Bristol House by Beverly Swerling

did the action and all who encouraged him therein.”
    Giacomo the Lombard, known also as the Jew of Holborn
    From the Waiting Place
    I do not know why I am commanded to tell my story, nor who it is who listens. But I am grateful to be in this place that is neither earth nor Gehenna, where the eternal fire burns. I have, I know, much for which to atone, and I am promised that to tell what happened between me and my daughter and he who was known in the Charterhouse as Dom Justin will help erase their stain. So be it.
    I am not required to tell everything: not how I came to leave Lombardy and smuggle myself into London to seek greater fortune, nor of the sweet young maiden I married there, a Lombard who was secretly a Jew like myself and a number of others, nor of her death hours after she gave birth to our only child, a daughter. What matters to the story I must tell is that when he was still at the beginning of his rise to the great power he was to wield, the man known as Thomas Cromwell learned my secret. Even with such vision as is granted me here, I do not know if it was his lackey, the draftsman Richard Scranton, who somehow exposed me, though I suspected that to be the case. Such details are of no importance now. It is enough to say that Thomas Cromwell commanded me to leave the town and live in the rural fastness of Holborn, there to seek on his behalf the rumored treasures of the disgraced Templars.
    From the very moment I was assigned the task, I knew that if it was the will of Boré Olam that I should discover such Jewish treasures, I would never give them into the hands of any gentile. When, after a year in the Holborn countryside, I did indeed stumble on such treasures as had come from ancient Jerusalem, defiance was already rooted in my heart.
    In this place where neither past nor present has meaning, it all seems of such little import . . . But I am given to understand I must begin my story at a specific point in earthly time, the night when the monk came to my cottage beside the river Fleet, and contrary to the many previous occasions, I was not there waiting for him.
    Great peril had been my constant companion during the Holborn years, but I did not know how much it increased when I chose that particular evening to go to the pit. I could not anticipate that Master Cromwell would on that occasion not send his usual vassal but instead would come himself to meet his treacherous Carthusian. Even if I’d known, I might have done nothing different.
    I found the pit irresistible. Since I discovered the place, it had infected my mind and churned in my belly and demanded my speedy return. So that evening I left Rebecca to receive the stinking lackey I expected Cromwell to send, a small, dark man with the mark of the pox on his face and always a stench of dead rat about him. He was an unwelcome guest, but Rebecca and I were accustomed to him. The strange trysts between him and the Carthusian had gone on for nearly four years, since my daughter was eleven and just beginning to show her womanliness and the uncommon beauty that was so much like her mother’s. Rebecca looked unhappy at the prospect of the meeting—I had seen how the poxed man eyed her and so, no doubt, had she—but she saw that I had made up my mind and did not argue.
    That same day I had been testing different compounds to make new things appear old—a necessary part of the great deception I practiced on Thomas Cromwell. When the latest such experiment proved unsatisfactory I threw the mixture into the river. The result was first a bright blue flame, then a ghostly white glow that lingered above the water for many hours. I had long been a goldsmith, but I had never seen such a thing before. It entered my mind that perhaps the days the ancient rabbis promised were near, the end times when Boré Olam would send the Chosen One to judge the world and bring peace and justice to all who were worthy and cast the rest into Gehenna.
    I had sins enough to feel