Ned was still smiling at her condemnation of his shoes, as he pulled the two of them over the river on the ferry. The pale light of the dawn summer sky reflected on the sleek water. “I’ll wait here,” she said, her hand on the ferry rope. “Will you bring the Coatmen now?”

“Yes,” he said. “We come quick.”

She smiled at him, knowing that Englishmen would take a long time to start a journey, they always fussed about a thousand things, they always carried far too much.

In the house, William and Edward were up and dressed, eating cornmeal biscuits. “Where have you been?” Edward asked.

“I’ve got us a guide,” Ned said. “He’s going to find us on the way.”

He filled his birch-bark bottle with water from the earthenware jar and wiped his face and neck with sassafras oil. “Want some of this?” He offered them the oil.

“What is it?” Edward asked.

“Sassafras oil, keeps the flies off.”

“Nothing keeps the flies off,” Edward said pessimistically, and William laughed.

Ned did not pull on the jacket that he wore to go to town but swung a cape of knotted reeds over his shirt.

“You look like a savage,” Edward remarked. “Will you wear a feather in your hair?”

“Keeps the flies off,” Ned claimed.

“Nothing keeps the flies off,” Edward repeated.

The three men came silently out of the house, climbed the riverbank, and looked back to the grazed wide way to the sleeping town, then they turned towards the river.

“Who’s that on the ferry?” William demanded.

“A woman of the Norwottuck,” Ned said. “My neighbor. She minds the ferry when I go into the woods.”

“An old lady?” Edward asked.

“She’s the elder of the village. She knows everything that happens that side of the river, and everything that happens in Hadley too.”

“Is she trustworthy?” William asked. “Does she know of us?”

“Aye,” Ned replied. “I said. She knows everything that goes on within fifty miles. She minds the ferry for me, she sells me sassafras and all sorts of things from the forest. Things I didn’t even know when I first got here.”

Ned snapped his fingers and his dog Red bounded down the bank and jumped neatly onto the ferry. Ned and the men followed and climbed on board as Quiet Squirrel wordlessly pulled on the rope to haul them across to the opposite bank. The ferry grounded on the pebble beach, William and Edward took up their little sacks, and went at once into the shelter of the woods. Ned turned to say good-bye to Quiet Squirrel.

“Tomorrow night I come back,” he said, and raised a hand.

“Tomorrow night, Ned.”

“Guide meets us?”

She smiled at him. “Quick! Quick!” she mocked him. “He will find you. You start—if you can walk at all in those shoes.”

Ned chuckled at the insult, threw her a salute, and turned, his dog at his heels, his musket slung over his back, to lead the way south.

JUNE 1670, LONDON

“It is quite ridiculous that we meet like this,” Livia said sharply to Sir James the next afternoon. “Like a maidservant creeping out to meet a footman! You must write down for me the address of your London house and then I can write to you and suggest a time and place to meet when we need to talk.”

He felt himself flinch at her bluntness. “Of course, I am honored,” he said quietly.

“Because we have much to do together.”

“We do?”

They were taking their usual path, along Savoury Dock, as St. Saviour’s Dock was ironically known to its neighbors who were sickened by the stink of the industries pouring their waste into the river. They turned right into Five Foot Lane, ignoring the catcalls of street urchins and the occasional appeal of vendors of small goods, and they wound their way through the line of little cottages to the fields where the sheep grazed in the distance and she could sit on the tree that he now thought of as “theirs.”

“We do,” she confirmed smartly. “And this is not a place of business.”

“I am not a businessman,” he said gently. “I have no place of business.”

She peeped up at him in her charming way. “I know,” she agreed. “You are above all this. But I have to toil and sow and reap for my boy, you know. For his inheritance. And his family, this family that I find myself among, these are working people and I cannot be idle. They need my help and I am going to help them.”

“But I…” he started.

“You can just leave, of course,” she offered him. “You need never see any of them again. You have been forgiven for your sins and no doubt you forgive them theirs. You tried to reenter their lives and you have been shut out. There is nothing more for you here. You could go now and never come back, arrange another marriage and hope for a son of your own.”

He blinked. “I could,” he said cautiously.

“Or you could help me save them,” she said, her voice a little lower, beguiling. “You could help this poor family to make a living, better than it is now. You abandoned them in poverty, and they cannot rise without our help. You can have no contact with Mrs. Reekie, you know, but her grandson should grow up as a prosperous English boy. You will tell me where he should go to school? I am sure that he should go to your school? At what age does he have to start? Should you introduce him?”

He flushed with embarrassment. “I didn’t go to an English school,” he said. “I was tutored at home and then I went to a seminary. I was intended for the priesthood.”

“Dio!” she exclaimed. “You? An English Milord?”

“There are many English Roman Catholics,” he said awkwardly. “But I lost my vocation, I had… I had a crisis of faith… and, like many, I converted to the Protestant Church and took up my title and my lands.”

She had no interest in his religion. “Oh! So! Where should Matteo go to school?”

“Perhaps Westminster?” he recovered. “I could assist you with that.”

She clasped her hands. “I ask for nothing from you but a little help. I was impulsive before, you understand that I am Italian? I see a happy outcome and I long for it all at once. You will find me passionate! You will forgive me that. But I will never trouble you with my dreams again. I thought that I could be a wife to you and give you a son—I thought it like a miracle that we should meet when I am the very thing that you want. But I see I was too quick for you! From now on we shall be nothing more than friends and partners.”

He was flushed with embarrassment at her frankness, but stirred by her words. “I could not engage myself to do more than make introductions for you, to gentlemen who are buying antiquities, and their agents,” he said stiffly.

“Nothing more than that,” she agreed. “Alys will arrange the shipping, I shall order the antiquities, you shall do nothing more than invite people to your house and make the introductions, and I shall sell the things.”

“At my house?” His refusal was immediate; but she laughed gaily and put her hands on his. “Not your beautiful house in the country,” she assured him. “I don’t ask for that. No, no, all I want is to be allowed to place some of my best and most beautiful pieces in your London house so that your friends and acquaintances may come and admire them, in your salon. That is how they should be seen.” She paused as a thought struck her. “Oh, but you do have a salon? This is not two rooms over a coffeehouse? In some shabby corner? You do have a proper house?”