Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

But his father would not equip him for that, and arranged to send him to the strictest and most ambitious of his clerical relations in the Holy City and told him to succeed in Holy Orders or be disowned.

Godwin and I met one last time, and Godwin told me then that we must never see each other again. He didn't give two farthings for a great life in the church. He said his uncle in Rome, the Cardinal, had two mistresses. His other cousins he also regarded as blatant hypocrites, with appropriate contempt. "There are wicked and licentious priests aplenty in Rome," he said, "and bad bishops and I'll become another one. And with any luck I will someday join the Crusaders, and will in the end have all. But I won't have you. I won't have my beloved Fluria."

As for me, I had come to realize that I could not leave my father, and I was filled with misery. My love for Godwin did not seem to be something I could exist without.

The more we vowed we could not have each other, the more incensed we became. And I think that night we were in the nearest danger of running off together, but we did not.

Godwin came to a plan.

We would write to each other. Yes, this was disobedience on my part to my father, no doubt of it, and certainly disobedience for Godwin, but we saw our letters as a means by which we might obey our parents with greater strength. Our letters, unbeknownst to our elders, would help us to accept their demands.

"If I thought we could not have that," Godwin said, "the outpourings of our hearts in letters, I would not have the courage to leave here now."

Godwin went to Rome. His father had made something of a peace with him, as he couldn't bear to be angry with him. And so Godwin left one day quite early, without any further farewell.

Now my father, fine scholar that he was, and is, was nearly blind, which might account for how well educated I am, though I think I would be, even if he were not.

My point is that it was simple for me to keep our letters secret, but in truth, I thought Godwin would quickly forget me altogether, and be swept up into the licentious atmosphere into which he would surely be plunged.

In the meantime, my father surprised me. He told me that he knew Godwin would write to me, and he said, "I won't forbid you these letters, but I don't think there will be very many of them and you only mortgage your heart."

Both of us were completely wrong. Godwin wrote letters from every town along his journey. Sometimes twice a day, the letters would arrive, by messengers both Gentile and Jewish, and I kept to my room whenever I could and poured out my heart with ink. In fact, it seemed we grew in our love through these letters and became two new beings, deeply bound to each other, and nothing, absolutely nothing, could drive us apart.

No matter. I soon had a greater worry than I'd ever anticipated. Within two months, the measure of my love for Godwin was perfectly plain to me and I had to tell my father. I was with child.

Another man might have abandoned me or worse. But my father has always doted on me. I alone survived of all his children. And I think there was a frank desire in him to have a grandson though he never spoke the words. After all, what did it matter to him that the father was Gentile if the mother was Jewish? And my father hit upon a plan.

He packed up our household and off we went to a small city in the Rhineland where there were scholars who knew of my father, but no kindred we could call our own.

There an elderly rabbi, who had much admired my father's writing about the great Jewish teacher Rashi, agreed to marry me and to give out that the child born to me was his. He did this really from great generosity. He said, "I have seen so much suffering in this world. I will be father to this child, if you want it, and never claim a husband's privileges as I am far too old for that."

There I bore not one child by Godwin, but twins, two beautiful girls, both of exactly the same stamp, so alike that even I could not always tell one from the other, but had to tie a blue ribbon on the ankle of Rosa so that I could know her from Lea.

Now I know you would interrupt me if you could, and I know what you are thinking, but let me go on.

The old rabbi died before the children were a year old. As for my father, he loved these two baby girls, and he thanked Heaven that he still had some sight left to see their beautiful faces before he became completely blind.

Only as we returned to Oxford did he confess to me that he had hoped to place the babies with an aged matron in the Rhineland and had had to disappoint her because of his love for me and for the baby girls.

Now all the while I had been in the Rhineland, I had written to Godwin, but I had told him not one word about these baby girls. Indeed, I had given him vague reasons for the trip--that it had to do with the acquisition of books which were now hard to come by in France and England, and that my father was dictating quite a lot to me, and needed these books for the treatises that occupied his every thought.

The treatises, his every thought, and the books--all that was simple and true.

We settled into our old house in the Jewry of Oxford in the parish of St. Aldate, and my father commenced taking pupils again.

Since the secret of my love for Godwin had been crucial to all parties, no one knew of it, and they believed my elderly husband to have died abroad.

Now while I was traveling I hadn't received Godwin's letters, so there were many of them waiting for me when I came home. I set about opening them and reading them when the nurses had the children, and I argued with myself frantically as to whether I should tell Godwin about his daughters or not.

Was I to tell a Christian man that he had two daughters who would be brought up as Jewesses? What might his response have been? Of course he could have bastards aplenty in the Rome he described to me and among his worldly companions for whom he had nothing but undisguised contempt.

In truth, I didn't want to cause him misery, and I did not want to confess to him the sufferings I had endured myself. Our letters were filled with poetry, and the depths of our thoughts, undetached perhaps from realities, and I wanted to keep things this way because, in truth, this way was more real to me than day-to-day life itself. Even the miracle of these baby girls did not diminish my belief in the world we sustained in our letters. Nothing could.

But just as I weighed my decision to keep quiet with the greatest scrupulosity, there came a very surprising letter from Godwin, which I want to relate to you from memory as best I can. I have the letter here, in fact, but securely hidden among my things, and Meir has never seen it, and I cannot bear to take it out and read it so let me give you the substance of it in my own words.

I think my own words now are Godwin's words, anyway. So let me explain.