You can imagine, I shuddered to read this blasphemy and he had written it down, all of it, before he described what then came to pass.
On a certain evening, as he was saying these very prayers to the Lord, in hatred and rage, brooding and repeating himself, and even demanding of the Lord why He had taken from Godwin not only my love but the love of his father as well, a young man appeared before him, and without preamble began to speak to him.
At first Godwin thought this young man was mad, or some sort of tall child, as he was very beautiful, as beautiful as angels painted on the walls, and also he spoke with a directness that was completely arresting.
In fact, for a moment Godwin considered that this might be a woman in male disguise, which was not so uncommon, apparently, as I might think, Godwin said, but he soon realized that this was no woman at all, but an angelic being in his midst.
And how did Godwin know? He knew on account of the fact that the creature knew Godwin’s prayers and spoke directly to him now of his deepest hurt and his deepest and most destructive intentions.
“All around you,” said the angel or creature or whatever it was, “you see corruption. You see how easy it is to advance in the Church, how simple to study words for the sake of words, and covet for the sake of coveting. You already have a mistress, and are thinking of taking another. You write letters to the lover you’ve forsworn with little regard for how this might affect her and her father, who loves her. You blame your fate on your love for Fluria and your disappointments, and you seek to bind her to you still, whether it is good or bad for her. Will you live an empty and bitter life, a selfish and profane life, because something precious was denied you? Will you waste every chance for honor and happiness given you in this world simply because you have been thwarted?”
In that instant, Godwin saw the folly of it. That he was constructing a life upon anger and hate. And amazed that this man would speak this way to him, he said, “What can I do?”
“Give yourself to God,” said the strange man. “Give him your whole heart and your whole soul and your whole life. Outsmart all of those others—your selfish companions who love your gold as much as you, and your angry father who has sent you here to be corrupt and unhappy. Outsmart the world that would make of you a common thing when you can yet be exceptional. Be a good priest, be a good bishop, and before you become either one, give away all you possess down to the last of your many gold rings, and become a humble friar.”
Godwin was even more amazed.
“Become a friar, and to be good will become much easier for you,” said the stranger. “Strive to be a saint. What greater thing could you achieve? And the choice is yours. No one can rob you of such a choice. Only you can throw it away and continue forever in your debauchery and your misery, crawling from your lover’s bed to write to pure and holy Fluria, so that these letters to her are the only good thing in your life.”
And then as quietly as he had come, the strange man went away, all but melting into the semidarkness of the little church.
He was there and then he was not there.
And Godwin was alone in the cold stone corner of the church staring at the distant candles.
He wrote to me that at that moment the light of the candles seemed to him to be the light of the dimming sun or the rising sun, a thing precious and eternal and a miracle wrought by God, a miracle meant for his eyes at that moment so that he would understand the magnitude of all that God had done in making him and in making the world around him.
“I will seek to be a saint,” he vowed then and there. “Dear Lord, I give You my life. I give You all that I am and all that I can be and all that I can do. I forswear every instrument of wickedness.”
That’s what he wrote. And you can see that I’ve read the letter so many times that I know it by memory.
The letter went on to tell me that that very day he had gone to the Friary of the Dominicans and asked to be taken among them.
They took him with open arms.
They were very pleased that he was educated, and knew the ancient Hebrew language, and they were even more pleased that he had a fortune in jewels and rich fabrics to give them to be sold for the poor.
In the manner of Francis, he stripped off all the luxuriant clothing he wore, gave them his gold walking stick as well, and his fine gold-studded boots. And he took from them a patched and worn black habit.
He even said he would leave behind his learning and pray on his knees for the rest of his life, if that is what they wanted. He would bathe lepers. He would work with the dying. He would do whatever the Prior told him to do.
The Prior laughed at this. “Godwin,” he said, “a preacher must be educated if he is to preach well, whether to the rich or to the poor. And we are the Order of Preachers, first and above all.
“Your education is to us a treasure. Too many want to study theology who have no knowledge of the arts and sciences, but you possess all this already, and we can send you now to the University of Paris, to study with our great teacher Albert, who is already there. Nothing would give us greater happiness than to see you there in our Paris friary and delving deep into the works of Aristotle, and the works of your fellow students, to sharpen your obvious eloquence in the finest spiritual light.”
That was not all that Godwin had to tell me.
He went on with a ruthless self-examination such as I’d never read from him before.
“You know perfectly well, my beloved Fluria,” he wrote, “this has been the most vicious vengeance upon my father that I could conceivably work, to have become a mendicant friar. In fact, my father at once wrote to my relations here to take me captive, and force women upon me until I had come to my senses and given up the fancy to be a beggar and a wayside preacher, dressed in rags.
“Be assured, my blessed one,” he wrote, “that nothing so simple has happened. I am on my way to Paris. My father has disowned me. I am as penniless as I might have been had you and I married. But I have taken to myself Holy Poverty, to use the words of Francis, who is esteemed by us as highly as our founder, Dominic, and I will serve only my Lord and King now as the Prior orders me to do.”
