“Professor Watt?” he said.
The old combativeness reared in her. She’d long intimidated her peers as a matter of course, before the effort of interacting with them at all had become too much trouble. “You’re late,” she said, “Mr. Levy.”
She watched Aaron Levy register her rebuke. He didn’t seem perturbed by it. He had a lean body and handsome face, but that American softness about the mouth. The effect was a confident friendliness that might at any moment become a smirk.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There was a delay on the bus line.”
He spoke with a slight lilt. She hadn’t expected him to be so Jewish. It was going to cause problems. But it wasn’t this, but something else, that disturbed her. Another errant spark of memory. Dror.
She said, “You might have telephoned.”
He studied her. “I’m sorry,” he said evenly. A countermove rather than an apology.
She was staring, she realized. She corralled her focus. She wouldn’t let the excitement of one day turn her into a fool. Yes, Aaron Levy bore a physical resemblance to someone—someone she’d cared for very much. And what of it? People, on occasion, resembled one another.
She spoke sharply. “Do you understand, Mr. Levy, the professionalism that will be required of you?”
Surprise and indignation pinked his cheeks. Then, a heartbeat later, she watched him accomplish a willed descent into leisure. He relaxed visibly, his thin frame angling back to lean against the wall. His eyes crinkled at the corners, his face went quick with mischief. He was, she saw, a man used to getting around women through flirtation.
“I tend to like a challenge,” he said.
No, she told herself—he was nothing like Dror.
“Required by these papers,” she enunciated. “By the documents that have been found in Richmond. Or did Darcy not explain the situation sufficiently?”
She had his attention. Something in those eyes flickered and engaged her gaze, this time seriously—as though the smooth Aaron Levy had yawned and exited the party, leaving someone else in his wake. “Andrew Darcy said that the last discovery of an untouched genizah of this age has to have been more than five decades ago.”
“Six,” she corrected. “And we won’t know for certain whether it’s a genizah until we examine the documents.”
“He said you might need someone who can translate Hebrew and Portuguese.”
“I am perfectly capable of translating those languages.”
He folded his arms.
“If you’re to join this effort,” she said, “you’ll devote the next three days to following my instructions. Based on what I’ve already reported to Jonathan Martin”—the head of the History Department, whose cozy relationship with the vice chancellor and cherished goal of outshining rival UCL might at last be working in Helen’s favor—“the acquisition process is soon to be underway. And assuming the evaluation of the documents goes well, the university will attempt to purchase them. If it succeeds, which I believe it will . . . and if your skills are sufficient, which I’ve yet to see”—she let the words linger—“I might be able to offer you the opportunity to work on these papers going forward.”
He said nothing.
“Of course, that would mean delaying your dissertation. I understand you’ve been laboring on that for quite some time?” She waited, the provocation deliberate, though she was surprised at her own sharpness. There was no reason for the sensation flaring inside her, as if he were a threat she must at all cost repel. He was a postgraduate student, that was all—and, from the sound of things, one on a rather ill-chosen mission. Darcy had said Aaron Levy was investigating possible connections between members of Shakespeare’s circle and Inquisition-refugee Jews of Elizabethan London. To Helen, the topic sounded better suited to a department of English, but evidently Aaron had campaigned for his chosen topic until Darcy had acceded. Specifically, young Mr. Levy was looking for proof that Shakespeare’s Shylock wasn’t modeled solely on the infamous Doctor Lopez—the Jewish physician of Queen Elizabeth who was executed for allegedly plotting her murder—but also drew on interactions with other hidden Jews of Shakespeare’s acquaintance. An ambitious and probably arrogant choice for a dissertation.
Had Aaron Levy chosen to study Shakespeare’s Catholic roots, it would have been different; that field had been blessed relatively recently with the astonishing gift of fresh evidence—a religious pamphlet found in the attic of Shakespeare’s father. That single document had upended and revitalized that arena of Shakespeare studies, leaving young historians room to work productively for years to come. Shakespeare as a hidden Catholic, Shakespeare as a Catholic escape artist sneaking in subtle commentary under the eye of a Protestant monarchy—there was fresh terrain.
The territory of Shakespeare and the Jews, in contrast, was well scoured. Other than Merchant of Venice and some fleeting or dubious references elsewhere, the plays offered no mention of Jews . . . and beyond the plays there was almost no direct evidence to examine. One might speculate about anything, of course: the identity of Shakespeare’s alleged Dark Lady or Fair Youth, or for that matter what the Bard might have favored for his breakfast. But without evidence, claims of any watermark of Jewish presence in Shakespeare’s work were no more than theories—and Shapiro and Katz and Green, among others, had covered those theories exhaustively. If the reigning lords of the field had been unable to find anything more solid, what was the likelihood that an American postgraduate would be able to do so? According to Darcy, the young man, for all his promise, was struggling.
Aaron’s expression betrayed nothing. He offered a slow, neutral nod.
“The documents are in Richmond,” Helen said, briskly now. “In a seventeenth-century house currently owned by a couple named Easton, who inherited the house from an aunt. The records I’ve seen thus far show that the residence was built in 1661—by Portuguese Jews, in fact. The house then changed hands in 1698, then again in 1704 and 1723. One wing was torn down and replaced in the nineteenth century, and the house was purchased in 1910 by the aunt’s family—who then allowed it to deteriorate.
“It seems that I was Mr. Easton’s tutor over a decade ago for a class in seventeenth-century history, during the course of which I evidently made some mention of the fact that I’d written several articles about the Marrano Jews of Inquisition Europe. Making me the only scholar of Jewish history he’d encountered in his life—and hence, all these years later, the recipient of his telephone call upon the discovery of some Hebrew writing in a space under the stair.” She felt a wry smile form on her lips. “I myself had no recollection of Mr. Easton. Apparently I found him unimpressive. But I am now”—she said—“sufficiently impressed.”
Two or three of her colleagues were passing down the hall. The commotion of their footsteps rose and subsided, the drafty Victorian hallways magnifying their transit to heroic dimensions. She set a hand on her desk, as though to steady something—but the pale light from the window struck Aaron Levy’s brown eyes and conferred on them a gentleness that mocked her: Helen Watt, sixty-four years old. Guardian of well-worn opinions and disappointments. The paths of her mind like the treads of an old staircase, concave from the passage of long-gone feet. She felt it ripple through the solidity of her book-lined sanctuary: only the slightest tremor of memory, yet it halted her. A scent of bruised herbs, of dust. And an iron dread, suddenly, in her soft belly. Yes, Dror had had those same tight curls, those almond eyes. But how different. For just an instant, then, Dror’s face was before her: his sun-browned skin, his jaw, his lips speaking, unhesitating and unsparing. Helen. That’s not true. You know it isn’t.