drove her on.

When she reached the mouth of the cave, she collapsed, gasping. When she felt the first pain, she thought it was a stitch. But then it came again, not harsh, but unmistakable; a pressure like a girdle drawn too tight. She cried out, not because the contraction hurt her, but because her child, whom she did not want, this baby, who might have turned into a monster, was about to be born, and she was all alone and very much afraid.

Ruti and Micha were together in the storeroom when they heard the door to the bindery open. The binder cursed. “Stay in here and be silent, for pity’s sake.” He closed the heavy door to the storeroom and stepped out, tugging at his leather apron, trying in vain to hide the bulge beneath. Stifling his annoyance, he arranged his face to greet the client.

His expression changed when he saw that it was a soldier, and no client, who had entered his workshop. The haggadah, complete, splendid, with its gleaming clasps and burnished medallion, sat on the counter, where he and Ruti had been admiring it until their desire had overtaken them. Micha, offering a polite greeting, moved between the soldier and the bench, deftly pushing the book under a pile of parchments.

But the soldier did not care for books and barely noticed his surroundings. He had picked up a thick needle from the workbench and was working it under his nails, sloughing greasy matter in a little cascade of motes that fell, Micha noted with dismay, onto a sheet of prepared parchment.

“Ruth Ben Shoushan,” the soldier said, without preamble.

Micha swallowed hard and made no answer. His inner panic expressed itself in a blank expression that the soldier took for witlessness.

“Speak, dullard! Your neighbor, the wine seller, reports that she came in here.”

No point denying it. “The daughter of the sofer, you mean? Ah yes, now that you mention it. She did come, indeed, on an errand for her father. But she left with…ah…a silversmith…I think from Perello. Her family had business with him, it seems.”

“Perello? She has gone there, then?”

The bookbinder wavered. He did not want to betray Ruti, but he was not a brave man. If he gave false information to the authorities, and was discovered…But then, if Ruti was found in his store cupboard, that was already enough to indict him.

“Sh…she did not confide her plans to me. You must know, sir, that unmarried Jewish women do not speak with men outside their families, except briefly, on necessary matters of business.”

“How would I know what your Jewess whores do?” said the soldier, but he turned for the doorway.

“May I ask…that is, might your lordship tell me, why so important an officer would concern himself with the humble daughter of the sofer?”

The young man, like most bullies, couldn’t resist a chance to instill fear. He turned back into the shop with an unpleasant laugh. “Humble, maybe, but not the daughter of the sofer anymore. He’s already on his way to hell with the rest of your damned race, and she’ll be joining him soon. Her brother’s for the stake, and she’s to go with him. He confessed that she tempted him to Judaize.”

Miriam returned from the mikvah, ready to greet her husband as a bride. There had been signs, the past year, that told her there could not be many more months in which the purification ritual would be required of her. She knew she would miss it: the restraint of abstinence, the anticipation of renewed union.

For the previous ten days, since the start of her period, David and Miriam had not even touched hands, according to the ancient laws of family purity. Tonight they would make love. As much as their personalities had grated one against the other, their physical union had always been a mutual pleasure, and no less as their bodies aged.

Miriam was spared from finding her husband dead in his blood on the stones of her courtyard. The whole alley had heard the rough, raised voices, and known all too well what they meant. As soon as the armed men were gone from the Kahal, they had come to do what was necessary and right for their neighbor.

When Miriam saw her house already prepared for shivah, she thought at once of Reuben. They had sat shivah for Reuben for seven days after his baptism as a Christian, to signify that he was dead to them. But now it fell into her heart that her son was truly dead. His father had relented and decided to accord him Jewish rites. She grasped the doorpost.

The neighbors supported her, brought her inside, and gradually made her understand the truth. David’s body had been washed and clad in white. Now the neighbors wrapped the body in a linen sheet and carried it to the burial ground. Shabbat was approaching, and Jewish law required burial without delay.

As soon as her husband was buried, Miriam lit the yahrzeit candle. She wanted to give herself up to grief. Her husband dead, her son convicted and sentenced to death in the Casa Santa, her daughter…where was she? The soldiers, in their callousness, had invaded the graveside, crudely interrogating the mourners as to the whereabouts of the deceased’s daughter. Miriam struggled to think clearly. For the first of her tragedies, David’s death, she could do nothing but grieve. For the second, her incarcerated son, she could do little but pray. But the third, Ruti, was another matter. There, it might not be too late. If the girl could be found, warned, hidden or spirited out of the city…

Just as she was thinking these things, the neighbors parted, jostling to make room as Joseph Ben Shoushan, still wearing his travel clothes, crossed to his sister-in-law to offer his condolences. His eyes were red from road weariness and grief.

