“Yes,” James said, coming round the desk to greet his brother-in-law. “Yes. Her ladyship has condescended to make me so happy.”

“Really?” George demanded.

“Next month,” Livia triumphed. “In two weeks! You must come to my wedding.”

JANUARY 1671, AT SEA

Felipe was in the prow of the ship, at noon, wrapped in a thick cape against the cold wind, watching the hypnotic smooth parting of the waves under the wooden bow. Sarah came up on deck as if drawn to him, and stood beside him. Without a word, he opened the side of his cape and put it around her shoulders, like an embrace. They stood, side by side, enwrapped in the cape, but not embracing. Their shoulders brushed against each other on each roll of the ship.

“You could have drowned.” Felipe was coldly furious.

“I can swim,” she said calmly.

“You could have been arrested. We nearly left you. The pedotti should not have let us launch the dinghy that close to the quarantine island. He would not have allowed us to wait for more than a moment longer.”

“But you persuaded him?”

“I had to tell a mouthful of lies.”

She smiled up at him. “That must have been torture for an honest man such as you.”

“This is not amusing to me,” he said furiously. “I thought you would die in the water. I felt—” He broke off.

“What did you feel?” she asked.

“Terrified,” he said, as if the truth were forced out of him. “I thought you were—”

She waited.

“I thought you were lost. I thought I had lost you.”

Still wrapped in his cloak she turned towards him and put her hands on either side of his face. “Forgive me,” she said earnestly. “I had to lie to you, I knew you would never have let me go; but I will promise to never lie to you again.”

He put his hands on her slim waist; but he did not draw her close. “You will be true to me?”

“I will,” she said solemnly.

“You know that I cannot make a promise to be true to you? I am what you called me—a counterfeiter, a forger, a fraud, a grave robber, a thief, and a liar.”

She nodded very gravely. “I know. But you could change?”

He shook his head. “Cara—I cannot promise to reform, I have lived a life—my whole life is dishonest. My business is forgery.”

The look she gave him would have converted any sinner. “But you could change? You could repent?”

He bowed his head. “I am not worthy of you. Even if I were free.”

“I see I would have to save you,” she said, with a hopeful little smile.

He swallowed down his reply, and he released her and she turned away so that they stood shoulder to shoulder again, watching the sea.

“Our worlds are oceans apart,” he remarked. “And soon there will be a sea between us again. Will you go back to being a milliner?”

“Already Venice feels like a dream,” she said. “I feel as if I will wake up to London and the shop and the hats, and the girls will ask me where I have been and what I have done, and I’ll never be able to tell them.”

“What would you tell them about me?”

She shook her head. “I’ll never speak of you.”

For a moment they were silent, looking at the waves.

“Will you sell your feathers at a great profit?” he asked.

“I’ll sell some, but I’ll keep some back. I’ll make my own hats and headdresses and sell them on my own account.”

“I shall think of you in your milliner’s shop, when I am home again,” he said. “I shall think of you every day.”

She looked up at him and for a moment he thought he could not resist pulling her towards him and kissing the sadness from her mouth.

“Don’t do that. Because I shan’t think of you at all,” Sarah said determinedly. “Not at all.”

FEBRUARY 1671, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned was smoking meat in the chimney of his house, long strips of venison that Quiet Squirrel had given him earlier in the day when she had crossed the river for trade. She said that she wanted some pins for sewing, an excuse so transparent that Ned did not even count the pins he poured into her sack, and neither did she.

“Want news?” he asked her, thinking that his grasp of the language was so poor that he could never convey to her his anxiety about what was to come, especially his fears for her, and the little village with the new palisade around it.

She nodded, her eyes on his face. “If you know anything, Ned.”

“Massasoit must go to Plymouth, understand? He must make answer, he must say: sorry.”

She sighed and he thought it was impatience at the childishness of his speech in their tongue. “I wish I could tell you that I know all this,” she said to him in her own language, knowing he would grasp one word in ten. “I know all this! We’ve all seen it coming. What I want you to tell me is when the men at Hadley, even the old soldiers that we helped to hide, are going to come against my people? I know they will. I don’t ask if, I ask when.” She took his hands and looked into his face as if to summon his attention. “Hadley men?” she asked him. “Are they going to march against us? Against my children?”

He understood at once what she meant. “No,” he said, then he checked himself. It was not for him to reassure her so that she trusted her neighbors when they were arming themselves, when they were talking of teaching a lesson to this wise old woman and the village. “Maybe,” he said, his face grim. “Maybe.”

“They are arming?” she asked him. “They are drilling?”

Before he could answer her head jerked up to listen to a noise outside, and at the same moment Red raised his head from his paws and growled.

“Someone at the door?” Ned asked, and turned back to her, but she was already gone. She had melted to the back of the room and slid herself under Ned’s big winter cape on its peg and stood perfectly still.

The hammer of a fist on the door echoed in the snow-silent cabin and Ned shouted: “Who’s there?”

“Selectman!” came the reply.

Ned opened the door and wrapped his jacket around himself against the cold as the man jumped down from the drift of packed snow into the house. Ned slammed the door behind him.

“Long way to come in the snow,” he said.

“I didn’t think I’d get through.” The man gestured at himself. He was dusted with snow from head to feet. He had been struggling through waist-high drifts up and down the common lane. “I’m going into all the houses this end of the village. You’re mustered: town militia. You’re to attend first Saturday on the meadow if fine. Next Saturday if snowing. One after that if still bad. You’re to bring your own weapons. D’you have a musket?” He looked above the door where Ned’s gun hung. “You’re to bring it.”

“What’re we doing?” Ned asked him.

“Drilling,” he said. “Practicing marksmanship, practicing marching.”

“To defend?” Ned asked, his last hope.