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of passengers—people belonging to classes and representing occupations whose existence I had never previously suspected. England, I understood at once, was as unlike Portugal as China or India. It was not merely different, but deeply alien. Servants upbraided their masters. Women dressed down their husbands in public. Customers were at the mercy of the shopkeepers from whom they wished to buy. The journey to England from Lisbon was less like crossing an ocean and more like venturing into the land of fairies.
    Before I had ever set eyes on it, I supposed London to be a city like Lisbon, but when it came into view, the size and the filth and the congestion confounded my imagination. It was spring, but still cold, and the air was thick with black smoke belched out from countless chimneys. Everything I touched was coated with a brown and oily scum. Two or three breaths of London air made my lungs ache. From a distance I saw both its massive buildings and the sprawl of lesser structures made of stone and brick and decaying wood. From the coach’s window, I observed not only beggars but whores too, who plied their trade openly and without shame. There were also other kinds of women upon the street—noblewomen and fashionable ladies without veils to cover their faces and in gowns that exposed no small part of their bosoms. There were merchants and peddlers and gentlemen and the poor. I saw no priests, no monks, and no nuns. The coach paused in the streets for the passage of drunks and defiant laborers and pigs and cows and sheep herded by their scowling minders, but never for a traveling relic or holy procession.
    Once we reached the center of the city, Mr. Hastings took a portion of my remaining funds and hired another coach, giving the driver a particular destination. During this last part of the voyage, Mr. Hastings wrung his hands as he looked out the window. “I’m almost free of ye,” he said. “I hope you’ll report I treated you kind.”
    I nodded. I did not like to speak anymore—not with these strangepeople in this strange country. I hated the way words felt in my throat, dry and rough as though moving against a tender grain. I understood Hastings wanted some assurance I would not complain about him, and I was willing to give it. I supposed I might have been treated better, but I did not much care, and I saw no reason to make trouble upon first arriving in a foreign land whose laws were a mystery and whose customs were a riddle.
    At last we arrived at a street full of people who looked, for the most part, impoverished. We left the coach and walked past innumerable peddlers, men and women selling food and clothes and trinkets, all shouting their wares at once. There were odd-looking men with beards and long coats. I heard English and a strange sort of Portuguese and a language that sounded like German. The air smelled of bread and cabbage and fish. Brisk business was conducted everywhere.
    Suspecting the answer, I spoke my first unsolicited words to Mr. Hastings. “What are these men?”
    Hastings wrinkled his nose. “Jews,” he said, keeping his voice low as if this were a secret.
    But it was not a secret. I could see that much. Jews. Actual Jews. Not New Christians, but my ancestral people, undisguised and undiluted, out in the street and speaking their own languages. There were men with long beards, who held books written in a strange script I knew must be Hebrew, though I had never before seen the letters. I had heard that Jews lived openly in England, but knowing and seeing were two different things.
    Hastings, oblivious to my wonder, asked for directions and then led us to a large house off the main street. Here things were less chaotic and the poverty less oppressive. The officer knocked and a serving woman of middle years answered the door. Hastings briefly explained his business, and we were ushered inside, directed to a sitting room, and told we would have to wait. The woman said that the master of the