“The servants told me the news as I arrived at my house. I came directly here. Sorrow heaps upon sorrow. David! My brother…if only I had ransomed your son as he asked me, this might not—” His voice broke.

Miriam spoke with a harsh urgency that startled the grieving man. “You did not, and what is done is done and God will judge you. But now you must save our Ruti—”

“Sister,” Joseph interrupted. “Come with me now to my house. I am taking you under my protection.”

Miriam, her eyes blank and uncomprehending, could not focus on his words. She could not leave her house during shivah, surely he knew that. And poor as she was, she did not intend to walk away from her own home to become a charity case in her brother-in-law’s. How could he think she would abandon her little house and all its memories? Miriam’s querulous voice sounded almost normal as she started to list her objections to her brother-in-law.

“Sister,” he said quietly, “soon, very soon, we shall all be forced to leave our homes and our memories, and we all of us shall be charity cases. I wish I could offer you a place in my home. All I am able to offer you is a place at my side on the uncertain road that now faces us.”

Slowly, painfully, Joseph explained to the crowded room the events of the preceding weeks. Husbands and wives, who usually would not touch each other in public, fell upon each other, weeping. Anyone passing by the little house and hearing the lamentation would have thought, Indeed, David Ben Shoushan was a good and pious man, but who would have known his death would provoke such an outpouring?

Joseph did not tell Miriam’s neighbors, simple people like the fishmonger and the wool comber, all the arguments and stratagems that had been tried in the monthlong struggle for the heart and soul of the monarchs. He told them, simply, that their leaders had done their best. Pressing the case for the Jews had been Rabbi Abraham Seneor, eighty years old, the queen’s friend, who had helped negotiate her secret marriage to Ferdinand. He had served as treasurer of her own hermandad police force and as tax collector for Castile. Seneor was such a wealthy and important man that when he traveled, it took thirty mules to accommodate his retinue. With him was Isaac Abravanel, renowned Torah sage and the court’s financial adviser. He had won his post in 1483, the very same year that the queen’s confessor, Tomàs de Torquemada, had been named Grand Inquisitor of the Holy Inquisition Against Depraved Heresy.

It was Torquemada who pushed the case for the Jews’ expulsion. He had been unable to act on his hatreds during the Reconquest, when the monarchs relied on Jewish money and tax collecting to fund the war against the Moors; Jewish merchants to supply the troops over miles of difficult, mountainous terrain; Jewish translators, fluent in Arabic, to facilitate negotiations between Christian and Muslim kingdoms. But with the conquest of Granada, the war was over; there were no more Arab rulers to deal with; and sufficient Jewish skills, such as translation and scientific knowledge, craftsmanship and medicine, could be found among the conversos.

Four weeks passed between the day the monarchs signed the edict of expulsion and the day they finally ordered its proclamation. During that time, they required strict secrecy on the matter, and this encouraged Seneor and Abravanel to hope that their minds were not fixed, that the right persuasions might be effective. Every day during this time, the two men worked to raise more money, to muster more supporters. Finally, Abravanel and Seneor knelt before the king and queen in the throne room of the Alhambra palace. A gentle light, from an alabaster-latticed window behind and above the monarchs, fell on their tired, troubled faces. Each, in turn, argued his case. “Regard us, O King,” said Abravanel. “Use not thy subjects so cruelly. Why do thus to thy servants? Rather exact from us our gold and silver, even all that the house of Israel possesses, if we may remain in this country.” Then Abravanel made his offer: three hundred thousand ducats. Ferdinand and Isabella looked at each other and seemed to waver.

A hidden door to an anteroom flew open. Torquemada, who had been listening, repelled, to every word praising Jewish loyalty and lauding Jewish contributions to the kingdom, swept into the throne room. The light from the high windows glanced off the gold crucifix he held out before him.

“Behold the crucified Christ whom Judas Iscariot sold for thirty pieces of silver!” he thundered. “Will Your Majesties sell him again? Here he is, take him.” He placed the crucifix on a table before the two thrones. “Take him, and barter him away.” He turned, in a swirl of black cassock, and strode from the room, not even seeking the monarchs’ leave to go.

