She glanced at his mother and saw her smiling, dark-eyed nod, and then turned back to his intense gaze. “Buonanotte, Felipe,” she repeated, and took her candle and walked from the dining room. She felt him watch her all the way to the foot of the stone stairs, and she walked, shoulders back, head set, proudly like a little queen, as beautiful as a statue, all the way up the stairs while the candle flame bobbed excitedly beside her.

DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

Johnnie came home the Sunday before Christmas and found his mother standing precariously high, on a clerk’s stool, pinning greenery above the corner cupboard in the parlor.

“You know, when I was young, it was forbidden to take a holiday on Christmas Day?” she said, stretching to make the last adjustment. “This is such a pleasure.”

“But why was it forbidden?” he asked.

“Oliver Cromwell,” she said shortly. “And the minister said it was pagan. But now it’s all turned around.”

“The court takes two weeks to celebrate,” he said. “Drunk for a fortnight. And then they start all over again for Twelfth Night.”

Alys laughed. “You’re a puritan like your uncle Ned,” she told him, as he helped her down. “Our minister, the puritan one at St. Wilfrid’s, used to say—where does it say in the Bible that you should get drunk to celebrate the coming of the Lord? And Old Ellie from East Beach would shout from the back: ‘He didn’t turn water into wine to make vinegar to put on His cabbage, you know!’ ”

“She did?”

“Aye, they would punish her every Twelfth Night for one thing or another. But they didn’t even call it Twelfth Night when I was a young woman. We didn’t have Twelfth Night nor Christmas.”

“Did you have presents?”

She turned from him to put berries on the coat hook on the back of the door. “We had no money for presents. But Rob and I used to look for the little tokens that your grandma loves so much. We’d search for them all year, and give them to her for Christmas. And she’d give us fairings, anything sweet. Lord, we loved anything with sugar.”

“You and your brother, Rob,” he confirmed.

“Yes, God bless him.”

“And Sarah is away, looking for him, this Christmas Day?”

She gave her son a long level look. “Oh—so you know too? You’ve known all along? And kept it from me? The three of you knew: your grandma and Sarah and you?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry, Ma.”

“You should have told me, Johnnie. We’ve become a family of secrets.”

He hesitated. “We’ve always been a family with secrets.”

She shook her head. “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

He looked awkward. “She thought you’d tell Livia.”

“I would have done!” Alys exclaimed. “I should have done! Who better than her to tell your grandma and my daughter that they were chasing after rainbows! What does she think? That Livia is not Rob’s widow? That he’s not dead?”

“They’re very sure that something’s wrong,” Johnnie said gently. “Grandma was convinced.”

“She’s taken it into her head that Rob is alive, and that Sarah will somehow find him, and Sarah took it as an excuse to go off on an adventure. Of course there’s nothing to it. God keep my daughter safe and bring her home.”

“Amen,” Johnnie said. “I miss her.”

“I miss her,” his mother confirmed. “And what are we going to tell Livia when Sarah steps off the ship from Venice? Tell me that!”

DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

The feather market was held in one of the great warehouses not far from the Rialto Bridge. Sarah and Felipe Russo walked through the narrow streets, across the market, where the money changers and moneylenders were setting up their stalls, under the arches of the court. Each man had a scale weight, and an abacus on his stall, a quill and paper to write a note of the debts, and a chest of coins safely underneath the table, guarded by a young man who stood behind the money changer and never took his eyes from the box.

“You’d do better to change your English money into gold,” Felipe told her. “You’re sure it’s a good coin?”

She nodded. “Will they give me the true weight for it?”

“They would not dare to cheat a Christian,” he said. “They’re Jews. They lend money and change gold and ply their trade in usury and sin by permission of the Doge. If any one of them so much as dreams of cheating he’d be denounced and publicly executed by sunset. They’re probably the most honest men in Venice. Certainly, they’re the most frightened.”

“You’d have to be a reckless man to break the law in this city,” Sarah remarked.

“Only for a very great profit,” he agreed.

“How do I choose which moneylender?” Sarah asked, hanging back from the downcast faces of the men in their long black gowns, each with a yellow star sewed on the front of his black coat. “They all look equally… tormented.”

“I use this man,” Felipe pointed out. “Mordecai.” He guided her up to the stall. “English guinea for gold,” he said shortly.

The man bowed, and took up his scales. “May I have the coin, your ladyship?” he asked Sarah in perfect English.

“How did you know I was English?” she asked, startled.

He kept his head bent but she could see his smile. “Your fairness of face, ladyship,” he said quietly. “All the English have that fair skin.” He glanced at Felipe and spoke in Italian: “So like the Milord doctor.”

“Just give her the money,” Felipe ordered quietly in Italian.

Sarah kept her face impassive as she watched the moneylender’s lad open the chest under the stall and hand up gold coins and little pieces of gold chain. She did not betray for a moment that she had understood the brief exchange. She put her hand in the placket of her skirt, drew out Alinor’s guinea, hesitated for a moment, and then handed it over.

Mordecai the moneylender put the coin on one side of the scale and added coins and links of a gold chain until they balanced exactly.

“And some for luck,” Felipe said in English, a little edge to his voice.

“Signor… it was fair measure and an agreed price.”

“You’ll sell a good English guinea at a profit, you know you will, you old sinner. Give the lady a little, for luck.”

“I don’t—” Sarah began.

“As I say.”

Without another word, Mordecai added three links of a gold chain and the scales tipped and wobbled to Sarah’s advantage.

“Hold out your purse and he’ll pour it in,” Felipe instructed.

Sarah did as she was told. “There you are,” he said as she pulled the strings of the purse shut and carefully tied it on her belt.

He guided her away from the stall, and they left the square and climbed up the steeply canted Rialto Bridge. On either side were little stalls selling beautiful pieces of glassware, exquisite metalwork: daggers enameled with glass, set with jewels. Spice sellers had colored and scented powders that Sarah had never seen before, there were perfumed soaps and sprinkling dust and oils on another stall, while another had yards of silks and velvets in the shadow of a huge oiled and painted parasol. Even the air smelled strange and exotic, scents of patchouli and lemon and rose billowed about them as they walked. Sarah stopped to smell the sharp wintry scent of myrrh.