“Oh! My dear!” Alys was shocked. “You shouldn’t have done that. I could have lent you the money.”

“I couldn’t ask you,” Livia said, putting her black trimmed handkerchief to her eyes. “How could I? Not after how you were about the shipping. I can’t bear to be a burden to you…”

“Did you pawn them? Can we get them back?”

“They gave me three shillings for them.”

Alys went at once into the counting house, opened the cashbox, and came back with the money in her hand. “There!” she said. “Money’s tight, but it’s always tight, and I’ll never let you sell your jewelry. Get them back, and never do that again. Come to me for anything else you need. Rob wouldn’t have wanted you to sell your little things.”

“But he’s not here!” Livia exclaimed, tears pouring down her face, her lower lip trembling. “I have to make my way in the world without him, and I just can’t! I don’t know how!”

“I’m here!” Alys exclaimed. “I’m here! I’ll take care of you, and little Matteo too. I always will.”

Livia flung herself into Alys’s arms. “You’re such a good sister,” she breathed. “I shall come to you for everything, I won’t do such a thing again. Roberto gave them to me on our betrothal, it broke my heart to sell them.”

Alys held her close. “Of course you must come to me for anything you need. You’re family, this is a family business, our fortune is yours.”

Livia stepped away, dried her eyes, and tucked the coins in her pocket. Alys rubbed her face with her hands, smoothed down her apron, and her gaze fell on the cards again. “But I wish you hadn’t had them printed like this.”

“I can get them reprinted, but it would cost another three shillings? I won’t allow the extravagance.”

“It looks as if you live there.”

“It does not look as if I live there,” Livia ruled. “It looks as if you can visit Avery House to see my antiquities, and you may apply to Avery House by letter if you wish to purchase. Avery House is my shop window, just as Sarah has a shop window for her hats. Nobody thinks she lives in the window.”

AUGUST 1670, LONDON

Sir James, when he saw the visiting card for Livia’s antiquities giving Avery House as the address, merely raised his eyebrows.

“You’re very organized,” was all he said. “Do you hope that I will distribute these cards for you? As if we were hucksters and Avery House our stall? Are people to order antiques from me as if I were a grocer?”

“No, no,” she said. “That would never do. I should never ask such a thing of you! I should never stoop to trade myself! See your name is not on here, nor mine. Just the address. These are for me to give to people who make an inquiry. All I want you to do is to invite people to a little party, to see our antiquities. I will show them the pieces, and then I will give them the cards, I will write on each card with a note of the piece they like and the price. So that they remember the antiquities are for sale and can be purchased from me.”

“You want me to invite people?”

“Gentlemen and ladies that you know.” She gave a little shake to her gown, as if dismissing everyone else in London. “No one commercial. We don’t want dealers or tradesmen or people of that sort.”

“I agree,” he said hastily. “But I don’t have a circle of friends like that. I lived in Yorkshire with my wife and my aunt at Northside Manor, and we seldom came to London. After my wife died, I closed Avery House. I only opened it this year for—” He broke off.

She felt a sting of jealousy as she realized he had opened it for Alinor; but she made sure that her smile never wavered. “You must have family friends?” she pursued. “Relations?”

“Of course I do.”

“And people who were friends of your parents.”

“Naturally. Though not everyone came home from exile.” He shook his head, thinking of those who had never returned.

“But there must be some people who were on your side for the king who came back and who owe you favors?” Livia pursued. “Many people. People whose secrets you kept? Were you not a royalist? Are you not the winners now?”

He gave a little resigned shrug. “Very well. I shall send out cards for a breakfast party.”

“If ladies are coming you will need a hostess,” she reminded him.

He hesitated. “I suppose I can ask my aunt if she will come south from Northallerton…”

“I shall do it,” Livia offered. “It is no trouble, and I have to be here anyway to speak of the antiquities. You can tell people that I am the widow of your former pupil Walter Peachey. They can think that we have been friends for years.”

He was shocked. “I cannot give you another man’s name!”

She smiled up at him. “It does not matter, does it, my dear Sir James? It gives you and I a provenance which we need. We can hardly say that we met at a dirty little warehouse, and that you were there to offer for a poor wharfinger’s mother, to claim your bastard son; can we?”

“No, of course we can’t say that, it would be a disgrace!” He was shocked.

“So we have to explain how we met,” she pointed out. “And why you would provide me with a gallery to show my first collection? All I am saying is we need a little polish.”

“Polish?” He examined the word.

“A little shine to deceive the eye.” She smiled. “As we do in the workshop. To add luster. A little polish. I will call myself Nobildonna da Picci, do you see? No change at all, just one little letter; and then no one can doubt our friendship is anything but you kindly helping the widow of your late pupil Walter Robert Peachey, my late husband. It is a more elegant name anyway, I think. We preserve my reputation from comment, and we spare you any connection to the wharf. You don’t want to expose me to gossip, do you?”

AUGUST 1670, LONDON

Sarah, home as usual for Saturday night, helped her grandmother to bed, straightening her bedding and smoothing the pillow and drawing the curtains against the night sky. A harvest moon lay low over the river and Alinor asked her to leave them open so that she could see the warm yellow light.

“You don’t fear it’ll give you bad dreams?” the girl teased.

“I like to dream. Sometimes I dream I am a girl again back on Foulmire, and the sound of the gulls are the cries of the birds on the mire. Sometimes I dream they are the birds that Rob loved on the lagoon at Venice and that he is listening to them now.”

“You dream of him like a wish?” the girl asked with ready sympathy.

“No,” Alinor said firmly. “I dream of him like a certainty.”

Sarah drew up the little stool and sat beside the bed. “A certainty? What d’you mean?”

“He was sure-footed, my son: that’s certain. He was a good swimmer: that’s certain. What she told us—”

“What Livia said?”

“Aye. What she told us can’t be true: that’s certain. She told us he was always taking out a boat on the lagoon, and walking on the sandbanks and islands. So he wouldn’t have drowned there. Not my Rob, not in water that came and went, that was sometimes land and sometimes sea.”