“All of these things are hers?” Sarah pursued.

He shrugged. “We don’t quarrel about who owns what. We have an agreement.”

“An agreement?”

“A partnership. But you know what she wants to ship? Or was the list stolen with the letter of authorization?”

Sarah picked her words with care. “The list was stolen with her letter to you. But I know what she wants.”

The chill of the storehouse, filled with icy marble so near to the dark, slowly moving canal, made her shiver. “The Caesar heads sold well, and the smaller pieces, like the fawn.”

His warm smile never wavered, she could not tell if he believed her.

“So let me show you some things, and you shall choose.”

He led her deeper into the warehouse where the shelves were filled with little scraps of things, the heads of babies, the wings of cherubs, a fat little foot of a child not yet walking, a clenched fist held against a giggling mouth. The farther they went into the gloom the more that Sarah felt that these were real children, horribly frozen babies.

“Nothing like this,” she said faintly. “She can’t sell anything like this.”

“It distresses you?” he asked acutely. “The row on row of stone babies?”

She felt herself choking, as if on the dust of their bones. She nodded.

He laughed as if he found her charming. “Then let me show you this…” He turned her around the shelves to another rack where small animals seemed to play. “Mostly off friezes. We think the country people sawed them from the facades of old palaces and temples. Made them into little gods. People are such fools. But they are pretty? Are they not?”

It was like being in a wonderland of an English forest. Little rabbits stood up on their hind legs, their ears pricked, squirrels flirted fat tails. Nests of baby birds opened their beaks and harassed mother birds bent to feed them, a wriggling worm rendered in stone before the open maws. There was even a stone pond with stone ripples and a leaping salmon.

“Oh! It is exquisite!” Sarah exclaimed, and then turned to the birds: blackbirds and robins and a speckled thrush, tits with long tails and tipped heads, and the adorable nest of a house martin with the mother bird hanging on the lip and half a dozen nestlings craning out.

“You like this? She would want this? This is what they like in England?”

“I love it!” Sarah declared. “We should have many small pieces. But she wants big pieces too. Grand pieces.”

“Grand?”

“The king is back on his throne and they all want portraits of Caesars and great men,” Sarah tried to explain. “All the lords are building big houses, they want to feel like returning heroes. They want to believe they are part of the Greeks, of the Romans, that great power descends to the new men, even though none of them ever risked anything, and none of them fought a battle.”

“You sound as if you despise them!”

“I do!” she said. She remembered she was supposed to be a servant and corrected herself: “Not that it’s my business, I know. I’m just a milliner.”

“And so who are the true heroes now in England? In the opinion of a pretty milliner?”

“People like Mrs. Reekie,” she told him truthfully. “People who have a vision, and hold to a vision. Not because they think they are better than everyone else; but because they know what is right in their hearts. People like Mrs. Stoney, her daughter, whose word is her bond, who smiles only rarely, but who is full of love that she doesn’t show. She never changes either. People like Mr. Ferryman, who left England and may never come back, because he will not live under a king again, after being free.”

“You sound as if you love them, your employers?”

“I do!” Sarah said, and then corrected herself with a shrug. “They’re good mistresses,” she said. “And that’s hard to find.”

“We live in changeable times,” he observed. “Most people prefer not to give their hearts and find it easier to change with the tides.”

“Good people know what’s right,” she argued. “And she—Mrs. Reekie—is like a lodestone. She can’t help but point the direction.”

He was silent for a moment. “Was it she who told you to come here?”

Sarah recovered herself, and smiled into his handsome face. “She allowed me to come, but it was Lady Reekie, the Nobildonna’s business, of course.”

“They like her? These good women in this great London merchant house? They admire her? She is happy? Does she say when she plans to return here?”

“They adore her,” Sarah said firmly. “Everyone adores her.”

“She has many friends?”

“Only Sir James, who shows her statues in his house.”

“Ah, she has an admirer? He’s a young man?”

“No, he’s quite old.”

“And what do you think of her? What is the opinion of the milliner of the Nobildonna, her Italian mistress?”

“I think she is the most wonderful woman,” she assured him, sounding completely sincere. “But I don’t say that I understand her.”

He laughed shortly. “Ah, she’s a woman!” he said. “If you cannot understand her, a woman and her own maid, I am sure I would never try to do so. Now, see here…”

He led her into a second room, off the first, crammed full of treasures, carefully arranged and stacked, some of them packed for travel, some of them laid on the floor. There were pillars piled one on another like carved logs. In the middle of the room were the larger pieces, many of them seated women. Some of them had been designed to serve as fountains, tipping empty jars into the darkness. All around them were random pieces of stone, some of them half-carved, others were blocks cut or fallen from a bigger piece, like a giant puzzle. And there were heads of great men, their stern brows crowned with laurel, and shields with inscribed poetry proclaiming heroism.

“I had no idea she had so much!” Sarah said. “How will she ever…”

“Sell it all?” he asked. “It is the collection of a lifetime, for a lifelong fortune. She can only sell a dozen or so pieces at a time. The English collectors want their statues one by one, not in their hundreds. I would never show a customer all of this, all at once. This is for you, only. When we have established a name, she will not have to sell pieces one at a time. The agents will come to us from England and France and Germany, we will have a showroom with just a few, a very few big pieces and they will order what they need and we will send it. The buyers like to see only a few pieces at a time, it makes them look rare.”

“They’re not rare?”

He held up the lamp so that she could see that every part of the room was filled. “They were carved for centuries in great numbers,” he said. “For tombs and public places, for houses and temples, for libraries and government offices, for roads and for overlooking the harbors. We are a country that has carved stone since the beginning of time. Of course, there are more statues than there are people in Venice! Now that they are admired, now that they are given a value, we find them, we dig for them all over and we trade them.”

“And you mend them and polish them?”