SEPTEMBER 1670, LONDON

On Saturday, when Johnnie and Sarah came home, they demanded to see the wrapped crates and then set up such a clamor that at least one should be opened, that Livia said she could not resist them. “But they have been packed so carefully!” she laughingly complained.

“We’ll repack them, Aunt Livia,” Sarah assured her.

“This is seaworthy packing, so that they can be carried from ship to shore and in the wagon to their new home!”

“I know, I know!” Johnnie replied. “And we know how to do it! We were born and raised in a wharf! We’ll repack them if you will just let us see one! Only one!”

“But you already know what they are like! You have seen such things at Whitehall Palace. You will have admired the king’s collection. It is just marble busts and columns.”

“We don’t go to court!” Sarah said dismissively. “And anyway, these are your marble busts and columns! That you’ve been waiting for, that you’ve spoken of every Saturday, that you’ve prayed for every Sunday. I want to see them!”

“Do let us see what you have,” Johnnie urged her. “And I can pack it up again. I can nail up the cases.”

“Ah! I cannot resist you, Johnnie! I spoil you, and that is the truth.”

“Very well, open them! I command it! We have to see!”

“If you command with that smile, I have to obey!”

Johnnie fetched a claw hammer from the tools hung at the side of the warehouse and levered the nails from the packing wood. With meticulous care, he laid one plank after another to the side, till all that stood before the rapt audience was a canvas padded with off-cuts from wool fleeces, too ripped and dirty for sale.

Sarah and Livia stood back while Johnnie and his mother unfurled the canvas and dropped it to the floor. They pulled the fleeces away to reveal the pillar that stood tall in the debris of packing. The scent of lanolin from the fleeces wafted into the warehouse and behind that a stranger smell: exotic, dusty and spicy: “Venice,” Livia sighed. “That is the very scent of my home.”

“Just this?” Johnnie asked. “Just a pillar? A stone pillar?”

“But carved,” his mother pointed out.

“It’s marble,” Livia defended her antiquity, “and very old.”

“I thought it would be a Caesar head!”

“I have Caesar heads. But you’re not opening every package to find them,” Livia countered.

Only Sarah had not spoken. Now she turned to Livia. “Can I touch?”

Livia laughed. “Yes. It was pulled down and buried in the ground and heaved up by a team of peasant farmers, before it was scraped clean and polished up. Of course you can touch.”

Dazed, Sarah stepped closer over the canvas and fleeces, to put her fingers in the groove of the column. “It’s smooth,” she said. “Smooth as silk.”

“The finest Carrara marble,” Livia confirmed. “The most valuable. Look at the color, like snow.”

Sarah ran her fingers across the grooves as if she were a blind woman and could only trace the shape. She stretched up and came to a tracery of foliage and stopped. “This is honeysuckle,” she said. “It’s a honeysuckle, look at the flower!”

“Yes,” Livia agreed.

“It’s like a flower that is frozen, like it froze into stone. It’s like life. How old?”

Livia shrugged. “A thousand years?”

“There was honeysuckle growing in Italy a thousand years ago? And a craftsman looked at it so closely that he sculpted it into this stone? So that I, a thousand years later, can see honeysuckle?”

“At last one of you who admires my treasure!” Livia said with a sideways glance at Johnnie. “You were clamoring to see it, but you do not love it as Sarah and I.”

“If we could only see them all…” Sarah hinted.

“No, no, no,” Livia laughed. “When I unpack them for showing at the house, you may come and see them there. Not you,” she twinkled to Johnnie, “not you, as you don’t love my treasures. But Sarah, you may come when I am unpacking and we will look at them by ourselves. Not at the party,” she added with a reassuring nod to Alys.

“I don’t want to come to the party,” Sarah said surprisingly. “It’s not the people I want to see, but the statues. When can I come? My next afternoon off is Wednesday.”

“Come on Wednesday,” Livia assured her. “And I will show you everything.”

“I love it,” Sarah said, resting a lingering hand on the column. “It is like a hat, but bigger.”

“A hat, but bigger?” Johnnie exclaimed, and they all laughed at the girl.

She flushed but she would not deny her feelings. “A hat, a really beautiful hat, is well made, and perfectly finished, and you can look at it from any side and it is a thing of beauty,” she said. “You can’t see the work that has been put in, it looks easy, not labored. And this stone is the same.”

“It is a work of craft and of art,” Livia agreed with her. “And—luckily for us, just like hats—in fashion right now. But I am glad that you see it, Sarah. You are my niece indeed.” Sarah glowed at the praise but her aunt was looking past her, at Johnnie. “But you,” she exclaimed to him flirtatiously, “you are nothing more than a barbarian!”

* * *

That night Alys went into her mother’s room to say good night to her, and found her sitting in darkness in her chair, looking over the shining water of the river to where the moon was low on the horizon, a harvest moon, a golden moon with a shimmering yellow reflection in the water below.

“Ma?” she said uncertainly. “Are you all right?”

“Aye,” the older woman said quietly. “Just looking. Just dreaming.”

“Are you ready to go to bed?” her daughter asked. “It’s late.”

Gently Alys helped her mother to the bed, drew the curtains on the window, and turned back to the pale beautiful face on the white pillow.

“And so she has her treasures safe in our warehouse,” Alinor said quietly in the dark.

“As we agreed.”

“And she takes them to him, and shows them in his house, as if they were partners?”

“Yes. But she never mentions his name to me, and I believe she never speaks of us to him. She knows we will not see him, nor speak of him.”

“Does he stay here for her, d’you think? When his home is in the north? Why does he not go back there?”

“We don’t care, do we?” Alys burst out, troubled at her mother’s dreamy voice. “We said he was to go, that we would never see him again. You don’t want him back, do you?”

“No. But I can’t help but wonder what she thinks of him, and he of her.”

Alys was shocked. “She thinks nothing of him! She’ll never recover from the loss of Rob. She still cries for him in the night. Her only comfort is to be with us, to be with me. She says that she’ll stay with us for always. We’re her family now. She does not think anything of… him.”

“I’m glad of that,” Alinor said calmly. “If that’s what she says. I’m glad that we comfort her for her loss—if we do.”