“Then we are agreed,” she said, and finally released him. “Go and get your appointment. You should start at Easter. I have been very good to you, Johnnie.”

“You have,” he said fervently.

“And one thing more?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t tell them any of this in the warehouse. Not any of it. Not our agreement, not your appointment, not till the day that you start work at Easter.”

“But why?” He was bemused. “They will be so pleased!”

“I have my reasons,” she said. “I have to make arrangements with Venice, I have to get my second shipment sold. I don’t want your mother to feel that I am moving too fast. She has to sell the warehouse and borrow money. You know what she’s like, so slow to see opportunity. Do you agree?”

He could not think why he should not agree, it was such a great benefit to him and there was no reason that he should tell his mother until he was about to start. But he was uncomfortably aware that there were secrets in the warehouse where there had never been any before. The unbalanced account books, Sarah’s absence, the unpaid Excise duty, Livia’s friendship with Sir James, this plan to sell and borrow, and—worst of all—his grandmother’s suspicions of her.

“It will not hurt my mother or grandmother if we keep it secret?” he temporized, and she widened her dark eyes at him, the picture of innocence.

“How could it? No! And I would be the last person in the world to harm them,” she said. “It is a little secret, just a delay. To spare me embarrassment.” She paused. “You know that they do not like Sir James. They do not like my friendship with him. But it brings us wealth, and it brings you this opportunity. I don’t want them to quarrel with me when I am trying to do good for them, and especially for you.”

“Oh, I see!” he said.

“So we are agreed? I do you this great favor, you tell no one of it, and you remember you are obliged to me.”

“I am!” he promised.

“So you can go,” she told him. He did not see her raise her face for his kiss as he dashed across the road, dodging between carts, and entered the tall door of East India House at a run.

DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

At dawn, a cold dark December dawn, after more than a month at sea, Sarah heard the order to drop the sails and the ship slowed. Throwing a shawl around her shoulders she ran barefoot up the companionway to the upper deck in time to see a shallow boat rowed like a gondola by a standing oarsman come alongside, and the passenger climb nimbly up a lowered ladder. He greeted Captain Shore with a brief handshake and went to the wheel. The sails were raised again and the ship was underway with the stranger commanding.

“Who’s that?” Sarah asked the ship’s cook as he went past with two mugs of grog for the Captain and the steersman.

“Pilot,” he said. “In his sandolo. Nobody knows the channels and the sandbanks like the pedotti. They have to live in Rovigno and guide the ships into the Custom quay.”

“This is Venice?” Sarah asked, disappointed by the low-lying sandbars and scrubby islands. “I thought it was a grand city? I thought there were big houses, not just these farms? And some of these are not even islands, they’re just sandbars.”

The man laughed and went on to the wheel. “You keep watching,” he advised her. “We’re hours out.”

Sarah went to the side and looked out through the gradually lightening mist. A succession of islands emerged, one after another, slowly changing into a landmass dim and purple. The marshy islands and little promontories became bigger, higher in the water, walled, with quays and piers, and then she started to see houses, at first built singly on little islands with a boat moored at the quay at the front, and then the islands were linked one to another, with little bridges and quays. The houses became bigger, more ornate, she could see the tossing heads of trees in beautiful gardens over the high walls, then there were fewer gardens and the houses ran side by side like a terrace with great water doors opening onto the lagoon, which was now narrowing ahead of them to become a broad beautiful canal, and she was no longer at sea but in a city, which looked, not as if it were built on water, but as if it had risen from it and was still dripping.

Sarah was astounded. A London child, she was not overawed by the crowds of people on the narrow quays running inland, nor the mass of water traffic in the broad waterway, but she could not believe the complete absence of horses and carriages and wagons: there were truly no roads, there was no grind of wheels or clatter of hooves, no smell of animals being driven to market. She found she was peering down the canal junctions assuming there must be lanes and fields and stables tucked behind the buildings; but where in London there might have been an alley, here there was the glassy shine of a canal with narrow dark quaysides running alongside it and dozens of low-slung bridges, some no more than a plank levered up on a rope that could be dropped for a pedestrian, and then raised for a passing boat.

On and on they went, the little craft before and behind them, traghetti crossing and recrossing from one side to another, gondolas spearing into the waters of the main channel and then swerving off into mysterious canals, barges loaded with enormous beams of wood, some of them with sharpened ends to be driven into the lagoon bed to form the piles for more new buildings and new quays; galleys, rowed by men bowed over the oars, skiffs, sandoli, wherries, boats of every sort and size.

Sarah’s bare feet grew icy cold; but she could not tear herself from the side of the ship watching this extraordinary city unfold. They went past a palace, white as marble standing on a marble quay, blanched and priceless, its huge gates open wide. There were men in dark cloaks walking in the inner marble courtyard, the snowy walls around them pierced with a thousand windows looking down, looking out, missing nothing. Beside the palace was a high bell tower made of brick, set in a vast public square, lined on every side with more white buildings with more dark windows.

Captain Shore yelled an order to dip the standard as a sign of respect to the palace, as the ship went on, down the wide channel between beautiful buildings on each side, falling sheer into the glassy water.

Looking forward, Sarah could see a massive stone quay dividing the canal into two. At the sharply pointed prow of the quay was a high brick watchtower crowned with a four-sided roof and a swinging weathercock. The warehouse walls, crenellated like a castle, stretched back along the white marble quays; the warehouse doors stood in great ranks, on both sides, facing the water. Moored up on both sides of the quays were three or four oceangoing ships like their own, cargo hatches open, loading and unloading at the treble-height doors.

Captain Shore shouted the order to drop the sails, the pedotti let the ship nose slowly into her mooring place, and the crew threw lines to the waiting lumpers, who caught them and made them fast. The pedotti lashed the steering wheel and put his seal on it, to signify that the ship could not sail again without a pilot on board, threw a casual salute to Captain Shore, pocketed his fee, and was first down the gangplank to take a ship up the Grand Canal on the return journey. He disappeared among the crowd of dockers with sleds and carts for unloading, the officials, and the duty officers.

“Better stop gawping and get your boots on,” Captain Shore advised, going past her. “They’ll want to see you, an’ all.”