my uncle, too. Yet what could a man such as myself offer? I who scraped together, at the very most, a few hundred pounds each year, had nothing for Miriam.
As I approached my uncle’s house, coming on to Berry Street from Grey Hound Alley, I was shocked out of my reverie by an ungainly beggar man, who materialized with jarring suddenness. He was a Tudesco Jew—as we Iberian Jews called our coreligionists from Eastern Europe—perhaps of middle years, though he looked ageless in that way of men who are undernourished and oppressed with labors and hardships. My readers may not even realize that there are different categories of Jews, but we separate ourselves based on our culture of origin. Here in England, those of us of Iberian descent were the first to return in the last century and until recently outnumbered our Tudesco cousins. Because of the opportunities our exiled forebears found among the Dutch, most Jewish businessmen and brokers in England are Iberian. The Tudescos are frequently persecuted and harassed in their native lands, and when they come here they find themselves without skills or trades, and thus the largest number of beggars and old-clothes men about the streets are of Eastern European origin. These distinctions are not etched in stone, though, for there are rich Tudescos, such as Adelman, and there is no shortage of poor among the Iberian Jews.
I should like to say that I formed no prejudice against the Tudescos simply because I thought their appearance and language strange, but the truth is that I found such men as this peddler an embarrassment—I believed them to cast our people in a shockingly bad light, and I felt ashamed of their poverty and ignorance and helplessness. This man’s bones jutted out of his parchmentlike skin, and his black, foreign garments hung upon him as though he had simply draped bedclothes across his body. He wore his beard long, in the fashion of his countrymen, and a conspicuous skullcap spread over his head, with stringy locks creeping from beneath. As he stood there, a foolish smile upon his face, asking me in poor English if I wished to purchase a penknife or a pencil or a shoelace, I was overcome with a desire, intense and surprising, to strike him down, to destroy him, to make him disappear. I believed at that moment that it was these men, whose looks and manners were repulsive to Englishmen, who were responsible for the difficulties other Jews suffered in England. Were it not for this buffoon, who gave the English something to gawk at, I would not have been so humiliated in Sir Owen’s club. Indeed, I should not find so many obstacles in my path that block me from learning what had happened to my father. But even this was a lie, I told myself, for I knew that the truth was that this peddler did not make the English hate us —he merely gave their hatred a focus. He was an outcast, he was strange to look at, his speech abused the language, and he could never blend into London society—not even as a foreigner blends in. This man made me hate myself for what I was, and made me wish to strike out at him. I understood this passion for what it was; I knew that I hated him for reasons that related not at all to him, so I hurried off, hoping to make him and the feelings he engendered in me fade away.
Yet as I rushed, I heard him call to me. “Mister!” he shouted. “I know who you are.”
This claim only fueled my anger, for what could I, the son of one of London’s prominent Jewish families—and this was a title that I rarely claimed—have to do with a beggar such as he? I clenched my fists and turned to face him.
“I know you,” he said again, pointing at me. “You.” He shook his head, unable to summon the words. “You this, yes?” He balled his hands into fists and brought them up level to his nose before he pantomimed some quick jabs. “You the great man, the Lion of Judah, yes?” He took a few steps forward and nodded vigorously, his beard swinging back and forth like a crazed and hairy pendulum. He barked a little laugh, as though his ignorance of the English tongue suddenly amused him. Then, placing one of his hands upon his heart, he reached down to his tray of trinkets and held something forth. “Please,” he said. “From me.”
As he held out an hourglass in the palm of his bony hand, I understood that, while I saw him as what I hated about myself, he saw me as something in which he could take pride. It is a terrible thing to come to so humbling a realization, for in an instant a man sees himself as petty and illiberal and weak. And so I took the hourglass from him and dropped a shilling upon his tray, rushing away as I did so. I knew a shilling to be an enormous amount of money to the Tudesco, but he chased after me, holding the coin. “No, no, no,” he repeated nearly endlessly. “You take from me. Please.”
I turned to face him. I saw that one hand was once again pressed to his heart, the other held out the coin. “Please,” he said again.
I took the coin from his hand and then dropped it in his tray. Before he could react I put a hand to my own heart. “Please.”
We exchanged brief nods, expressing a communion I did not entirely understand, and then I hurried off in the direction of King Street.
I walked quickly, hoping to remove the encounter with the peddler from my mind, and when my uncle’s house came in sight, I nearly trotted. The servant Isaac opened the door only after I had knocked several times, and even then he attempted to block my entrance by maneuvering his withered frame before me. “Mr. Lienzo is not in,” he said sharply. “He is at the warehouse. You can see him there.”
He sounded clipped, perhaps a bit frightened. “Is something wrong, Isaac?”
“No,” he said rapidly. “But your uncle is not here.”
He attempted to close the door, but I pushed against it. “Is Mrs. Miriam about?”
Isaac’s face changed dramatically upon the mention of her name, and on an impulse I forced my way past him and into the foyer, from where I could hear voices, raised as if shouting. One of them was clearly Miriam’s.
“What happens in there?”
“Mrs. Miriam, she is having an argument,” he said, as though offering precisely the information I needed to ease my confusion.
“With whom?” I demanded. But at that very moment the withdrawing-room door opened and Noah Sarmento emerged, his face bearing a scowl something grimmer than his usual. He paused for a moment, visibly astonished to see the two of us standing in close proximity to their quarrel.
“What do you want, Weaver?” he asked me, as if I had just barged into his own home.
“This is where my family lives,” I said with what I admit was a bellicose inflection.
“And for a sufficient quantity of silver, you now care about your family,” he snapped. He grabbed his hat from Isaac, who had produced it without my notice, and stepped out of the already open door. Isaac closed it as Miriam emerged from the withdrawing room. She opened her mouth to speak to Isaac, but stopped upon seeing me.
I can only presume that she found some irony in my presence there, for she smiled slightly to herself. “Good afternoon, Cousin,” she said. “Would you care for some tea?”
I told her I would enjoy it very much, and we retreated into the withdrawing room, where we waited for the maid to bring us the tea things.
Miriam was still heated from her argument with Sarmento, and her olive skin had enough of the red mixed in to make her eyes glow like emeralds. On this day she wore a particularly striking shade of royal blue, which I speculated was a favorite color with her.
She was disordered, I could see that quite clearly, but she tried hard to mask her mood with smiles and pleasantries. After a few moments of asking me about the weather and how I had entertained myself since last we met, she produced a dazzling Chinese fan and began to wave it at herself somewhat violently.
“Well,” I breathed. At least, I thought, the difficulties with Sarmento made the matter of the money I’d lent seem less pressing. I had thought to engage her in idle chatter for a while, but I soon decided I should get nowhere with a woman like Miriam if I pretended to a frivolousness I surely did not possess. “Is Mr. Sarmento causing you any difficulties with which I can assist you?”
She set aside her fan. “Yes,” Miriam said. “I should like you to beat him soundly.”
“Do you mean at cards? Billiards, perhaps?”
We might have been discussing the opera for all her face revealed. “I would prefer cudgels.”
“I think Mr. Sarmento would hold his own nicely in a battle,” I said absently.
“Not against you, surely.”
I stiffened a bit at this. Miriam flirted with me, quite obviously so. She had not failed to observe that I found her attractive, and I thought to myself that I would be wise to keep my wits about me. I could not allow myself to forget that she had been in an argument that her servant had been at pains to conceal from me. Whatever I was to this family, I was not yet trusted. “No,” I said, looking about the room. “Not against me. And against you, Miriam, he fared poorly as well. You have quite knocked him out of the ring.”