Abravanel glanced at his old friend Rabbi Seneor and saw a look of defeat. Later, out of hearing of the monarchs, he vented his anger. “As the adder closes its ear with dust against the voice of the snake charmer, so the king hardened his heart against us with the filth of the Inquisitor.”

The bookbinder was the very last of David Ben Shoushan’s close acquaintances to present himself at shivah. He had waited until the nearing hour of Shabbat had driven the other mourners to their homes. He wanted to speak to Miriam as privately as he could.

His strategy worked. Miriam, who had refused to leave with Don Joseph despite her brother-in-law’s sincere entreaties, was alone save for one servant that Don Joseph had required to stay with her. She was irritated when the servant announced Micha. She needed time to think. How could she leave the Kahal, the only world she had ever known? She had been born there. Her parents had lived and died there. Their bones, and now the body of her husband, were buried in the Jewish graveyard. How could a people leave its dead untended? And among Christians! When the Jews were gone, they would plow the land for gain, disturbing the rest of all the beloved dead. And what of the old, the ill, those who could not travel, the women nearing their time? Her mind skipped to the wife of her condemned son. She, at least, would be safe. Able to give birth in her own home, with family to tend to her. Give birth to the grandchild whom Miriam would never see. Her tears began again, and now here was the fool of a bookbinder, and she must try to compose herself.

Micha expressed the usual condolences and then approached Miriam more closely than propriety allowed. He put his face to her ear. “Your daughter,” he said, and she stiffened, ready to receive the blow of even more bad news. Swiftly, Micha told of the soldier’s visit. Any other time, Miriam’s shrewd brain would have led her to wonder why Ruti had tarried so long at the bindery, since her sole purpose in being there was to bring her father news of when he might collect the haggadah. She would have demanded to know what business Ruti had in the binder’s storage alcove. But grief and worry had dulled Miriam’s mind, and her entire focus was on what the binder said next.

“What do you mean, ‘gone’? How can a young girl be gone, alone, on the southern road, at night, with Shabbat beginning? What nonsense is this?”

“Your daughter told me that she knows of a safe hiding place that she could reach before Shabbat. Her intention is to hide there and send you word when she is able to do so. I gave her bread and a skin of water. She said there is food in the hiding place.”

Micha took his leave then, hurrying home through the narrow streets of the Kahal. Miriam was so lost in her worry—what secret place could Ruti know?—that she had failed to ask Micha for the haggadah.

But the bookbinder had given the haggadah to Ruti, at her insistence. As he walked toward his house, he wondered if he had done right. He reached his door just as the notes sounded marking the beginning of Shabbat. As he stepped through the door, the thin cry of the ram’s horn joined with the wailing of his infants within, and he pushed the thoughts of the girl, and her troubles, away from him. Surely he had enough problems of his own.

As Ruti made the familiar approach to her cave, she, too, heard a faint wailing. Ruti was sure-footed in the dark. She had made this illicit night journey many times, creeping from the room in which her parents slept to snatch a few hours of secret study. But the unexpected sound made her stop suddenly on the steep path, and a scatter of smooth stones loosed themselves and clattered off the path and onto the dry rock below.

The wailing stopped abruptly. “Who is there?” a weak voice called. “For the love of the Savior, help me!”

Ruti barely recognized Rosa’s voice. Dehydration had swollen her tongue; terror and pain had exhausted her. For twenty hours she had writhed alone, the contractions mounting. Ruti scrambled into the cave, crying out reassurance and fumbling for the hidden lamp and flints she kept there.

The light flared on a forlorn, bruised figure. Rosa sat with her back to the rock wall, her knees pulled up hard to her chest. Her nightdress was smeared with blood and other fluids. She mouthed the word water through cracked lips, and Ruti quickly held the skin to her mouth. Rosa swallowed too much and a second later was bent over, heaving. In the midst of her vomiting, another contraction seized her.

Ruti tried to control her own fear. She had only the most vague idea of how infants came into the world. Her mother had been reticent about matters of the body, considering that Ruti did not need to know such things until she was betrothed. The Kahal was crowded, its homes pressed one against another, so she had heard the cries of laboring women and knew it was a painful, sometimes dangerous, business. But she hadn’t conceived of so much blood and excrement.

