“Me!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” he said steadily. “You should assure him that you are provided for, that you are safe.”

I hesitated.

“I myself have sworn to him that if you are in any difficulty or in any danger that I will care for you before any other. I will protect you as my wife for as long as you live.”

I held on to the handle of the door so that I did not pitch myself into his arms and wail like a bereaved child. “That was kind of you,” I managed to say. “I don’t need your protection, but it was kind of you to reassure him.”

“You have my protection whether you need it or not,” Daniel said. “I am your husband, and I do not forget it.”

He took up his cape from the stool before the fire and swung it around his shoulders. “I shall come tomorrow, and every day at noon,” he said. “And I shall find a good woman to sit with him so that you can rest.”

“I will care for him,” I fired up. “I don’t need any help.”

He paused in the doorway. “You do need help,” he said gently. “This is not something you can do well on your own. And you shall have help. I shall help you, whether you like it or not. And you will be glad of it when this is all over, even if you resist it now. I shall be kind to you, Hannah, whether you want me or not.”

I nodded; I could not trust myself to speak. Then he went out of the door into the rain and I went upstairs to my father and took up the Bible in Hebrew and read to him some more.

As Daniel had predicted, my father slipped away very quickly. True to his word, Daniel brought a night nurse so that my father was never alone, never without a candle burning in his room and the quiet murmur of the words he loved to hear. The woman, Marie, was a stocky French peasant girl from devout parents and she could recite all the psalms, one after another. At night my father would sleep, lulled by the rolling cadences of the Île-de-France. In the day I found a lad to mind the shop while I sat with him and read to him in Hebrew. Only in April did I find a new volume which had a small surviving snippet of the prayers for the dead. I saw his smile of acknowledgment. He raised his hand, I fell silent.

“Yes, it is time,” was all he said. His voice was a thread. “You will be well, my child?”

I put the book on the seat of my chair and knelt at his bedside. Effort-fully he put his hand on my head for a blessing. “Don’t worry about me,” I whispered. “I will be all right. I have the shop and the press, I can earn a living, and Daniel will always look after me.”

He nodded. Already he was drifting away, too far to give advice, too far to remonstrate. “I bless you, querida,” he said gently.

“Father!” My eyes were filled with tears. I dropped my head to his bed.

“Bless you,” he said again and lay quietly.

I levered myself back to my chair and blinked my eyes. Through the blur of tears I could hardly see the words. Then I started to read. “Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all of the house of Israel, speedily, yea soon; and say ye, Amen.”

In the night when the nurse knocked on my door I was dressed, seated on my bed, and waiting for her to call me. I went to his bedside and saw his face, smiling, illuminated and without fear. I knew he was thinking of my mother and if there was any truth in his faith, or even in the faith of the Christians, then he would be greeting her soon in heaven. I said quietly to the nurse, “You can go and fetch the doctor Daniel Carpenter,” and heard her patter down the stairs.

I sat beside his bed and took his hand in mine and felt the slow pulse flutter like the heart of a small bird under my fingers. Downstairs, the door quietly opened and shut and I heard two pairs of footsteps come in.

Daniel’s mother stood in the bedroom doorway. “I don’t intrude,” she said quietly. “But you won’t know how things should be done.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I have read the prayers.”

“That’s right,” she said. “You’ve done it right, and I can do the rest. You can watch, and learn, so you know how it is done. So that you can do it for me, or for another, when my time comes.”

Quietly she approached the bed. “How now, old friend?” she said. “I have come to bid you farewell.”

My father said nothing but he smiled at her. Gently she slid her arm under his shoulders and raised him up, turned him on his side so that he could face the wall, his back to the room. Then she sat by his side and recited all the prayers for the dying that she could remember.

“Good-bye, Father,” I said softly. “Good-bye, Father. Good-bye.”

Daniel cared for me as he had promised he would. As son-in-law, all my father’s goods became his by right; but he signed them over to me in the same day. He came to the house and helped me to clear the few possessions that my father had kept through our long travels, and he asked Marie to stay on for the next few months. She could sleep downstairs in the kitchen, and would keep me company, and keep me safe at nights. Mrs. Carpenter frowned her disapproval at my unfeminine independence; but she managed to hold her peace.

She made the preparations for the Requiem Mass and then the secret Jewish ceremony, done the same day, behind our closed door. When I thanked her she waved me away. “These are the ways of our People,” she said. “We have to remember them. We have to perform them. If we forget them, we forget ourselves. Your father was a great scholar among our People, he had books that had been all but forgotten and he had the courage to keep them safe. If it were not for men like him then we would not know the prayers that I said at his bedside. And now you know how it is done, and you can teach your children, and the way of our People can be handed down.”

“It must be forgotten,” I said. “In time.”

“No, why?” she said. “We remembered Zion by the rivers of Babylon, we remember Zion in the gates of Calais. Why should we ever forget?”

Daniel did not ask me if I would forgive him and if we could start again as man and wife. He did not ask me if I was longing for a touch, for a kiss, longing to feel alive like a young woman in springtime and not always like a girl fighting against the world. He did not ask me if I felt, since my father was dead, that I was terribly alone in the world, and that I would always be Hannah alone, neither of the People, nor a wife, and now, not even a daughter. He did not ask me these things, I did not volunteer them, and so we parted kindly on my doorstep, with a sense of sadness and regret, and I imagine he went home and called on the way at the house of the plump fair-haired mother of his son, and I went into my house and closed my door and sat in darkness for a long time.

The cold months were always hard for me, my Spanish blood was still too thin for the damp days of a northern coastal winter, and Calais was little better than London had been under driving rain and gray skies. Without my father I felt as if some of the chill of the sea and the skies had crept into the very blood of my veins, and into my eyes, since I wept unaccountably for no reason. I gave up dining properly, but ate like a printer’s lad with a hacked-off slice of bread in one hand and a cup of milk in the other. I did not observe the dietary restrictions as my father liked us to do, I did not light the candle for the Sabbath. I worked on the Sabbath, and I printed secular books and jest books and texts of plays and poems as if learning did not matter any more. I let my faith drift away with my hopes of happiness.

I could not sleep well at night but during the day I could hardly set type for yawning. Trade in the shop was slow; when the times were so uncertain no one cared for any books except prayer books. Many times I went down to the harbor and greeted travelers coming from London and asked them for news, thinking that perhaps I should go back to England and see if the queen would forgive me and welcome me back to her service.