He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts. “How did Ma bear the news?” He looked quickly at Sarah: “It didn’t make her ill?”

She beamed. “That’s what’s amazing. She was unhurt. She didn’t believe Livia for a moment!”

“She didn’t? But why not?”

“There’s something about Livia that Grandma doesn’t like,” Sarah said honestly. “She’s never said what. But she never believed her, not from the first. Livia is beautiful, and so tragic—you know—she told a story that would break your heart. But Grandma just looked at her and said, ‘Oh yes.’ ”

“Oh yes?” Rob repeated.

Sarah felt a little bubble of laughter at the thought of her idiosyncratic grandmother. “It was when Livia put Matteo into her arms and said he would comfort her and be in the place of you.”

Rob was smiling now too, imagining his mother. “She didn’t like that?”

“It should have been really moving; but apparently your ma just held him, looked into his face, and said: ‘I don’t think it quite works like that.’ ”

“Lord, I can hear her! I can see her!”

“But why?” Felipe asked. “This woman is like a stone!”

“She’s not a fool to be played by a mountebank,” Rob snapped. “She’d see right through you.”

“Later, when she asked me to look for you, she told me she would know if her son was dead and I believed her,” Sarah told him. “I knew what she meant. I’d know if Johnnie was sick or dead. I’d just know it. Grandma never believed that you were dead, and she was certain you weren’t drowned. The only time she had a doubt was just when I was leaving, and then she was afraid. She asked me to bring back something of yours that could go into her coffin at her death. And to put flowers on the water where they lost you.”

“What flowers?”

“Why does that matter?” Felipe asked, who had been following the rapid speech.

“Forget-me-nots.”

Rob grimaced. “Ah God, I’d never have wanted her grieved! And all this time, in the well and on the island, I’ve been thinking that Livia was breaking her heart and going to everyone for my release.” He glanced at Felipe. “I thought you’d acted on your own, and that she would be fighting you, trying to get me freed. I imagined her entrapped by you, fighting to be free.”

Felipe shook his head. “Not the Nobildonna! You never knew her at all. She left at once for England, the moment they issued a warrant for your arrest. She was afraid they would call her as a witness to the death of her first husband. The day you were arrested was the day she sailed for London. She went like a princess, with a beautiful trousseau of black gowns—from when she was mourning the Conte—and she hired a maid to care for Matteo.”

“And we took her in,” Sarah told him. “And Ma believed her. She showed her antiquities in London, she sold them, and she said she would use the money to buy a bigger warehouse, in a better part of town, with better rooms for us.”

“Her antiquities?” Rob turned to Felipe.

“Indeed.” He gave a little bow. “Those that she stole from her husband and those that I make. And now she has ordered more from my store. We’ve got them on board now. We’re taking them to her.”

“She doesn’t know that Ma sent you to Venice?” Rob asked Sarah.

Sarah nodded. “She doesn’t know. At least—she didn’t know when I left. I don’t know what she’ll have got out of my ma while I’ve been away.”

“She won’t know that you’re coming to London with her antiquities?” He turned to Felipe.

The Italian smiled. “She can’t know that. I did not know it myself.”

“Why did you bring him?” Rob turned to Sarah.

“Perhaps she is going to save me?” Felipe said provocatively.

“In fact, it’s an ambush,” Rob named it.

“She deserves it,” Sarah said grimly.

“She’s still my wife.”

There was a pause. “You can’t still love her?” Sarah asked cautiously. “Are you going to forgive her? She nearly killed you.”

“I have thought of her night and day for nearly ten months. I can’t suddenly see her as an enemy. I can’t believe that she has done what you say. I can’t change how I feel, like that!” He snapped his fingers. “In a moment.”

Felipe raised his eyebrows at Sarah. “As I say,” he reminded her: “persistently stupid.”

“I can’t understand how she can have done the things you say, when I think of how she was with me,” Rob explained to Sarah, ignoring Felipe. “It’s as if you’re talking about a stranger. The thought of her trying to rescue me was all that kept me alive. I knew she would never stop trying to save me—and now you tell me it was she who put me there?”

“But this is her!” Felipe exclaimed. “This is what I love about her—the very thing that you never saw! That she can change her very self in a moment! She understands that the only way to make money is to be constantly deceitful—she stops at nothing.”

Rob shook his head, as if he could not follow his own thoughts. “When I first met her, she was a young wife, lonely and ill-treated by her husband’s family, a beautiful widow, lost in a grand palazzo with a family that hated her. I loved her. I fell deeply in love with her. I rescued her from them. I can’t imagine any other Livia.”

“There are a dozen others,” Felipe told him. “And you’re not the first man to love the face that she showed him.”

“And not the last!” Sarah added. “She’s doing it right now! She turned to Rob. “I’m sorry that you still love her, Uncle Rob. But I think she’s planning to marry this English lord. The one who helped her to sell the antiquities to other gentlemen.”

“Who is he?” he asked.

“Sir James Avery,” she told him.

He thought for a moment and shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

“He came to the warehouse,” Sarah told him. “Someone from the old days at Foulmire? Ma hates him, but Grandma said she would see him, just once. Wasn’t he your tutor? When you were a boy? On Foulmire?”

“That was James Summer,” he exclaimed. “James Summer was my tutor. Not Avery. But I suppose—could it be the same man?” He looked astounded. “He came back to Ma? But how does Livia know him?”

“Livia got her claws in him on his first visit. He let her use his house to show the antiquities. By the time I left, she’d persuaded him to do a second show. That’s what this shipment is for. She was very sure of him, in and out of his house, acting like she owned it. It looked to me as if she planned to marry him.”

Felipe waited, his eyes on Rob’s stunned expression. “Slow,” he remarked quietly to Sarah. “Persistently…”

“She can’t marry him; she’s married to me!” Rob said simply.

“Ecco!” Felipe said triumphantly. “Finalmente! Exactly.”

FEBRUARY 1671, LONDON