She looked around for something to wipe the vomit from Rosa’s face. All she could find were the pungent cloths in which she had wrapped some dry cheeses for her sustenance during the long nights of study. When she brought these near Rosa’s face, the girl heaved again. But this time there was nothing left to vomit.

The night stretched on. The pains came, in the end, without respite. Rosa screamed until her throat was too raw to utter more than a rasping cry. Ruti could only bathe Rosa’s forehead and cradle her shoulders through the spasms. Would this baby never be born? She was afraid to know what was happening between Rosa’s legs, but as the girl began to scream and flail in a new agony, Ruti reluctantly moved from her position and knelt in front of this woman, whom her brother had loved so much. The thought of him, and the agonies he might very well be undergoing even at the same moment, gave Ruti a kind of courage. Gently, she eased Rosa’s knees apart and gasped with a mix of awe and panic. The baby’s dark crown was forcing its way against taut, straining skin. With Rosa’s next contraction, Ruti overcame her fear and touched the head, trying to position her fingers so that she might grasp the small skull and ease its passage, but Rosa was too weak to push. For minutes, an hour, there was no progress. They were all three of them trapped. The infant in the unyielding birth canal, Rosa in her agony, Ruti in her dread.

She moved on her hands and knees close to Rosa’s battered face. “I know you are tired. I know you suffer,” she whispered. Rosa groaned. “But there can be only two endings to this night. Either you find the strength to push this baby out or you will die here.”

Rosa howled and raised a hand in a weak attempt to strike at Ruti. But the words moved her. When the next spasm slammed her, she mustered what little strength remained in her body. Ruti saw the crown of the head straining, the flesh tearing. She cupped her hand around the head and eased it out. Then the shoulders. All in a rush, the baby was in her hands.

He was a boy. But the long struggle to be born had been too much for him. His tiny arms and legs flopped limply in Ruti’s hands, and no cry came from his still face. With distaste, Ruti hacked at the cord with her small knife and wrapped the infant in some cloth she had torn from her own mantle.

“Is he…is he dead?” whispered Rosa.

“I think so,” said Ruti somberly.

“Good,” breathed Rosa.

Ruti rose up from her knees and carried the baby away to the back of the cave. Her knees stung from the pressure of the stone, but that wasn’t why her eyes filled with tears. How dare a mother rejoice in her own infant’s death?

“Help me!” Rosa cried. “There’s something—” She screamed. “It’s the monster! It’s coming out!”

Ruti turned. Rosa was squirming, trying to crawl up the wall away from her own afterbirth. Ruti looked at the glistening mass and shuddered. Then she remembered the cat that had birthed her kittens in a corner of the courtyard, and the messy afterbirth that had followed. Stupid, superstitious Christian whore, she thought, giving vent to all the anger and jealously she felt for this woman. She laid the limp bundle down, took a step toward Rosa, and would have struck her, if the bruises on her face, visible even in the dim lamp light, had not called on her pity.

“You grew up on a farm…. haven’t you seen afterbirth before?”

Ruti’s anger and grief made further conversation with Rosa impossible. Without speaking, she divided the few supplies in the cave—the cheese, the bread and water she’d had from Micha. Half she set beside Rosa.

“Since you care so little for your son, then I do not suppose it is any great matter to you if I bury him according to Jewish rites. I will take the body and see it into the ground as soon as Shabbat ends at sunset.”

Rosa let out a great sigh. “Since he isn’t baptized, it makes no difference.”

Ruti tied her small bundle of provisions in what remained of her mantle. She slung this over one shoulder. Over the other, she placed a sack that contained a small packet, carefully wrapped in layers of hides and tied up with thonging. Then she reached for the body of the stillborn child. The baby moved in her hands. Ruti looked down and saw the eyes of her brother, warm, kindly, trusting eyes, gazing back at her, blinking. She said nothing to Rosa, who had curled herself up into a ball and was already halfway to exhausted sleep, but passed quickly out of the cave. As soon as she was on the path, she descended as fast as was safe with her burdens, fearful lest the child should cry and give away the secret that he lived.

On Sunday, just after the noon bell, all across Spain, royal heralds sounded a fanfare, and citizens gathered in town squares to hear a proclamation from the king of Aragon and the queen of Castile.

Ruti, dressed in the manner of a Christian woman, in ill-fitting clothes she had pilfered from the box in Rosa’s bedroom, made her way through the gathering crowd in the fishing village’s main square until she was close enough to hear the herald. It was a lengthy text, setting out the perfidies of the Jews and the insufficiency of measures so far taken to stop their corruption of Christian belief.

