Page 81 of The Phoenix Bride
“Yes, I know,” I say. “I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” he echoes, frowning.
“Yes. I could stay at Sam’s tonight. With you.”
“Cecilia…”
“I could send a messenger to Margaret,” I say, “telling her I will come in the morning, that Sam and I have eloped. There’d be little she could do to retrieve me.”
“But why?” he asks.
“Because I want to,” I reply. “Isn’t that reason enough?”
“No. As much as I would like it to be—it isn’t.”
The uncertainty in his eyes frustrates me, and my response emerges more harshly than it should. “What am I supposed to do?” I say. “You never believe me when I tell you what I want; you seem to think you know it better than I do. I find it demeaning.”
“I don’t mean to demean you. But you were very unwell when we first met. You are better now—I am so glad—but still, your attachment to me is grown from grief, and from desperation. You have been vulnerable, and perhaps I have taken advantage of that.”
“I am not as fragile as you think. I know that I have been unwell, but you haven’t somehow tricked me into wanting you.”
He asks, “How can I know that? How can I be certain?”
“How can we be certain of anything?” I reply. “My own mind works against me so often, David. There is so much of myself I dislike, and so much of myself I don’t trust. There are days when every thought I have feels like a lie. But this—you—has alwaysfelt real. I have never questioned it. I can’t prove that to you, but I am asking you to believe it. If we had met some other way, at some other time, nothing would change. I would want you just the same.”
His grip on my hand tightens, and the barge sways beneath us. The glow of the city behind us gilds him like a saint. He doesn’t speak his acquiescence; he doesn’t need to. In the soft, half lidding of his eyes, his surrender is as clear as any answer could be.
“Ani l’dodi,” he says. I don’t know what it means.
—
The boat stops at the other side of the river, and Elizabeth leaves. She shakes David’s hand, promising to search for him once the fire ends. Then she takes her things and stomps out into the streets.
“Will she be all right?” I ask David.
“I think so,” he replies. “She is tenacious.”
We continue to sail west in silence. As we near the fire, even Sam ceases speaking. It is worse than before. The heart of the city is entirely devoured, and the smoke billows in great clouds, swaddling the sky in soot. David stutters a breath that seems more powerful in its grief than any weeping could be; I press my arm against his and offer what futile comfort I can.
Something falls against my bare shoulders, a light touch, like a lover’s caress. I glance up to the sky and gasp softly. Ashes are falling over us, gentle as snowflakes. They dust David’s hair white, coat the blue silk of my wedding dress in a silver sheen. For a long moment, I can do nothing except watch them spin in the air, entranced by the dancelike quality of their movements.
Eventually, I look back to David. He is watching me and smiling, with a gentle sort of regret.
“I shouldn’t say this,” he says, “but you look beautiful—as if you have risen from the flames.”
Throat tightening, I twine my hand in his, and we turn back to the city. The fire burns so high that it seems it could set the sun itself alight and burn it away, make the sky brighter than anyday, prevent the night from coming. Time itself has ended. There will only ever be the river and the fire, and myself and David between them, watching London burn.
The first time I fell in love, I was eleven. My father was invited by a physician’s guild to give a lecture in Granada. He was very glad to accept: our ancestors had been from Andalusia, and they had fled west when the Spanish Inquisition began. The Inquisition in Portugal had started a generation later. My grandfather had often joked that if we were destined for a pyre, it ought to have been in the shadow of the Alhambra, not the gutters of Lisbon. “Men like us,” he’d say, “deserve to burn in the most beautiful place on earth!”
There was never a pyre for us. Our false conversion had assured that much, at least. But the unfulfilled promise of Granada lingered, the pomegranate ripped from our hands. My father saw this lecture as an opportunity to show me part of our history, and soon we were making our way south. I remember very little of the journey itself. We went by ship to Malaga, and from there north to the city, on mules and by coach and foot.
But I remember Granada. I always will: It was my first love, after all. I understand why my grandfather wanted to die there.Our family has always been doctors, and it feels like a physician’s city. The twisting streets rise and fall like breathing lungs, the canal’s veins flowing between them, to the heart of the cathedral. Above these organs rises the rib cage of the Albaicín, a neighborhood that holds the last dregs of non-Christian rule. Once home of the Moors and the Jewish quarter, it still remains as it was five hundred years ago, stretching across the hills in strands of whitewashed walls and terra-cotta rooftops. From its heights, one can see the palace of the Alhambra as it colors the land gold.
My father and I could see it all from our balcony. He told me stories of princesses and conquerors, the great sultans and the Jews who advised them. This was once a land, he said, where our people and the Moors drank together, from fountains of milk and honey.
They were fairy tales, but I believed them. I thought of those fountains, and I imagined that the milk and honey remained within my veins. From the moment of my conception, the blood of Granada itself was inside me. All the princesses and conquerors and sultans paraded along my fingertips. At night, I would run beside the canal clutching my candle, watching the windows of Alhambra blink at me, another mote of light in an ocean of stars. I screamed and cried when we had to leave.
I used to dream of returning. Even after coming to London, I would constantly imagine making the trip, standing in the streets of the Albaicín and watching the land turn gold again. But recently even memories of Granada feel lost to me, and the thought of seeing it again is as futile as diluting the sea. Allthings are ephemeral: I am reminded of that as I watch the fire swallow the place I call home. Even cities don’t stand forever. Perhaps one day, Granada will burn, just as London has.
