* * *

They closed the front doors on the last guest at three in the afternoon. “Come into the parlor,” Sir James said. “You must be exhausted.”

Livia dropped into a chair. “How many people?” was all she asked. “I lost count.”

“As many as a hundred,” he confirmed, taking a seat opposite hers. “Were there any actual orders?”

She showed him a little notebook that she had on a silver chain at her waist. “Three for sure, and two others who are going to measure their dining hall to make sure they have enough space. Most people said they would write within a few days. But three promised to buy.”

He shook his head. “You were magnificent!” he said. “And so calm!”

“Because you were there,” she assured him. “And because I was in Avery House. How could I be anything but calm when the house is so beautiful and there have been such wonderful women in this place before me? I thought of what you have told me of your mother, and I wanted her to be proud of the house… and even of me,” she added.

“She would have been,” he said. “She would have seen, as I have done, how hard you work and how easy you make it look.”

She glowed with pleasure and came across the room to his chair. She bent quickly and put her lips to his cheek. “Thank you for saying that,” she said. “That is the best of the day. It has been a wonderful day; but that is the best.”

He could smell her perfume, sun-warmed roses, and for a moment he thought that he could put his hands on her slim waist and pull her down to sit on his lap and kiss her lips. He hesitated, half-afraid of his own desire, aware that this was a woman without protection in his house, and that she was the daughter-in-law of the woman that he had loved all his life.

“Forgive me…” he started, but she had already slipped away to the door.

“I shall leave you to dine in peace,” she said, as if she did not want him at all. “I must get back to the warehouse and tell them how well we have done. I shall be able to help them to buy new premises, and have a better life, and I am glad of it. Wait till they hear!”

“Will you tell them I send my best wishes, that I am glad of your success for them, and happy that I have been able to help?”

She came back to him and put her hand on his arm. “No,” she said tenderly. “Alas, they will not hear your name. They even warn me against trusting you.” She paused, her pretty face looking up at him. “I hope I don’t cause you pain when I tell you they have cut you out of their lives. You should think of yourself as free of them.”

“I am forgotten?”

She showed him a tentative smile. “Is it not for the best? Since there is nothing that binds you to them?”

He knew it was. “Then I may forget too?” he asked her.

“You forget too,” she assured him lightly. “It is the past. It was long ago. A boy’s error. Nothing from the past shall haunt us. You are making a new England here, you can be free of the ghosts and sorrows of the past! The war is over, the plague has finished, the fire is out. All the old heartaches are healed. There is no need to feel old pain.”

He knew she was right; she was inviting him to enter a new world that had been here all along, but he had not realized he could enter it. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “At last, it’s over.”

* * *

He sent Glib the footman to walk her to the wherry and pay for it, to cross with her and escort her to the warehouse door. The lad waited, hoping for a tip, but she slipped inside without a word to him and closed the door and leaned her back against it, savoring the success of her day—with the antiquities, with the buyers, and with James himself.

Alys came out of the counting house, frowning. “You’re very late,” was all she said in her level tone. “Ma and I have eaten, but I saved some soup for you.”

Livia’s frustration at the dullness of the woman in her poky poor little hall, with her offers of boiled-up soup and her complaint of lateness, suddenly burst out. “I don’t want soup. I’ve had the most wonderful day; I don’t want to come home to soup!”

Alys’s welcoming smile drained from her face. “Did you want something else? There might be—”

“Nothing! I’ve had the finest of food, a wonderful start. It was a wonderful day!”

“Your things sold well?”

“Beyond my dreams! James said—” She bit off his name. “It was a triumph. A hundred people came!”

“If you give me the money, I’ll put it in the cashbox?” Alys held out her hand. “I’ll take it to the goldsmith’s in the morning.”

Livia’s rage at the poverty of her home and the contrast with her triumph at Avery House spilled out in a torrent of words. “Look at you with your hand held out! Like a beggar! Of course, I don’t have the money now! D’you think I’m running a market stall? D’you think I haggle and trade and spit on my hand and shake it? That’s not how I do business.”

Alys flushed a deep red as her hand dropped awkwardly to her side. “What other way is there? You sell something, and you take the money. How else do you do business? Have you taken no money at all?”

“Of course, you have no idea! I create an interest, I make a fashion, everyone in London is talking about my antiquities. I have sold nothing! I would be mad to do so! But I have spoken to everyone. Between now and next month the orders will pour in and compete with each other. Of course, no money changes hands today! Do you think I am some grubby shopkeeper? A poor workingwoman?”

Alys was stunned into silence. Livia took off her bonnet and handed it to her, as if she were a servant. “Oh, tell Tabs to bring my soup, if that’s all there is?” she ordered. “And a little bread? And a glass of wine?”

“Of course,” Alys said, her voice flatter than ever. She stalked down the hall to the kitchen door and put her head around it and gave the order to Tabs. She paused outside the parlor; she could not bring herself to go in, hurt by Livia’s words but angry at the injustice. She opened the door, ready to speak but at once she saw that Livia’s mood had changed. She was stretched in the chair, her head flung back, her eyelids closed, a smile on her lips.

“You ought to have a bell for Tabs,” she remarked. “It is ridiculous to have to go to the kitchen for everything you want.” When Alys did not answer, she opened her eyes. “It was the most wonderful day,” she repeated dreamily.

“I don’t see how; if you come home as poor as you went out,” Alys returned.

Livia’s sloe eyes showed a gleam. “I know you don’t, my dear,” she said. “Which is why a woman like you runs a sufferance wharf—under sufferance to trade, and under sufferance to live—but I am, tonight, the acknowledged provider of the best and most beautiful architectural antiquities in London.”

“It is a sufferance wharf,” Alys conceded, resentment making her Sussex accent stronger. “Honestly run, with steady trade. You’re right we live in this world on sufferance. My mother was not suffered to be herself; but horribly pursued and punished. My husband’s family would not suffer my presence; and I was driven from my home. I don’t blame you for looking down on us; but Rob would never’ve done so. He never allowed anyone to say a word against his ma or me. Rob was proud of us, proud of our surviving: poor women though we are, unfashionable women though we are!”