Act of Faith (7 page)

‘It’s hard to say.’

I waited a few moments. ‘Is that all?’

‘I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you, Isabella. You will need to take him his meals before Willem wakes and after he has gone to bed.’

‘You don’t really expect us to hide him from Willem?’

‘We must.’

‘But why?’

‘I’ve told you not to mention the Hebrew Bible to anyone. It’s work that must be done in dark corners — not in the workshop in the light of day — or we may all suffer for it.’

I blushed. Even my ears were hot. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘So I ask you to tell no one about this new translator. Promise me this?’

‘Not even Fra Clement?’

‘Especially not the good monk.’

‘I thought you trusted him,’ I said. ‘He told me there were no secrets between you.’

‘Really? When did he say that?’

My blush changed into a sudden chill that crept down my neck and along my backbone.

‘Ages ago.’

‘Hmm.’ Master de Aquila was looking at me far too closely for my liking. ‘Of course I trust him. He has been a good friend to us. But it’s better not to test any man’s loyalties too much.’

‘You’re very wise, Master.’

‘Or perhaps very foolish.’ He smiled and I relaxed a little. ‘Time will tell. But of your loyalty I have no doubt. I need you to help me.’

‘I will do whatever you ask.’ I hoped I wasn’t blushing any more.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I was blessed the day you were brought to my house.’ He patted my hand. ‘Come, there’s much to be done. I need you to take a message to Simon — he, at least, must know that our guest is due.’

I hurried through the streets and alleyways, over narrow stone bridges across canals in which clots of ice bobbed and buckled. A frost-filled wind stabbed at my face, bringing tears to my eyes.
I wiped them away fast, in case they froze on my cheeks. Clutched in one mitten was a long letter to Simon from Master de Aquila, carefully sealed with string and wax. I poked it into my apron waistband so I could rub my hands together.

Just as I thought I might actually die of cold, I found myself standing in front of the massive carved door at the front of Simon’s workshop. I knocked. No answer. There was no way I was standing outside waiting for him. I took the iron door handle in both hands, turned and pushed.

From the hallway, I heard the sound of someone rustling through papers in the downstairs office. I tapped lightly on the door. ‘Hello?’

‘Isabella!’ It was Fra Clement, hunched over Simon’s desk. ‘May I help you?’

‘Fra Clement — what are you doing here?’

‘God’s work, my dear.’ He put down a clutch of documents and straightened his cassock. ‘No business of yours.’

‘Of course,’ I said quickly. I scanned the room. ‘I’m sorry. I’m looking for Simon.’

‘He’s out, apparently. I was waiting for him myself.’

I started to edge out of the doorway. ‘I’ll come back later.’

‘In this weather?’ He glanced at the window and the driving sleet outside. ‘Nonsense. Have you brought Simon a message from your master? Shall I pass it on to him for you? Then you can run home and get warm.’

I hesitated.

‘Surely, after all these months, you have learned you may rely on me, Isabella?’

‘It’s not that, sir,’ I stuttered.

He smiled, and raised one hand as if to take a vow. A fat gold
ring glimmered red in the light from the fireplace. ‘I solemnly promise I will not forget to pass on the message.’ Then he stretched his hand towards me.

‘It’s just …’

There was something odd in his smile, his gesture.

‘Actually, I’m not delivering anything,’ I said. ‘I’m here to collect a manuscript.’

I am not a convincing liar, but it seemed to work.

‘Then you must wait with me, it would seem, and we can greet Simon together on his return.’ Fra Clement made himself comfortable near the fireplace and began stoking the coals with a poker.

‘I have some other errands — I’ll finish those and come back later,’ I said.

I curtseyed awkwardly and backed into the hallway. In my rush to get away, cloak pulled down over my face, I collided with Simon on the street corner.

‘There you are, child,’ he said. ‘I was hoping to hear from you today.’

‘I brought a message, but Fra Clement — he’s in your house,’ I said. ‘Waiting for you.’

‘Do you still have the letter?’

‘Here.’ I shoved the roll of paper into the palm of his hand. He hid it quickly under his coat. ‘I didn’t — that is, Fra Clement, he offered —’

‘You did the right thing, Isabella.’

‘My master says that the friend you are expecting will arrive on Sunday.’

