Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

Her thick curling black hair was loose over her shoulders, and down her back.

She was a woman already at fourteen, quite obviously, and she had a woman's shape and bearing.

That all the gifts of her parents were mingled in her was plain. "You've come to tell me that Lea is dead, haven't you?" she said immediately to her father, after he'd kissed her on both cheeks and on the top of her head.

He began to weep. They sat down opposite each other in front of the fire.

She held both his hands in hers, and nodded more than once as though talking to herself about it. And then she spoke up again.

"If I told you that Lea has come to me in a dream, I would be lying to you. But when I woke this morning, I knew not only for certain that she was dead, but that my mother needed me. Now you come with this friar and I know you wouldn't be here at this hour if something wasn't required of me at once."

Godwin at once brought up a stool for me and asked me to outline the plan.

As briefly as possible I told her what had happened, and she began to gasp when she realized the danger to her mother, and to all the Jews of this town of Norwich where she had never been.

She told me quickly that she'd been in London when many Jews from Lincoln had been tried and executed for the murder of Little St. Hugh, just such a supposed crime.

"But do you think you can play the part of your sister?"

"I long to do it!" she said. "I long to stand up to these people who dare to say my mother killed her daughter. I long to upbraid them for these wild accusations. I can do it. I can insist that I am Lea, for in my heart I am Lea as much as I am Rosa, and Rosa as much as Lea. And it will be no lie to say that I'm eager to leave Norwich and return to Rosa, my very self, in Paris at once."

"You mustn't overplay it," said Godwin. "Remember, no matter what your anger or your disgust with these accusers, you must talk softly as Lea talked softly, and you must insist softly as Lea would have done."

She nodded. "My anger and my determination are for you and Br. Toby," she said. "Have confidence in me that I will know what to say."

"You realize if this goes wrong, you will be in danger," said Godwin, "just as we are. What sort of father is it that would let his own daughter go so near to a blazing fire?"

"A father who knows that a daughter must do her duty by her mother," she answered at once. "Has she not already lost my sister? Has she not lost the love of her father? I have no hesitation, and I think the frank admission that we are twins is a great advantage and without it the imposture would surely be undone."

She left us then, telling us she would prepare for the journey.

Godwin and I went off to arrange for a wagon to take us to Dieppe, from which we'd sail to England over the treacherous Channel once more, and this time in a hired boat.

As we left Paris, the sun was just rising, and I was filled with misgivings, perhaps because Rosa was so angry and so confident, and Godwin so seemingly innocent, even in the way he lavished upon every servant his brother's money as we set out.

Nothing material meant anything to Godwin. He burned with zeal to endure anything that nature or the Lord or circumstance forced upon him. And something in me thought that a healthy desire to survive what lay before us might have served him a little better than the guileless manner in which he moved headlong to what fate had in store.

He was absolutely committed to the deception. But it was unnatural to him in the extreme.

He had been himself in all his debaucheries, he told me when his daughter was sleeping apart from us, and he had in his conversion and commitment to God been nothing but himself.

"I don't know how to dissemble," he said, "and I'm afraid I'll fail at it." But I thought, more than once, that he wasn't afraid enough. It was almost as if he had become, in his inveterate goodness, a little bit of a simpleton as is bound to happen, I think, if and when one gives oneself absolutely to God. Again and again, he said that he trusted God would make everything right.

It is impossible to relate here all the other things we spoke of during that long ride to the coast; or how we talked together constantly even as the boat tossed on the rough waters of the Channel, and as our newly hired cart made its way to Norwich over the muddy frozen roads from London.

The most important thing for me to note is that I came to know both Rosa and Godwin better than I had known Fluria, and tempted though I was to ply Godwin with questions about Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus (who was already being called by this great title), we talked more about Godwin's life among the Dominicans, his delight in his brilliant students, and how committed he was to his Hebrew study of Maimonides and Rashi.

"I am no great scholar when it comes to writing," he said, "except perhaps in my informal letters to Fluria, but I hope that what I am and what I do will survive in the minds of my students."

As for Rosa, she had guiltily enjoyed her life among the Gentiles, and no small part of it had been her extreme pleasure at seeing the Christmas pageants before the cathedral, until she had felt that Lea, so many miles from her, was suffering grievous pain.

"I keep this ever before my mind," she said to me once while Godwin slept in the cart beside us, "that I did not give up my ancestral faith out of fear or because some wicked person tormented me into it, but because of my father, and because of the zeal I saw in him. Surely he worships the same Lord of the Universe that I worship. And how could a faith be wrong, which has brought such simplicity and happiness to him? I think his eyes and his manner did more to convert me than anything that was said to me. And I find him always a shining example of what I mean to be. As for the past, it weighs on me. I can't bear to think of it, and now that my mother has lost Lea, I can only pray with all my heart that, young as she is, she'll be the mother of many children by Meir, and for this, their life together, I make this journey, giving in perhaps too easily to what has to be done."

She seemed aware of a thousand difficulties of which I hadn't even thought.

First and foremost, where would we stay when we reached Norwich? Would we go at once to the castle, and how would she play the part of Lea before the Sherriff, not knowing whether Lea ever knew the man face-to-face?

Indeed, how could we even approach the Jewry and seek shelter with the Magister of the synagogue, for with one thousand Jews in Norwich, there was bound to be more than one synagogue, and should Lea not have known a Magister by likeness and by name?

I sank into silent prayer when I thought of these things.Malchiah, you have to guide us! I insisted. But the danger of presumption struck me as very real.