“Does it not comfort you?” Alys whispered. “To have Rob’s wife and his baby under our roof?”

In the silence, Alinor shook her head.

“Why not?” Alys demanded. “Why does she not comfort you, Ma?”

“Ah,” said Alinor. “That I can’t say. I’m not yet sure enough to speak.”

SEPTEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned was called to the ferry in the morning by a clang of a horseshoe on the far side, and when he went to the pier and looked across he could see Quiet Squirrel and some women from her village. One of them had a little girl, of about six, gripping her buckskin skirt.

“Coming!” Ned called, and stepped from the pier to the ferry and pulled it across the wide river.

Chattering among themselves, the women came down the shingle beach and stepped on board the grounded ferry. Quiet Squirrel was last on, taking one hand of the little girl while her mother held the other.

“Netop,” Ned said to the child, and all the women on the ferry replied: “Netop, Nippe Sannup! Hello, Ferryman.”

The little girl looked up at the tall Englishman, her dark eyes taking in his friendly open smile, his white linen shirt, his thick trousers. Her dark gaze scanned him from his tall black hat to his heavy shoes. She turned to her mother: “He smells very strange,” she said in their language. “And why does he stare at me?”

“He can understand some of our speech, you know,” Quiet Squirrel told her. “Better not say he smells. Besides, he can’t help it, they spend all their time wrapped up in thick clothes as if it were winter.”

“I think you strange,” Ned replied to the child. He did not know the word for “smell.”

The little girl laughed. “Why does he speak like a baby?”

“He speaks like a child, but he is a man,” Quiet Squirrel replied.

Ned took hold of the rope, rocked the raft gently to free it from the beach, and then pulled it steadily across the river.

“Can we pay in dried meat?” Quiet Squirrel asked. “You’ll want dried meat for your winter stores, Ferryman.”

“Yes-yes,” Ned acknowledged. He smiled down at the little girl. “She too heavy! Pay twice!”

There was a chorus of laughter from the women. “Pay by weight!” they exclaimed. “Quiet Squirrel costs nothing!” The little girl squirmed near to her mother and hid her face in her skirts, she was laughing so much.

“You very fat!” Ned told her. “You sink my ferry.”

The child had to sit on the planks as her legs buckled beneath her with laughter.

“Nippe Sannup, you’re very funny,” Quiet Squirrel told him. “This is my little granddaughter, Red Berries in Rain.”

“Not little,” the child said, her eyes on Ned’s smiling face.

“Very big,” Ned said in her language. “Married?”

The child rocked with laughter. “I’ll marry you!”

All the women cried out and laughed together. “No! No! Sannup! You must marry me!” one of the bolder ones cried, leading a chorus of proposals. “Marry me! Marry me!”

“Aren’t you marrying the thin one with no home? The one who never pays full price?” Quiet Squirrel asked.

“You know everything?” Ned demanded, easily recognizing Mrs. Rose from this description.

“Most things,” Quiet Squirrel said with pleasure.

“Maybe marry,” Ned said. “Maybe not. What you think?”

The ferry reached the other side and nudged against the pier. It rocked as the women climbed off and Quiet Squirrel and her daughter kept a gentle hand on the little girl.

“I think you would make a good husband,” she told him seriously. “But if you married and had a family you would become a greedy farmer like all the rest. And you would not be your own man. And I think you want to be your own man, just as we want to be ourselves.”

She spoke too fast and used too many strange words for Ned to understand, and without trying to explain she handed him some dried deer meat wrapped in woven cattail leaves. “Wrap it tight, keep it dry,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “And don’t you marry.”

SEPTEMBER 1670, LONDON

Sarah went down the newly washed steps to the kitchen door of Avery House and tapped on the panel.

“Who is it now?” came the irritable shout from inside.

“Sarah Stoney,” she said inaudibly. She raised her voice and repeated: “Sarah Stoney.”

“Never ’eard of ’er,” came the discouraging reply.

Sarah stepped up and peered over the half door. “Sarah Stoney for Nobildonna da Ricci,” she said. “I’ve come to see the antiquities. She said I might.”

“Step in, step in,” came the shout. “I can’t leave this.”

Sarah opened the door and came into the kitchen to see a brawny red-faced woman, floured to the elbows, kneading a huge mound of pastry at a stone-topped table in the middle of the kitchen. Copper pans gleamed over the closed stove in the yawning hearth, a pump over the sink ran icy water, a dog in the corner growled at the stranger and sat down again.

“Come in. For Lady Peachey, are you?”

Sarah, at a loss at the strange name, replied: “To see the statues.”

“Glib will take you,” the woman nodded. “Shout out of that door. It’s just the backstairs. Shout for Glib.”

Sarah, horribly embarrassed, crossed the kitchen and opened the door that the cook had indicated. “Glib!” she called.

A clatter of shoes on the wooden stairs preceded Glib, a gangling youth.

“Take the young lady to Lady Peachey, she’s in the gallery,” the cook ordered him. “And then come straight back here. I’ll need you to fetch the fruit from the store.” She turned to Sarah. “Follow him,” she commanded. “You shouldn’t have come in this door anyway, unless you’re Trade. Which of course you may be. As might be her ladyship, Her Highness. For all anybody knows.”

Sarah followed Glib’s skinny shoulders in too-large livery up the short flight of stairs from the basement kitchen, through the green baize door into the startlingly high and bright hall. He crossed the black-and-white marble slabs and led the way up a stone staircase to the gallery at the top. It ran the length of the front of the house and, at the end, standing before a column of pure white marble, Sarah recognized the dark silhouette of the Italian widow.

“Aunt Livia!”

“Ah, Sarah,” she said, turning around and offering her cool cheek for a kiss. “You found your way, then.”

“It’s very grand,” Sarah whispered, turning to see that Glib was retreating back down the stairs. “I did not expect it to be so very—”

“Yes, I’m pleased,” Livia interrupted her. “See, here is the column you liked so much, it looks very handsome here. I have put it here, and on either side of the gallery I have six, just six each side, heads of Caesars. That’s all I am having up here—I don’t want it to be crowded. It must not look like…”

But she had already lost the girl. Sarah had stepped back and was craning her head to see the statues. Twice as large as life, the blind bronze eyes stared into the gallery, unseeing. Each stone head stood on a fluted column of creamy marble, each one crowned with shining laurel leaves of bronze. The faces, rounded or beaky, indulgent or stern, seemed to look back at the girl who gazed up at them, rapt, going from one to another and stretching out her hand to touch the cool column.