1632(17)

Finally—it took but seconds, though it seemed an eternity—she had the sash undone. She brushed the curtain aside and thrust her head through the window.
For a moment, she did not understand what her eyes were seeing. Her mind was still fixed on her father's plight. His heart . . . !
Then, she saw. She gasped and drew back. A new terror came, crashing onto the old. Some of that fear was caused by the sight of bodies scattered everywhere. Or so it seemed to her, in that first glimpse. Rebecca had never witnessed scenes of violence before. Nothing beyond scuffling ruffians, at least, and the authorities in Amsterdam tolerated little even of that. She had certainly never—
Blood everywhere! And that's—that's a head lying over there. And that woman—what? Has she been—? Oh, God!
But so much only caused fear. The terror—the hot spike sent down her spine—was caused by the sight of the man standing right before her. Advancing toward her. Not thirty feet away, now.
Rebecca watched the man come, paralyzed. Like a mouse watching a serpent.
An hidalgo! Here? God save us!
"What is it, child?" demanded her father. Hissing: "What is happening?" She sensed him lurching forward on his seat behind her.
She was torn between fear of the hidalgo and fear for her father. Then—was there any end?—came yet another terror. She heard the leader of her father's hired Landsknecht shout again.
"Let's go!" she heard him cry. "Come on! We're not getting paid enough for this!"
Rebecca heard pounding hooves set into motion. An instant later she felt the carriage rock and realized that the driver had leapt off also. She could hear him thrusting through the bushes alongside the road, racing off.
They're deserting us!
She turned back into the carriage, staring wide-eyed at her father. Her lips began to open. But the gentle and wise man upon whom she had relied all her life would be no help to her now. Balthazar Abrabanel was still alive. But his eyes were shut, his jaws tight with agony. Both hands were now pressed to his chest. He was slipping off the cushions onto the floor of the carriage. A faint groan came.
The child's terror overrode the others. Rebecca was on her knees in an instant, clutching her father. Desperately trying to bring comfort and aid, not knowing how she could do either. She stared at the heavy chests resting on the seat bench opposite her. Those contained her father's books. His translation of Galen's medical writings was in one of those chests. But it was hopeless. There were thirty-seven volumes of Galen. All of them written in Arabic, which Rebecca could only read poorly.
She heard a voice. Startled, she turned her head.
The hidalgo was standing at the window of the carriage, pushing his head through the window. The man was so tall that he had to stoop a bit to do so.
Again, the voice. The words registered, barely. She thought she understood them, almost. But it was not possible. He couldn't be speaking—
The hidalgo spoke the same words. This time, they registered fully. Most of them, anyway. His accent was very strange, unlike any she had ever heard in that language.
English? He speaks English? No hidalgo speaks English. It is beneath their contempt. A tongue for pirates and traders.
She stared at him, now as confused as she was frightened. The man was every inch the hidalgo. Tall, strong, erect, handsome. He exuded the certainty and self-confidence which only a Spanish nobleman possessed. Even his clothing, a ruffled white shirt—silk, she was sure of it—over dark trousers, was not dissimilar. True, she thought there had been something odd about his boots, but—
He smiled very widely. Who else has such perfect teeth?
And then, he spoke again. The same words, repeated for the fourth time. "Please, ma'am, do you need help?"  Rebecca Abrabanel would always wonder, in the years to come, why she spoke the truth then. Spoke it—babbled it. She would spend hours remembering that moment, sitting quietly by herself. Wondering.
Some of it, she would decide, was ancient heartbreak. For all the savagery of the Holy Inquisition and the pitilessness with which the hidalgos enforced the expulsion, Spain and Portugal's Sephardim would never be able to forget Iberia, the sun-drenched land they had come to love, spending centuries helping to build, convinced that Jews had finally found a place of welcome and refuge. Until Christian royalty and nobility decreed otherwise, and they were driven out to wander again. Yet they retained the language, and recited the poetry, and cherished the culture for their own. Ashkenazim could huddle in their ghettos in central and eastern Europe, shutting the outside world from their souls. But not the Sephardim. Almost a century and a half had gone by since their expulsion from the land they called Sepharad, but it was still the highest praise, amongst them, to call a man hidalgo.