‘Good.’ He paused. ‘Did you tell Fra Clement about our … friend?’

‘Of course not,’ I said.

‘You’re a good girl.’

‘Don’t you trust him?’ I asked, slightly shocked at my own thoughts, my own words.

‘Not so loud.’ Simon lowered his head until it was close to mine. ‘Your master is the most optimistic of Jews. He trusts Catholic monks and Protestant printers. I am different. I have seen too much to trust anyone — present company excepted, of course.’ He patted my cheek and smiled. ‘Off you go, now. Tell that old rascal I’ll be along to see him in the morning.’

As I ran past him, into the next street, I heard him call out: ‘Ah, Clement, what are you doing loitering outside in this weather? Why aren’t you in by the fire?’

Our guest arrived late on Sunday evening, when Willem was out of the house. I answered the quiet knock on the kitchen door. Simon greeted me politely, but didn’t introduce the man who stood, muffled thickly against the cold, just behind him.

‘Is he in?’ Simon asked.

I nodded. ‘Upstairs.’

Simon said something in an unfamiliar language to the stranger and he bowed slightly to me. I smiled.

‘You are welcome here, sir.’ I said it in French but he didn’t reply. ‘Come in out of the cold.’

‘We’ll find our own way,’ Simon said. ‘But perhaps you could spare us some supper? Our friend has had a long journey.’

‘Of course. I’ll bring it up.’

By the time I had prepared the supper, Master de Aquila had shown our guest to his room in the attic.

‘Take it up, take it up! What are you waiting for? The poor
man is half-starved.’ He waved me on up the rickety stairs to the very top of the house.

The stranger was unpacking, standing at a large table that had been shoved into one corner. The table was littered with scrolls of paper, books, pens and a small globe on a stand. There was nothing else in the room besides a narrow bed along one wall and a washstand near the door.

I put the tray down on the bed. ‘Here’s your supper,’ I whispered.

The man didn’t even glance up.

That’s the way it always was. No matter what time of day or evening I brought the food, he was working at the table, either in a little patch of daylight or the soft glow of a candle. He sometimes thanked me, speaking quietly in English with a thick accent, but he never looked up at me and never stopped working.

Every morning I got up even earlier to take breakfast to the attic before Willem woke. Every evening, when I took our master’s supper up to the library, I packed twice as much as usual onto the tray so he could share it with his guest.

‘If the old man keeps eating like that he’ll explode,’ Willem joked.

‘He needs strength,’ I said. ‘He works too hard.’ It was true.

‘What about me? Why don’t I deserve extra supper?’

‘You already eat more than the rest of us put together.’ That was true, too.

He snatched a handful of walnuts from the tray. I slapped at his hand and he laughed, delighted at his own daring.

‘Shall I take it up for you?’ he said.

‘I’m not letting you anywhere near this food.’ I grabbed the tray and took it upstairs to Master de Aquila.

‘Willem asked why you eat so much supper,’ I said.

‘He’s too nosey for his own good.’

‘Surely one day he will find out the truth?’

Master de Aquila glanced up from his work. ‘I doubt it. And you will not tell him.’

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘But why does it all have to be so mysterious?’

‘I told you. The Hebrew Bible.’

‘But, sir …’ I took a breath and heard it shudder. ‘If it’s so dangerous, perhaps we shouldn’t be doing it at all.’

Master de Aquila threw down his pen and sat back in his chair. ‘Isabella, I had always imagined you to be a sophisticated young woman of great ability. Instead, I see before me a frightened girl.’

‘Perhaps you expect too much.’

‘I think not.’

‘I have lost everything.’

‘You are grieving — I understand that. But one day you will find that you are ready to resume a life of some sort, and that remarkable young scholar will, I hope, return to inhabit your body. Then you will discover there is a great deal of work to be done.’

‘Am I not working now?’

‘Other work — work that cannot be entrusted to just anybody.’

‘You don’t trust me?’

‘I do, indeed, but you are not ready to bear the burden. Not yet.’

‘You have no faith in me.’

‘It’s not a matter of faith.’

‘Then why won’t you tell me the truth about this man in the attic?’

‘Isabella, please believe me, it is better if you do not know the details.’

