Livia tried to smile. “No, no, I can take extra instruction next week, and we can marry before Lent. In early February.”

James hesitated.

“There is no reason for delay,” Livia told him.

“Certainly,” he agreed. He took her hand and kissed it and glanced nervously at his aunt. “February, in St. Clement Danes.”

“And do you have no family in England at all?” Lady Eliot pursued. “No one to stand as your godparent when you are baptized? No one to give you away when you are married? You are as solitary as… as an orphan?”

“I have no one.” Livia blinked on a tear, daring Lady Eliot to challenge her any further. “I know nobody in England but my late husband’s family, women wharfingers with a little warehouse. I make no pretense! I married beneath myself when I engaged with him and his family. But with my dear Sir James I will return to people of my own sort—nobility.”

“Oh, will you?” Lady Eliot said, with one eye on Sir James’s face. He was looking into the fire, downcast. He did not look like a joyful bridegroom only six weeks away from his wedding.

DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

Felipe Russo and Sarah took a gondola from the Custom House; Sarah sat wrapped in her cape, in the middle seat, while Felipe took the seat in the prow.

“A song?” the gondolier asked agreeably. “A song for young lovers?”

“No,” Sarah said irritably, and hardly saw the beautiful houses, the white marble church, the pretty canals as they passed by.

“Are we not lovers now?” Felipe asked her teasingly.

Absently, she shook her head. “Do you have a chart of the lagoon?”

“To see Roberto’s island?” he asked with ready sympathy. “Yes, I will get one out for you. But you know…”

“I know I cannot send a ship for him,” she said.

The gondolier spun the gondola to arrow them into the water gate of the Russo house, mooring beside the Russo gondola so they had to disembark on the warehouse side. Sarah shrank from the lower storehouse door, knowing what was behind it, and they walked around the quay and climbed the wide marble steps.

Sarah hesitated in the hall at the top warehouse door. “Will you show me what was hers, from her palace, just the things she truly owns?”

“That’s easy,” Felipe said. “Come on up to the dining room.”

He led the way to the room where the cold watery light was playing on the painted ceiling. Sarah looked at the walls lined with the beautiful silent statues.

“Not them,” he said, closing the door behind him.

She glanced at the ornate chandelier.

“Not that. Nothing. Nothing is left. As soon as she married the old Conte and entered the Palazzo Fiori she started smuggling pieces out for my workmen to copy. She was selling pieces that we had forged back to her husband. If he had a column and we could find something to put on top of it, we would blend them and polish them and sell them to him as a new thing. Once he took to his bed we were free to make copies of his collection, borrowing an original, making a mold from it, putting the copy back, and selling the original.”

“Forgery,” Sarah said flatly. “And theft.”

Gently he cupped his hand on the cold white calf of a statue of a nymph pouring water. Her sightless eyes looked out over the canal, the carved water fell, eternally, from the mouth of the vase. She smiled a little, as she had smiled for centuries—or perhaps for only a week. “To me there is a truth to beauty. I don’t really care who made it, or how, or when. If people are so foolish as to pay more for something that is old and was despised until I found it—then they may.”

“But not if they are paying Livia for your work,” Sarah said astutely.

He bowed with a smile. “Not then,” he agreed pleasantly. “Which is why I am going to come to England with the antiquities. I shall see for myself where she shows them and how much she is earning for them. I shall see this Sir James for myself.”

“Very well,” Sarah agreed.

“And in return for my help today and in the future, you will not denounce me: not for grave robbing, nor exporting without a license, nor covering up a murder, nor wrongful arrest, nor theft and fraud—” He broke off. “That’s all, isn’t it?” he asked.

“That’s all I know of,” Sarah said cautiously. “But that’s not to say that’s all you’ve done.”

He gave a crack of a laugh. “Ah, Miss Jolie—you are well to be cautious, but truly that is all that concerns you and me. So we shall be partners? Now that you know the truth of me? You are the only woman that has ever known the truth of me, which is—I admit—very bad indeed, but I did not kill the Milord my master, I did not hate Roberto, I did not denounce him myself, and I will not drown you in the water gate.”

“You want to be partners with me?” she asked cautiously.

He took her hand to his lips. “Partners, and perhaps we will be lovers, since you tell the good Captain that I am ‘sweet on you.’ ”

He watched the color rise into her cheeks, and turned her hand over to put a kiss into the palm. “It is nothing but the truth,” he said. “I am very sweet on you, Miss Pretty. You know, you will always be Bathsheba Jolie to me.”

* * *

Next morning, when Sarah came downstairs, she found the dining table covered by a huge map of the islands of Venice, and only a corner left free, for a pastry and a cup of chocolate for her breakfast. Felipe was standing at the window drinking a tiny cup of coffee, he turned and smiled as she came into the room, and he pulled a chair from the table for her to sit. “Did you sleep well, cara?”

Sarah nodded. “Is this the map of the Venice lagoon?”

“Yes.” He pointed on the map to where one tiny island was marked in green to show that it was above the level of high tide. “That’s where Roberto is imprisoned, that’s the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo.”

Around it was a speckle of sandbanks, of reedbanks, of mudflats and wetlands and underwater shoals. It was a world that was never still, it was a coastline that could never be mapped. Every high tide the land became water. If there was a storm surge, even the islands with quays and stone seawalls would be inundated. But every day new houses and islands were created from stakes driven into the lagoon bed and built up with boulders. Old islands were eroded by the sea and were reborn as marsh. Venetians and the sea were in continual dialogue over what was land and what was water.

“But this is just like his home.” Sarah pored over the map, seeing how the little island, crowned with a building like a castle, was surrounded by marsh, sandbars, reed beds, and deep channels. “The people who lived on land called Rob’s home ‘wandering haven’ because they never knew where the harbor channel was running, it changed every storm. Only my grandma and her two children, Rob and my ma, who lived right on the edge of the mire, knew the paths, knew the dry places, the sinking sands and the hushing well.”

“He always liked the lagoon,” Felipe said doubtfully. “We could not understand it. He was always out with a gun in a shallow boat, or in a skiff with a fishing line. When he was not studying, or with his patients, he would go out walking the margins: the shoreline between water and land. He liked that it was so uncertain underfoot. He liked that it was lonely. We thought it odd—we like a marble quay not a barena.”