He went on to write, “I have asked of my superiors only two things: one, that I be allowed to keep my name Godwin, indeed to receive it anew as my new name, as the Lord would call us by a new name when we enter upon this life, and secondly, that I be allowed to write to you. I must confess, to obtain the last indulgence, I revealed some of your letters to my superiors and they marveled at the elevation and loveliness of your sentiments as much as I do myself. Permission for both has been granted, but I am Brother Godwin now to you, my blessed sister, and I love you as one of God’s tenderest and dearest creatures, and with only the purest thoughts.”
Well, I was astonished by this letter. And I soon learned that others had been astonished by Godwin as well. Happily, he wrote to me, his cousins had given him up as hopeless, seeing in him a saint or an imbecile, neither of which any of them thought to be useful, and they had reported to his father that no blandishment on earth could make Godwin leave the life of the Friars Minor to which he’d given himself.
I received a constant flow of letters from Godwin, as I had before. These became the chronicle of his spiritual life. And in his newfound faith, he had more in common with my people than ever before. The pleasure-loving youth who had so enchanted me was now a serious scholar as my father was a serious scholar, and something immense and wholly indescribable now made the two men in my mind very much alike.
Godwin wrote to me of the many lectures he attended, but also much about his life in prayer—how he had come to imitate the ways of St. Dominic, the founder of the Black Friars, and how he had come to experience what he felt was the love of God in a wholly wondrous way. All judgment dropped from Godwin’s letters. The young man who had gone to Rome so long ago had had only harsh words for himself as well as everyone around him. Now this Godwin, who was still my Godwin, wrote to me of the wonders he beheld
everywhere he looked.
But, I ask you, how could I tell this Godwin, this wondrous and saintly person who had blossomed from the young shoot I had earlier loved, that he had two children living in England, both being brought up to be exemplary Jewish girls?
What good would such a confession have done? And how might his zeal have affected him, loving as he was, had he known that he had daughters living in the Jewry of Oxford, far from any exposure to the Christian faith?
Now, I have told you that my father did not forbid these letters. He had thought in the early years that they would not go on. But as they did go on, I made them known to him for more reasons than one.
My father is a scholar, as I’ve told you, and he not only studied the Talmud commentary by the great Rashi, but had translated much of it into French to aid those students who wanted to know it, but did not know the Hebrew in which it was written. As he became blind, he dictated more of his work to me, and it was his desire to translate much of the great Jewish scholar Maimonides into Latin if not French.
It came as no surprise to me that Godwin began to write to me on these very subjects, of how the great teacher Thomas of his order had read some of Maimonides in Latin, and how he, Godwin, wanted to study this work. Godwin knew Hebrew. He had been my father’s best pupil.
So as the years passed, I revealed Godwin’s letters to my father, and frequently commentary of my father on Maimonides, and even on Christian theology, made its way into the letters I wrote to Godwin.
My father himself would never dictate an actual letter to Godwin, but I think he came to know better and to love better the man whom he believed had once betrayed him and his hospitality and so a form of forgiveness was granted there. It was granted to me at least. And every day, after I was finished listening to my father’s lectures to his students, or copying out his meditations for him, or aiding his students to do it, I would retire to my room and write to Godwin, telling him all about life in Oxford, and discussing all these many things.
Naturally in time, Godwin put the question to me: why had I not married? I gave him vague answers, that the care of my father consumed all my time, and sometimes I said simply that I had not met the man who was meant to be my husband.
All this while, Lea and Rosa were growing into beautiful little girls. But you must give me a moment here because if I don’t weep for both my daughters I simply cannot go on.
At this point, she did begin to cry, and I knew there was nothing I could do to comfort her. She was a married woman, and a pious Jewish woman, and I couldn’t dare put my arms around her. It was not expected. In fact, it was likely forbidden for me to take such a liberty.
But when she looked up and saw the tears in my eyes, too, tears I couldn’t quite explain because they had as much to do with all she’d told me about Godwin, as about herself, she was comforted by that, and seemed to be comforted by my silence as well, and she went on.
CHAPTER TEN
Fluria Continues Her Story
BROTHER TOBY, IF YOU EVER MEET MY GODWIN, HE will love you. If Godwin is not a saint, perhaps there are no saints. And who is the Almighty, Blessed Be He, that he would send me a man so like Godwin just now, and so like Meir, for you are that as well.
Now, I was saying to you that the girls were flowering, and each year grew more lovely, and more devoted to their grandfather, and more a joy to him in his blindness than possibly children are to many a man who can see.
But let me make mention here of Godwin’s father, only to say that the man died despising Godwin for his decision to become a Dominican friar, and leaving all his fortune, of course, to his eldest son, Nigel. On his deathbed, the old man exacted a promise from Nigel that he would never set eyes on his brother, Godwin, and Nigel, who was a worldly and clever man, gave in to this with a shrug.
