Page 91 of The Phoenix Bride
She kisses my cheek. For a moment, I am transported: She smells like silk and fire and something I lost long ago, which recalls Lisbon and synagogue and Manuel’s smiles across the seder table. The smell of home, of community. It lingers briefly, then disappears as she pulls away.
“You will find her again,” she says. “If it is meant to be, you will.”
—
Winter comes and passes. The shopping gallery is replaced with a tangle of scaffolding, which I am informed will someday be a theater. Spring begins a slow and uncertain arrival: a scattering of blue-skied days that are interrupted, as a tremor in an arthritic hand, by sudden and violent storms.
On the last day of March, I show Sara out after her appointment, offering her my arm as we reach the staircase.
“Honestly, I am not made of porcelain,” she snaps at me. “I won’t shatter, should I descend a set of steps unaided.”
“I only thought to help.”
She grumbles and shoves past me, ignoring my arm. Joseph, who is waiting for her in the hallway, gives me an apologetic look; still, he hasn’t the courage to intervene. He kisses her once she reaches him, and says, “It is certain?”
Her expression softens, and she smiles at him. “As much as it can be. David, the primrose oil?”
“It will be ready in the morning.”
“I will come to pick it up,” Joseph says. “Our thanks, as always. If we have any trouble—”
“Talk to a midwife first,” I say firmly. “I appreciate your trust in me, but she will know better than I.”
They both sigh—they have more trust in a Jewish physician than a gentile midwife, perhaps understandably so—but they don’t complain. After farewells, they leave.
I go downstairs as well, then out the back door, to the tiny patch of garden I have yet to tend. As I go to stare at the soil, berate myself for my lack of industry, I suddenly notice there are small hooks screwed into the crumbling brick wall behind the flower beds. The hooks are rusty with age—once they likely held trellises, but no longer. What metal remains glints in the sunlight, winking at me as I move.
I return inside and retrieve the glass beads Manuel gave me from my traveling case, where they have languished since we moved here. I string them from hook to hook, taking care to turn each bead to catch the light.
Halfway through my work, Jan comes downstairs to watch me. Once I am finished, he steps forward and crouches to put something in the soil beneath the hooks.
“What was that?” I ask him.
“A coffee bean,” he says, smiling at me. “Who knows? Perhaps, someday soon, it’ll actually start to grow.”
—
By May, the trees begin to bloom. There is a linden in Saint James’s Park that bursts open its blossoms like fireworks, sending them spinning in the air. Linden flowers are a sedative; they make you wistful, complacent, dreamy. That may be why my memories feel so unreal, why they linger so insistently, even aftermonths of trying to forget. The courtyard of the Eden townhouse, where I first saw Cecilia, was bathed in the stuff. It made the air sweet, my chest light. Perhaps it drove me to madness. It is a comforting thought, and one I consider often. Sometimes I can pretend briefly that my longing for her is a disease that I can treat. That I can cure it with decoctions and troches and electuaries.
One day I return home to see a letter on my desk. I almost break the seal, and then I realize I recognize the handwriting on the envelope, the jagged sweep of the vowels in my name.
I go to retrieve another letter—one I received very long ago, that I saved from the fire, that I have kept in a drawer all this time, despite myself—and I compare it to the one I have just received.
It is undeniable. The letter is from Cecilia.
I sit down in the chair, hand trembling. How does she know where I am? Jan, it must have been—I know he has been corresponding with Sir Grey, lovelorn fool that he is.
I imagine opening the letter. I imagine what it will say.David, I still love you.Or:Master Mendes, I am writing to ensure our parting is permanent.I don’t know which version would be more terrifying.
She is due to return to London soon. I know that much.
I break the seal on the envelope, pull out the folded piece of paper—I can see the dark, illegible imprint of her writing on the reverse, can see the message is brief, curt, direct—and I can’t doit.
I put the paper back into the envelope, and I put the envelope into my drawer.
Pacing the room, I seek desperately for distraction. I polish all my pewter plates. Then I make a set of electuaries and prepare all my patients’ poultices for the next fortnight. My attempts toscrub the pots afterward are so aggressive I skin my knuckles against the metal, and I must bind them with gauze.
That night, I cannot sleep. I squirm beneath my sheets, and I stare at the ceiling, imagining Cecilia’s letter in my drawer hot as a coal, burning a hole in the wood, smoke filling the room. I drift away only when the sun begins to rise, and even then, I rest only briefly. I dream of linden and the water. I dream of fire and the past.
