‘We can make a home here,’ he said earnestly. ‘You and I can be married and have children who will be English children. They will know nothing but this life, we need not even tell them of your mother, of her faith. Nor of our own.’

‘Oh, you’ll tell them,’ I predicted. ‘You say you won’t now, but once we have a child you won’t be able to resist it. And you’ll find ways to light the candle on Friday night and not to work on the Sabbath. You’ll be a doctor then, you will circumcise the boys in secret and teach them the prayers. You’ll have me teach the girls to make unleavened bread and to keep the milk from the meat and to drain the blood from the beef. The moment you have children of your own you will want to teach them. And so it goes on, like some sickness that we pass on, one to another.’

‘It’s no sickness,’ he whispered passionately. Even in the midst of our quarrel, nothing would make us raise our voices. We were always aware of the shadows in the garden, always alert to the possibility that someone might be listening. ‘It is an insult to call it a sickness. It is our gift, we are chosen to keep faith.’

I would have argued for the sake of contradicting him, but it went against the deeper grain of my love for my mother and her faith. ‘Yes,’ I said, surrendering to the truth. ‘It is not a sickness, but it kills us just as if it were. My grandmother and my aunt died of it, my mother too. And this is what you propose to me. A lifetime of fear, not Chosen so much as cursed.’

‘If you don’t want to marry me, then you can marry a Christian and pretend that you know nothing more,’ he pointed out. ‘None of us would betray you. I would let you go. You can deny the faith that your mother and your grandmother died for. Just say the word and I shall tell your father that I wish to be released.’

I hesitated. For all that I had bragged of my courage, I did not dare to tell my father that I would overthrow his plans. I did not dare to tell the old women who had arranged all of this, thinking only of my safety and Daniel’s future, that I wanted none of it. I wanted to be free; I did not want to be cast out.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, a girl’s plea. ‘I’m not ready to say . . . I don’t know yet.’

‘Then be guided by those who do,’ he said flatly. He saw me bridle at that. ‘Look, you can’t fight everyone,’ he advised me. ‘You have to choose where you belong and rest there.’

‘It’s too great a cost for me,’ I whispered. ‘For you it is a good life, the home is made around you, the children come, you sit at the head of the table and lead the prayers. For me it is to lose everything I might be and everything I might do, and become nothing but your helpmeet and your servant.’