He said nothing as they reached the top of the stairs but gestured to the gallery that ran the length of the building, along the wide front, where the portraits of his ancestors took up only half of the walls. “Here,” he said.

“There is room for busts, and heads, and columns,” she said, delighted. “And these wonderful high windows for light. Why do you have so few things?”

“Some pieces were sold,” he said. “The house was commandeered during the Cromwell years, and some things went missing. Stolen, by common soldiers. They didn’t even know what they were taking. Probably hanging on some merchant’s wall right now. I doubt we’ll ever get them back.”

“Why can’t you get them back?” she demanded.

“It would be a hard claim to prove.”

“Why don’t you steal them back?”

He gave a shocked laugh. “I couldn’t! Of course not!”

Quickly, she agreed with him. “No, of course not. So you must buy some new. I can give you an excellent price on some Caesars. Quite original, in historical order, on their own marble columns. They would be perfect here.”

He laughed. “You would offer them to me at a good price?”

“At ten percent under the market price if you keep them here, in this gallery, and show them to your friends.”

“I was joking…” he said.

“I never joke about money,” she said seriously. “You can have ten percent under market price for anything you like if you will show them to people. Now, is there anywhere else that my antiquities could be shown? Do you have any space outside, for the big statues?”

“There is the garden,” he said unwillingly, for the garden was his private haven in London, a long run of wide green space, down to the river, planted with apple trees and plum trees, dancing with blossom in early summer, bright with scarlet and bronze leaves in autumn when the boughs were laden with fruit. It had been his mother’s favorite place, where she had held midsummer balls when the old king had been on his throne and everyone thought that nothing would ever change.

“Show me!” Livia demanded, and he gave her his hand and led her through the great glazed doors to the terrace at the back of the house, and then down the steps to the garden that led to the river.

“This is what I thought London would be like,” she breathed. “Not a dirty little warehouse, run by two sad women, but this! A big English garden, and a river like silver.”

“Are they sad? Would you call them sad?”

“No, they’re where they want to be, it suits them—but this is like another world! High tide, and no wharves and noisy unloading, just the birds singing in the trees, and the fruit forming on the bough, and the grass under my feet! This is the England I dreamed of!”

He was exhilarated by her joy in his garden. “You like it? I love it here—but you should see my lands at Northallerton.”

“I should love to come!” She took it swiftly, as a direct invitation. “For this is a paradise!”

“This is a pleasure garden, but at Northside Manor I have orchards, and herb gardens, and vegetable gardens and a dairy and a bakehouse and… it is a manor that can keep itself. It can feed and house and manage itself. I can live off my own.”

“When I was a little girl that’s how we lived,” she told him. “In the vineyards, outside Florence. We kept hens and cows and ducks and bees. I kept the hens, we had twenty eggs a day. I have always longed to live in the country again. Matteo should be brought up in the country.”

“And yet your home was Venice,” he observed.

Her dark eyelashes veiled her bright eyes. “You know that a young woman cannot choose,” she said quietly. “My parents married me to Signor Fiori. He took me far from my home, and the countryside that I loved. I came to Venice like an exiled child. Do you know how that feels?”

“Yes,” he said, the exiled child whose home had been stolen by the parliamentarians before he could inherit it from his royalist father. “I know what loss feels like.”

She put her hand in his with her quick sympathy. “Ah, let us make each other happy again? I am bold with you because I understand your feelings so well. We are one and the same.”

He flushed, but he did not drop her hand. “I should not mislead you; you know I am a new widower. I am not ready for another marriage.”

She bowed her head. “I will wait for you to speak,” she promised him. She looked up; he thought her lips were so warm and red that she must rouge them. “You must take as long as you like. I will wait for you to say the words that I long to hear.”

JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned walked a little way with the two Englishmen and the Indian, until they came to a story hole at the side of the path where he stopped. “I’ll leave you here,” he said. “This was where a woman from the Pequot people, far from her home, picked up a baby muskrat, and she made it into a pet. She washed it clean so it didn’t stink, and it followed her like a dog.” He looked at the bewildered Englishmen. “The Pequots think the world was made when a woman fell from the skies and a muskrat brought her earth from the floor of the sea. She made the first land from the seabed, and gave birth to the People. So muskrats are an important animal for them. The Pequot woman was honoring her stories while with a strange people.”

William and Edward exchanged a glance. “Paganism,” William condemned in one word.

Ned shrugged. “Isn’t it like us telling the gospel to Indians? That you keep telling your stories because they are part of who you are?”

Edward slapped him on the back. “Ned, soldier, first you spoke paganism—now heresy! It’s just getting worse, not better. We’re going to have to burn you for a heretic!”

Ned laughed at himself. “Well, it’s the story for the hole,” he said, “so perhaps you will remember it, for it’s important. It marks where the Bay path, an Indian trail, crosses the Connecticut path, a way that the settlers use. We drive our beef down it all the way to Boston, see how rutted and muddy it is? And how wide? It’s too busy for you: the settlers are fearful of the forest and travel in big groups, you’d be seen if you walked here. So you’ll cross the drover road here, and Wussausmon will show you the hidden ways to the shore, he’ll take you past the villages, the Nipmuc and the Narragansett homes. This is where I say good-bye. He’ll bring you back to Hadley at the end of summer.”

William took Ned’s arm and drew him to one side. “Who is he? And how does a savage speak English as if he came from the University of Oxford?” he whispered.

“Because he attended Harvard College!” Ned told him. “He’s a minister in one of the praying towns, he was brought up in an English household, his English name is John Sassamon. He advises the governor and the Council at Plymouth on Indian affairs.”

“Well, he doesn’t look like an Englishman,” William said flatly.

“Not now—he’s in his buckskins now, and goes by his tribal name Wussausmon,” Ned tried to explain. “He serves Po Metacom, the Massasoit of the Pokanoket. He serves as a go-between for him and the governor at Plymouth. He serves Josiah Winslow. He’s like an ambassador.”