Anger flamed inside me. Or perhaps it was guilt. I don’t know.
I felt my fists clench and my shoulders straighten as I shrugged off all those weeks and months of sitting alone in my room debating endlessly with my own soul.

‘You either trust me or you don’t,’ I said. ‘There is no such thing as half-trust. It’s either there, like a shaft of clear air between us, or it has no existence at all.’

‘But surely it has layers, like friendship?’

‘There are levels of secrecy, perhaps, but not of trust.’

Master de Aquila’s eyes narrowed. He realised now that he would have to weigh every one of his arguments.

‘Yet when the sun rises, it merely softens the darkness at first. It does not truly shine until mid-morn. When it begins to sink —’

‘Yes, yes,’ I interrupted. ‘I understand the metaphor: you want to keep me in the shadows.’

‘Perhaps I wish to shield you from a harsh glare until your eyes are accustomed to it.’

‘Then it is as I thought — you don’t trust me.’

‘Like the twilight, faith is neither black nor white.’

I snorted. ‘We are printers. We don’t deal in grey. Black. White. Ink. Not ink. That is our world.’

‘That is our little part of the world,’ he retorted. ‘The rest of it is finely etched: sometimes silver, sometimes shadowy, or blinding yellow.’

‘My father trusted me.’

‘Did he?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Is there any such thing?’

‘Between parent and child, yes.’

‘Ah.’ He hesitated. ‘I see. Again, I must disappoint you, for I am not your father.’

‘No. You aren’t.’

But there I stopped. I suddenly had no heart for further debate. I realised that I had, without thinking, dropped back into the repartee that had once filled a house where the grass swept down to a river. But it wasn’t the same. Nothing would ever be the same.

It was weeks before my master returned to the subject, for which I was grateful. One afternoon, he called me into his office.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘I have entrusted secrets to you,’ he said. ‘Now you can help me.’

‘Am I not helping you already?’

‘Yes, my dear, of course. But I must ask more of you than your prodigious translation skills. I need someone I can trust —’

‘You can trust me, Master,’ I said, perhaps a little shrilly.

He smiled. ‘I believe it, so —’

‘I will never tell a soul.’

His smile faded. ‘If you don’t let me finish my sentences, you will never know anything worth telling.’

‘Forgive me.’

He snorted. ‘If only repentance brought genuine change.’

‘I will never interrupt you again.’

At this, he laughed out loud. ‘Then all my prayers are answered.’ He laughed for an unnecessarily long time, until tears wet his beard.

‘Are you finished?’ I asked.

‘No, I fear not. That joyous thought will sustain me for many days yet.’

I crossed my arms and muttered under my breath, just as Nanny used to do, ‘Lord, give me strength.’

‘What was that?’

‘I am merely waiting patiently, without interrupting, for the rest of your precious sentence.’

That set him off again.

I stomped back to the printing workshop. The sound of his laughter followed me down the stairs.

I knocked on his door an hour later to see if he had calmed down.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

‘Wrapping up pamphlets for Paul.’

‘Come here, child. Let me finish what I was trying to say earlier.’

I sat in my usual chair at the side of his desk.

‘I need you to act as a messenger.’

‘That’s all?’ I said. ‘I do that already.’

‘But these are different messages, sometimes deliveries of books or manuscripts.’

‘Why can’t Willem do it?’

‘He can, and indeed he does. But for these kinds of errands it is best to have more than one courier, for secrecy’s sake. I won’t —’

‘Secrecy?’

He raised his hand. He wasn’t laughing now. I kept my mouth shut.

‘This is the point. There are works that we print here that are best kept as private transactions between friends.’

‘I know,’ I said impatiently. ‘The Hebrew Bible.’

‘Not only that. There is greater work done here. As you know, we printed the Talmud of my people. One day, we will publish
the Hebrew Bible. But we also print Bibles in many languages, common languages, so that common people can read them — or, at least, learn to read them. It is not entirely legal. We print books of ideas, like your father’s
Discourse on Liberty
. All of this we do, whether the authorities approve or not.’

‘I see.’

It all made sense now: the late-night meetings with Simon, the letters and messages left at strange addresses, the bulky packages in the hallway that vanished as if by magic before morning. Clandestine printing.