“No! Never say it!” he said laughing. “All we do is clean them and we sometimes mount them on a plinth so they can be seen. But we don’t alter them in any way. They have to be authentic.”

“You don’t copy them? Or carve your own?”

“The skills have been lost,” he said firmly. “That’s what gives these survivors their value: that they are so old and can never be made again. To pass off modern work as that of the ancients would be a fraud. These are worth a fortune because they are antiquities. A modern copy would be worth only the price of the stone and the wage of the mason. An ancient statue is worth ten times that. We take great care that all our things are truly old, truly beautiful.”

“And you share everything?”

“Let us say we are partners. We were partners when she first saw them in the Palazzo Fiori, we were partners when we rescued her share, and we are partners now, as we sell them.”

“Her palace must have been very beautiful,” Sarah ventured.

“It was one of the finest.”

“And then she married Mrs. Reekie’s son. That was surely a comedown for her?”

“Ah, the doctor? Little Roberto? Did you know him?”

Sarah found that she was bristling at the casual dismissal of her uncle. “No, I never knew him. He’d gone to Venice before I went to work for Mrs. Reekie. I know of him, for they talk of him often. They loved him, they mourn him… But I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”

“And of course, you’ll never see him,” he reminded her gently.

“No, of course. It was a great shock for the household when the Nobildonna wrote and told us that he was dead.”

“It was a great shock for us also,” he said. “A tragedy. So? You have seen our store. You can take your pick. How many things do you want?”

“About twenty things,” Sarah said. “And Captain Shore is to ship them back to England, as before.”

“Will you choose them now?” He handed her the candelabra and leaned against the wall as she walked around the crowded room, looking at one thing, stretching around something to inspect another, and bending down to admire the stored columns.

“I should take columns,” she said. “I know she wants four or five. Some of the bigger animals—people like them for their gardens. Lions especially. Some vases, and I think—the Caesar heads, another set of them. And a few little things, for showing on tables.”

“You like the Chimera?” he asked, showing her a lion with the head of a goat bursting from its spine, being bitten by the lion tail, which was itself a snake. Sarah recoiled. “It’s horrible!”

He laughed. “Little Jolie—nothing is horrible. Nothing is beautiful. It is just what people like now and then. And this is amusing as it shows a brute that preys on itself. Like Man perhaps. It is not charming but it is in fashion. All we care for is fashion. All we want is money. You can start packing them tomorrow. Your taste is very good, it’s just what I would have chosen myself.”

He led the way out of the room and closed the door behind him. Their nighttime candles were burning on the marble side table in the shadowy hall. Sarah was suddenly acutely aware that the house was silent and that they were alone together, and that his dark gaze was on her face.

“Now,” he said quietly. “Would you like to sleep in your bedroom? Or would you prefer to come to mine?”

Sarah shot one horrified glance at his smiling face. “No!” she said. “I’m not… I’m not…”

“Not that sort of milliner,” he said understandingly, not the least embarrassed. “In that case I will give you your candle and bid you good night, Miss Jolie.”

DECEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned went through the laborious process of loading his basket with goods, strapping on his snowshoes, shooing Red out of the door, and heading into town. Red bounded through the snow, sinking and leaping, his thick fur ice-tipped. Ned did not need to dig out his garden gate; the drifts were so high that they stepped over the top of it and onto the wide featureless snow plain that was the village common. On either side Ned could see the roofs and the shuttered top-floor windows of the houses. One or two settlers had dug out their front doors; but most had abandoned the front of their houses to the snow and only dug out their yard so they could feed their beasts and get to their stores. Every house carried a cap of snow, every house showed a streamer of smoke at the chimney, as if to say that the village was fighting to stay warm, burning huge stores of wood every day to try to get through the ordeal of winter.

Ned traded venison from Norwottuck as he went, picking up a small cheese from a dairywoman whose cow was still in milk, and admiring some knitted woolen gloves. Though his fingers were red and chapped from the cold, he did not think he could afford to trade food for gloves.

He made his way down the street to the minister’s house where the slaves had arduously dug a path to the front and back door and to the meetinghouse. Ned, carrying his basket, went round to the back, and knocked on the kitchen door.

“You have to push it open, the wood’s warped,” came a shout from Mrs. Rose inside.

Ned put his shoulder against the door and fell into the kitchen. “Beg pardon,” he said, flinching from her glare as snow from his hat cascaded on the clean floor. He stepped back out again, took off his snowshoes, shook himself like a bear, and then came inside, leaving his oiled cape, coat, hat, and mittens on the hooks at the side of the door. “I am sorry,” he said.

“Never mind, you’re in now,” she said. “Is it cold out?”

“Very. I left my dog in one of your stables.”

“Will he be warm enough there?”

“Yes, I won’t be too long. I brought you some meat.”

She glanced into his basket. “Thank you. They’re all upstairs,” she told him. “The cellar’s too cold in this weather. And no strangers come in this season, anyway.”

Ned hesitated, wondering if he should say something more intimate to her. “I’m glad to see you,” he said. “You’re looking well.”

She threw him a little smile. “And I you,” she said. “I think of you, beside the ice river, the last house of the town.”

“It’s not that far away,” he protested, as he always did.

“Look at you!” she replied. “Wearing half a bear just to get to the minister’s house.”

He nodded. “John Sassamon came the other day and he was wearing half what I put on, and he was warm. I must get him to trade me his furs.”

She turned her head at once. “He’d rather have a red or a blue coat,” she said. “They all would. They all want proper clothes; but they won’t work to earn it. You shouldn’t buy his native clothes, and he should stay in his proper trousers and shirt. Why would he run around in buckskin when he’s got a perfectly good proper house in Natick? A wife? A ministry? What’s he even doing this far north?”

“That’s what I’ve got to talk to the minister about,” Ned said.

She nodded, compressing her lips on what she might have said. “He’ll be spying,” was all she said shortly. “Running about the woods and spying on us.”