Summary

In March 2001, Helen surveys her apartment and thinks to herself, “how much longer?” (336). “She’d live here in this flat, managing on her own, until the end”; against her physician’s advice, she refuses to “move into one of those dreadful faculties” (336). Helen is determined not to “dwell on the thought” of her eventual death due to Parkinson’s disease (336).

Helen finds an article in Early Modern Quarterly published under Wilton titled Sabbatean Florence and a Female Scribe: A Startling Find Beneath a London Stair (337). Its publication “on short notice was practically unheard of … the editor must have held space for something by Wilton, at Jonathan Martin’s request” (337). The article acknowledges that while an “absence of prior information about such a significant Sabbatean upheaval in Florence may at first appear puzzling … that absence can be explained by several factors” (338). Wilton discusses Alvaro’s...