“It will go well,” the younger woman said confidently. “It is he who should be anxious. I’m going to be the one who profits from this.” She drew closer and put her head on Alys’s shoulder. “I am not too heavy? I love it when you hold me and I can fall asleep in your arms. I feel beloved again. I need to feel beloved.”

“You’re not too heavy,” Alys said quietly, letting Livia press her cheek against her neck and snuggle in. “Will you go to his house all day tomorrow as well?”

“Of course! I have so much to do!”

OCTOBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

As the weather started to turn colder and the trees shed blazing leaves of gold, bronze, and red, swirling around in a blizzard of color, Ned rethatched his roof of reeds, knowing that the nights would get longer and colder until the snows came to make everything white and silent. He was straddling his ridge pole, tying in the stacks that he had traded from the Nipmuc who brought great rafts of reeds upriver, towed behind their dugouts from the coastal marshes, when he heard the clang of the horseshoe from the far side of the river. Looking across, shading his eyes from the low red autumn sun, he could see the figure of an Indian man, the unmistakable profile of buckskin leggings and a bare chest half-covered with a leather cape. Ned grunted with irritation at having to interrupt his work, but went hand over hand down his roof ladder, and then scrambled down the rough wood ladder that leaned against his wall.

He went out of his garden gate, up the rough steps in the landward side of the bank, and stepped down to the frosty white pier on the river side. The water was colder every day. He rubbed his rough hands together as he stepped on the ferry, unhooked it, pulled on the cold damp rope, and saw, as the ferry bobbed and yawed across the river, that the Indian was Wussausmon, and behind him, shielded by the trees of the forest, were the puritan lords: William Goffe and Edward Whalley.

Ned jumped ashore with real pleasure, greeted Wussausmon, and turned to his comrades. “Good to see you! You’re well? Safe? All well?”

The three men embraced. “God bless you, Ned, here we are back with you,” said William.

“All quiet here?” Edward demanded, peering across the river to Ned’s house.

“All quiet, all safe,” Ned assured them. “I can take you across now, you can wait in my house till evening, and we’ll walk round the forest way to the minister’s house at dusk.”

“I can tell him you’re coming,” Wussausmon volunteered. “I’m going into town.”

“Like that?” Ned gestured to the buckskin leggings and cape.

“Like this,” he confirmed. “No one notices me like this.”

“Good, good,” William agreed, walking down the beach and onto the grounded ferry, followed by Edward and Wussausmon. Ned pushed off, and rocked the ferry to get it into the flow of the water so that he could pull them over.

“You look well,” he remarked.

They did. The summer at the shore had put a tan on their skin and flesh on their bones. They had walked and hunted, rested and gathered food. They had fished and swum. Their Pokanoket neighbors had loaned them a dugout and they had paddled up and down the coast and up the Kittacuck River. They had prayed with local people who listened to the gospel with courtesy but were not converted, and they had seen no English: not one settler, only a white sail, far away on the horizon.

“We’ve been desperate for news,” William said. “Any news from England, Ned?”

“They say there’ll be another war with the Dutch,” Ned volunteered. “They’re not allowing any Dutch shipping to take our goods.”

Both men looked immediately disapproving. “A war against godly men?” William asked.

“The king’ll probably join with the French against them,” Ned suggested. “That’s what they’re saying.”

The ferry nudged the pier and Ned tied it off.

“God help the country, fighting a godly realm in alliance with papists, with a king married to a heretic. God teach them a better way to go.” William closed his eyes briefly in prayer. “And what will it mean to us here? Are we settlers supposed to fight the war too? In front of the savages in the New World? It’s the worst thing we could do.”

“Lord make him see sense,” Edward joined the prayer.

Wussausmon looked from one man to another. “You pray against your king?” he asked.

“We’ve done far worse than that.” William opened his eyes and smiled.

OCTOBER 1670, LONDON

Livia was seated in a high-backed chair in the black-and-white checkerboard hall of Avery House by half past nine on the day of the viewing breakfast. In the basement kitchen the servants prepared silver salvers of biscuits, pastries, and fruits. Bottles of wine chilled in buckets of cold well water. Great jugs of freshly squeezed lemonade were cooling in the sink. Everything was ready.

Sir James stood in his study door admiring Livia, seated in the hall. She was dwarfed by the thick wooden arms and the high back of the chair, but she radiated self-possession and a pretty dignity of her own. He knew that she was nervous; but she did not fidget or run from kitchen to garden to check that everything was ready. She contained her nerves behind a calm smile and only the rise and fall of her black lace bodice showed that her heart was pounding.

“They will come.” He stepped into the hall to reassure her. “But they will come throughout the day. We can’t expect anyone to come on the striking of the ten o’clock bell.”

The face she tilted up towards him was serene. “I know,” she said. “And besides, you have a beautiful house that anyone would be glad to visit, and I am showing genuine rare antiquities. I know that we are together offering the very best. People are bound to come, and if they come: they are bound to admire.”

He thought she showed her quality in her self-control. That she was—just as she said of her antiquities—something rare and beautiful He was glad that he had opened his house for her, that his memories of his wife’s awkward silences could be overlaid by this dainty little woman and the occasion she had single-handedly created. The ten o’clock church bell rang at St. Clement Danes and all over the house there were silvery chimes of ten from clocks in the study and in the drawing room, and loud pealing from all the neighborhood churches.

“Will you take a glass of lemonade?” he said. “We cannot expect people to be on the very dot—”

There was a hammer on the door and the noise of a carriage outside. With a triumphant smile at him she motioned Glib to open the door and the nominated maid to stand ready to take the hats and sticks. As the door opened, she rose to her feet and waited, like a queen, for her first guest.

Sir James recognized Lady Barton and her daughter, old friends of his mother, and, stepping forwards, made the introductions. Livia curtseyed to precisely the right level as he introduced her and gave her hand to her ladyship and led the two of them upstairs. She did not glance back at him and beam, as he had been afraid she would do. She was perfectly dignified. As she went up the stairs, her black silk skirt brushing the worked-iron bannister, there was another knock on the door and a well-known landowner, famous for his park and gardens, was there, hat and cane in hand, coming to visit the antiquities. Sir James realized that it was he who was beaming, like a schoolboy, up at Livia.