‘Not if your father finds us here with it,’ Isaac warned. ‘Does your mother know about the stone, Nathan?’
Nathan nodded miserably. ‘But she won’t tell anyone. She thinks the old man was tricked into giving away his wealth for nothing. She couldn’t bear the shame of her friends and neighbours thinking her father had lost his wits.’
As he spoke, Nathan took the stone from Aaron’s hand and began to wrap it in wool.
‘What are you doing with it?’ Aaron demanded indignantly.
‘I’m taking it home,’ Nathan told him, ‘where I should be right now. I shouldn’t have let you talk me into coming here. I should be sitting with my poor mother in mourning.’
‘But you can’t take the stone,’ Aaron protested. ‘I need to spend the night studying it and meditating on the letters. I told you letters are only the sign, but there is a message hidden in them, something that will show us what to do.’
‘You don’t need the stone to meditate on the letters. You know what they are.’ Nathan thrust the stone firmly into his scrip.
‘But suppose your mother finds it and throws it out,’ Aaron said.
Nathan pressed both hands tightly against the leather scrip. ‘It belongs to me. I am Jacob’s grandson. I’ll keep it under my pillow at night and with me all day. If my zayde thought it was worth giving everything he had for it, then I won’t part with it for a king’s ransom. This stone is all I have left of him.’
Aaron’s face was flushed with fury. ‘But it’s wasted on you! Jacob would want it to go to the person who can use it. You haven’t the wit to discover the riddle in it. I’m far more advanced in the mystic path than any of you. I’m the only one who can read it.’ He tried again to wrest the scrip from Nathan’s grasp, but Nathan fought back. Isaac and Benedict stepped in to separate them.
‘It belongs to Nathan,’ Benedict said firmly. ‘It’s stained with the blood of his family. Besides, it’s safer in his house than in yours. Your father may be set in his ways, Aaron, but he is not stupid, and if he found it in your possession he wouldn’t rest until he found the letters on it. Now make haste. Let’s separate and get out of here before the elders arrive.’
Judith didn’t wait to hear what Aaron replied. She fled across the room and resumed her sweeping. Footsteps clattered down the back steps, and moments later the door connecting the study chamber to the synagogue opened and Benedict emerged alone. He stopped as he caught sight of her.
‘Cleaning at this hour, Judith? It’s very late,’ he said with a frown.
‘I was late arriving,’ Judith lied. ‘I had to walk to the far end of Fish Quay to find good herring for supper and then there was such a crowd.’
Benedict stepped closer, taking the broom from her and bringing both her hands to his lips, kissing each hand in turn.
‘You work too hard,’ he told her. ‘But as soon as we are married, all that will end, I promise. Just a few more months and I will have the money.’
Judith sighed and tried to force a smile. Marriage had been set to follow within a year of their betrothal, but a year ago, just weeks before the wedding, Benedict’s father had been hanged along with two other men. They were three of the sixteen men and women accused of the forced circumcision of a convert’s little son ten years before. The whole Jewish community had raised the money demanded to pay for a mixed jury of Jews and Christians. But the King had taken the money, then declared that Jews were barred from sitting on the jury, because they would not convict one of their own.
Judith’s own parents as well as the Kabbalah teacher had been among those accused, but they had wisely fled to Germany before the trial and could never return for they had been declared fugitives, but at least they were alive. Benedict’s father had foolishly put his faith in the King’s justice, and now he was dead and all his property forfeit to the Crown. Benedict was forced to work for a Christian master in the shop his father had once owned and rent a tiny chamber between the shop and the storeroom to sleep in.
Judith had repeatedly assured Benedict that she would gladly wed him without a penny between them, for she loved him more than her own life, but Benedict was too proud to accept that. When he could afford to marry her, he said, he would, but as Judith lay awake at night with every fibre of her body aching to be lying in his arms, she began to fear she would be wearing a shroud before a bridal gown.
They heard the sound of laboured footsteps on the wooden stairs below. Benedict grabbed Judith’s cloak and thrust it around her shoulders as Rabbi Elias shuffled into the room. The rabbi stared in puzzlement at the sight of the young couple alone in the synagogue. Judith could see the question forming on his lips.
Before the rabbi could ask it, Benedict said quickly, ‘Judith’s brother couldn’t come for her tonight. He was concerned that she shouldn’t walk home alone, so he asked me to escort her.’
The rabbi’s frown relaxed. ‘Troubled times, troubled times.’
Benedict hastily ushered Judith towards the stairs.
‘You are a close friend of the boy Nathan?’
Benedict turned. The rabbi was gazing not at him but at the closed doors of the ark where the scrolls of the Torah were kept.
Rabbi Elias continued without looking at Benedict. ‘I know that Jacob ben Meir went to Exeter to bring back some special object for this community, something he believed would protect us, give us hope. That much he confided in me before he left. Jacob said he was willing to give everything he owned for that chance for us all to live in peace. I believe that had he known what that object would really cost him, he still would not have hesitated to bring it here. Yet the universe is created in pairs. For every light there is a corresponding darkness, and what brings peace can be used to bring destruction, if it falls into the wrong hands.’
The rabbi turned and fixed Benedict and Judith with his piercing blue eyes. ‘I am only in my forty-second year, and if it pleases the Eternal One I might live for some years yet, but my son is not willing to wait until I am old to replace me as rabbi. He believes that like our forefathers, the Maccabees, who rose up against the occupying Greeks, we can rise up against our masters and overthrow them. But this is not Israel and we cannot fight the whole of Christendom! If we try, they will utterly destroy us. Our only hope is to put our faith in the Eternal One, as we have always done. Benedict, you are a man known for keeping your own counsel, so I will not ask you if you know what object Jacob brought back or where it is, but ask you this — do all in your power to ensure it does not fall into the hands of my son, Aaron, and those like him, or it will mean the end of all of us.’
Thursday 23 May, the fifth day of Sivan, the eve of the Festival of Shavuoth
The flames in the oil lamps guttered each time the synagogue door opened to admit more men and boys hurrying in from the chilling rain. The benches around the little tables were filling up fast, and Nathan found himself squashed between Benedict and a stout red-faced butcher who, though he had washed, still stank of blood and dung.
‘Have you brought the stone with you?’ Benedict whispered.
Nathan nodded reluctantly. He hadn’t had any choice but to bring it. Aaron and Isaac had both arrived on his doorstep as dusk was gathering and insisted on watching him put the stone in his scrip before escorting him like a prisoner to the synagogue.
‘I don’t see what good it will do you,’ Nathan told them. ‘We can’t discuss the meaning of the letters this evening. Every man in the community will be in the synagogue tonight.’
But Aaron had exchanged a knowing wink with Isaac, and Nathan realized at once that they were planning something. Whatever it was, he wanted no part of it. So it was much to Nathan’s relief when Aaron and Isaac left him at the synagogue door and went to join the other groups of men.
It was the tradition for the men to gather on the eve of Shavuoth to study all night, until dawn proclaimed the time for morning prayers and the main services of the festival would begin. Debates over the holy texts were always lively, as each man deliberately offered a counter-argument to that of his companions so that all possible interpretations of the verses could be explored.