“Therefore we command…all Jews and Jewesses, of whatever age they may be, that live, reside, and dwell in our said kingdoms and dominions…by the end of the month of July next, of the present year 1492, they depart from our said kingdoms…and that they not presume to return to, or reside therein, or they shall incur the penalty of death.” Jews were not to leave with gold or silver or gems; they had to pay all outstanding debts but were not in a position to collect any monies owed to them. Ruti stood there, as the hot spring sunshine beat on her unaccustomed head covering, and felt as if the world had cracked wide open. All around her, people were cheering, praising the names of Ferdinand and Isabella. She had never felt more alone.

There were no Jews in the village, which was why Ruti had chosen to walk there after taking what she could from the Salvador masía. She had not considered it theft, as the things she took were for the support of the Salvadores’ grandchild. In the village, she had sought out a wet nurse, concocting an implausible story about her sister having been lost at sea. Fortunately, the woman was ignorant and dull, and did not question Ruti’s account, or why a woman just delivered of a newborn should have been at sea at all.

As the crowd dispersed, singing and crying out slanders against the Jews, Ruti stumbled across the square toward a fountain, and sat down heavily on its stones. Every path before her was a road into the dark. To go home to her mother was to put herself in the hands of the Inquisitors. To carry on the tenuous pretense of being a Christian was impossible. She had fooled a dull peasant woman, but when she had to find lodging or buy food, the flimsy nature of her story would almost certainly be exposed. To become a Christian—to convert, as the monarchs urged all Jews to do—was unthinkable.

Ruti sat there as the afternoon waned. Anyone who looked closely at the dumpling girl would have seen that she was rocking gently, back and forth, as she prayed to God for guidance. But Ruti had never been the kind of girl that people noticed.

Finally, as the slanting light turned the white stones orange, she arose from her place. She pulled off the head cover of a Christian woman and discarded it by the fountain. From the sack beside her she drew out her own scarf and her surcoat, marked with the distinctive yellow button of a Jew. For once, she did not lower her eyes as she walked through the square, past the staring Christians, but held their gaze and returned it with one of anger and resolve. And so she made her way to the dockside shanty where the wet nurse waited with the baby.

When the sun had set and darkness sheltered her from the eyes of the curious, Ruth Ben Shoushan walked into the sea, the nameless infant tight against her breast, until she stood waist-deep. She unwrapped him, throwing the swaddling cloth over her head. His brown eyes blinked at her, and his small fists, free of constriction, punched at the air. “Sorry, my little one,” she said gently, and then thrust him under the dark surface.

The water closed around him, touching every inch of his flesh. She had a firm grip around his upper arm. She let go. The water had to take him.

She looked down at the small, struggling form, her face determined, even as she sobbed. The swell rose and slapped against her. The tug of the receding wave was about to pull the infant away. Ruti reached out and grasped him firmly in her two hands. As she lifted him from the sea, water sluiced off his bare, shining skin in a shower of brightness. She held him up to the stars. The roar in her head was louder now than the surf. She cried out, into the wind, speaking the words for the infant in her hands. “Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad.”

Then she drew the cloth from her head and wrapped the baby. All over Aragon that night, Jews were being forced to the baptismal font, driven to conversion by fear of exile. Ruti, exultant, defiant, had made a Gentile into a Jew. Because his mother was not Jewish, a ritual immersion had been necessary. And now it was done. Even as the emotion of the moment brimmed within her, Ruti was counting up the days. She did not have very long. By the eighth day, she would need to find someone to perform his brit. If all went well, this would be in their new land. And on that day, she would give the child his name.

She turned back toward the beach, hugging the baby tightly to her breast. She remembered she had the book, wrapped in hide, slung in a shoulder sack. She pulled on the straps to raise it out of the reach of the waves. But a few drops of saltwater found their way inside her careful wrappings. When the water dried on the page, there would be a stain, and a residue of crystals, that would last five hundred years.

In the morning, Ruti would begin to look for a ship. She would pay the passage for herself and the baby with the silver medallion that she had pried off the leather binding, and where they made landfall—if they made landfall—would rest in the hand of God.

But tonight she would go to her father’s grave. She would say the Kaddish and introduce him to his Jewish grandson, who would carry his name across the seas and into whatever future God saw fit to grant them.