Or so Godwin told me in his letters, because Nigel immediately left the grave of their father in the church and went to France to see the brother he both missed and loved. Ah, when I think of his letters, they were like cool drinking water to me, all of those years, even though I couldn’t share with him the joy I had in Lea and Rosa. Even though I kept that secret fastened in my heart.
I became a woman of three great pleasures, a woman who listened to three great songs. The first song was the daily teaching of my beautiful daughters. The second song was my reading and writing for my beloved father who depended upon me often for this, though he had students aplenty to read to him, and the third song was the letters of Godwin, and these three songs became a small choir that soothed and educated and improved my soul.
Don’t think me evil that I kept the secret of the children from their father. Remember what was at stake. For even with Nigel and Godwin reconciled and writing regularly to each other, I couldn’t envisage anything coming of my revelation except disaster all around.
Let me tell you more of Godwin. He told me all about his classes and his disputations. He would not be able to teach theology until he was thirty-five, but he was preaching regularly to large crowds in Paris and had quite a following. He was happier than he had ever been in his life, and he said over and over again, he wanted me to be happy, and asked why I had not married.
He said the winters were cold in Paris, just as they were in England, and the friary was cold. But he’d never known such joy, when he had had pockets of money to buy all the firewood he would want, or all the food. All he wanted in the world was to know how it went with me, and had I too found happiness.
When he wrote of this, the untold truth pressed in on me painfully, because I was so happy with our two daughters at my knee.
Gradually, I realized that I wanted Godwin to know. I wanted him to know that these two fine flowers of our love had bloomed safely and gave forth their beauty now in innocence and with protection.
And what made the secret all the more painful was this, that Godwin continued so ardently with his Hebrew studies, that he often disputed with the learned Jews in Paris, and would go to their houses to study with them and talk with them, just as he had long ago done when he went back and forth between London and Oxford. Godwin was as much now as ever a lover of our people. Of course he wanted to convert those with whom he disputed, but he had a great love for their keen minds, and above all for the devout lives that they lived, which he said often taught him more about love than the conduct of some of the theology students at the university.
Many a time I wanted to confess the whole state of affairs, but these considerations stopped me, as I’ve told you. One, that Godwin would be deeply unhappy if he knew that I had been left with child. And secondly, that he might, as any Gentile father might, be alarmed that two daughters born to him were being brought up as Jews, not so much because he would judge me for what I had done, or fear for their souls, but because he knew the persecutions and violence to which our people are often subjected.
Two years ago, he knew what had happened in the matter of Little St. Hugh of Lincoln. And we had written to each other candidly about our fears for the Jewry of London at that time. When we are accused in one place, the violence can break out in another. The hatred of us and the lies about us can spread like a plague.
But such horrors as that pressured me to keep the secret. For what if Godwin knew he had daughters in danger of riot and murder? What would he do?
What finally caused me to put the whole question before him was Meir.
Meir had come into our house just as Godwin had years ago, to study with my father. As I’ve indicated, my father’s blindness did not stop the flow of students. The Torah is written on his heart, as we say it, and after all his years of commentary on the Talmud he knows it by heart as well. And all of Rashi’s commentary on Talmud, that he knows too.
The Masters of the Oxford synagogues came to our house regularly to consult with my father. People even brought him their disputes. And Christian friends he had aplenty who sought his advice on simple matters, and now and then, when they needed money, with the laws now against our lendin
g, they came for him to find some way to borrow without the interest being recorded or known. But I don’t want to talk of those things. I have never managed my own property.
And very soon after Meir began to come to my father, he managed my affairs for me, and so I didn’t have to think of material things.
You see me here dressed richly and in this white wimple and veil and you see nothing to mar the image of a rich woman except this taffeta badge affixed to my breast which brands me as a Jewess, but believe me when I say I seldom think of material things.
You know why we are moneylenders for the King and for those of his realm. You know all of this. And you know probably that since the King outlawed our money lending at interest, ways have been found around it, and we still hold in the name of the King a great deal of parchment on many a debt.
Well, my life being devoted to my father and my girls, I didn’t consider that Meir might ask for my hand, though I couldn’t help but notice what any woman would, and I’m sure even you have noted, that Meir is a fine-looking man of considerable gentleness and keen mind.
When he very respectfully asked for my hand, he put it to my father in the most generous terms—how he hoped, not to deprive him of me and my love, but rather to invite all of us to move with him to the house he’d only just inherited in Norwich. He had many connections there, and relations, and was a friend to the richest of the Jews in Norwich of whom there are many, as I think you know simply from the sight of the many stone houses that stand out so remarkably. You know why we build our houses of stone. I don’t have to tell you.
Now my father had almost no sight left to him. He could tell when the sun had risen and he knew when it was night, but as for me and my daughters he knew us by the touch of his gentle hands, and if there was anything that he loved almost as much as he loved us, it was instructing Meir, and guiding Meir’s reading. For Meir is not only a student of Torah and Talmud, and of Astrology and Medicine, and all those other subjects which have interested my father in passing, but Meir is a poet, and he has a poet’s view of things, and he sees beauty everywhere that he looks.