“Shall I come with you?” Livia asked, taking her arm.

Alys nearly laughed. “You’re dressed far too fine,” she said. “Nobody would talk with me if I walked in with you. They would think that I had risen in the world and was no longer interested in unloading apples for penny profits.”

“I am too fine?” Livia asked, as surprised as if she had never considered her appearance before.

“Far too beautiful,” Alys said, giving her a little push towards the front door. “Go and sit with Ma. She’s planning a great feast for Sunday to celebrate Sarah’s day of freedom. She will be a time-served milliner, and in December, Johnnie will be out of his apprenticeship too.”

“Of course it is a pleasure to sit with your mother, but when will you be home?”

“When I have secured next month’s business,” Alys said. “However long it takes.”

“Spending hours on apples?” Livia teased. “But shall you see the Captain again? The one who went to Venice?”

“Yes, he’ll be there. He’ll be going to Venice again.”

“He is faithful?” Livia asked.

“He’s always reliable.”

“Ask him if he has room for some more antiquities,” Livia said. “The same sort of load? Say twenty crates? At the same price and terms? I’ll write out the directions again, he can go to my old steward and collect them.”

Silently, Alys followed her into the warehouse as Livia helped herself to a pen and tore a page of paper from the back of the ledger to write her steward’s address.

Alys did not take it, her face was flushed with embarrassment. She put her hands behind her back though Livia offered her the address. “I’m sorry, my dear, I am so sorry… but I can’t commission him. I don’t know how to say this…”

“Whatever is the matter?” Livia asked, smiling.

“I don’t have the money to pay him. I can’t commission him, until we earn.”

Livia widened her eyes. “But surely, you don’t have to pay him until he returns? You only pay a little now?”

“I have to pay half now, and we really don’t…”

“Pay him his price now and when he returns I will have the money from the sale to pay him the second half. I will pay it myself. Don’t worry.”

Alys hesitated. “We’ve never run the warehouse like that,” she said. “We’ve always had enough in the chest to pay for the whole bill, before commissioning anything.”

“Allora!” Livia remarked gleefully. “And now you are living beyond your means, as you should, as we should, as I have always done. For we know that we are going to earn more than you have ever earned before! But we have to get the goods here before we can sell them! We cannot make money without spending money. We have to have more antiquities to sell and you have to pay the Captain to fetch them. What is the difficulty? Is there nothing in the cashbox at all?”

“It’s pounds he wants, not shillings! I’ve got about fourteen pounds. I can just stretch to pay the first half, but I don’t have the rest.”

“But this doesn’t matter!” Livia smiled and took Alys’s anxious face in both hands and kissed her on the mouth. “Send him out with your little savings, and when he returns I will have sold the antiquities and I will pay him. Be happy!” she told her.

“It’s just that we never…”

“You’ve never had such profitable trade before.”

“It’s such a risk!”

“No it is not,” Livia ruled. “You are trusting me, as we agreed. You have to trust me.”

* * *

Alinor, in her bright high room, was drawing up a list of Sarah’s favorite dishes for the feast on Sunday. She had prepared her a gift, a soft shapeless pillow stuffed with lavender and rosemary for repelling moths, catnip and chamomile for repelling fleas. “You press it in a bonnet to help it keep shape.” She showed Livia. “And it keeps out the moths. Her mother is getting her a hatbox, and we are going to hire a signwriter to paint her name on the outside in curly letters, like a proper milliner.”

“But she can’t open her own business, can she?” Livia confirmed. “She’ll never have her own hatboxes?”

“Ah no, we couldn’t afford to set her up in a millinery business. Rents are impossible, a millinery shop needs to be in the City. She will have to sign on as a senior milliner where she is now. She’ll stay for a year, and only then perhaps look for another position.”

“It’s like slavery,” Livia exclaimed, who had been married younger than Sarah was now. “All she can hope for is a kind master. And what about Johnnie? Is he to be cast into slavery too, poor handsome boy?”

“He completes his apprenticeship at Christmas, and then he’ll be a senior clerk. His great ambition is to be a writer for the East India Company—but we can’t introduce him.”

“His merits are not enough? When he has served his time?”

“No. It’s not merit—you have to know the right people and they propose you. Even the lowliest clerk has a patron. Johnnie will never get into the Company without a patron.”

“What you need is a wealthy and well-positioned friend,” Livia observed.

Alinor gave her a grave level look. “We don’t have one,” was all she said. “Johnnie and Sarah will have to make their own way in the world. Like their uncle Rob did.”

“Ah yes,” Livia said, her hand on her heart at once. “My Roberto earned his success because he studied so hard and learned so much.”

“He would not have given one word to that man that you call a friend.” Alinor was steely. “They parted in a silence that Rob would never have broken.”

“He’s no friend of mine,” Livia said earnestly. She took Alinor’s hand and held it in her own. “I use his house, I use his name only to make our fortune,” she promised. “As soon as I can, I shall buy a house to show my goods and I will never see him again. You will never think of him again.”

Alinor withdrew her hand. “I would not think of him now if you were not at his house every day,” she said quietly.

Livia picked up the menu for Sunday. “But this is a feast!” she said.

Alinor let her turn the conversation. “We celebrate so seldom these days. When I was a girl there were feast days all the time. Harvest home and Christmas and Midsummer Day and Easter, and the quarter days as well, and the saints’ days, Plough Monday and Beating the Bounds…”

“Are they not all restored now?” Livia asked. “Now that the king has come back to London and everyone is happy again?”

“They were country festivals. They can’t happen in the town.” Alinor looked out over the river as if she could see the long horizon of the mire and the procession of people going to the little church with flowers in their hats.

“Would you like to live in the country again?” Livia inquired. “Roberto was always speaking of his home, and the tide coming in over the land. It’s what he loved about Venice—the marshes outside the city and the sandbanks and the reeds. He said it was like the country of his childhood, half sea and half water and never certain.”