He laughed. “I will keep you safe, little cautious one! There will be no trouble for you! But half a guinea, it shall be.”

The woman behind the stall proffered a large set of scales with a tray for money on one side and a basket on the other. She showed that they weighed true with matching Venetian coins on either side, and then Sarah put a handful of her gold into the tray. The woman tipped an avalanche of turquoise feathers into the basket until the scales trembled and swung, and then balanced themselves evenly.

“And for luck?” Felipe reminded her, and she threw in another handful.

“You are content with your purchase?” he asked Sarah.

Dazzled by the color, the basket of sapphire, she nodded, and the woman poured them like a stream of light into a bundle of soft cloth, tied the top into a loop for easy carrying, and shoveled the gold into a pocket of her apron.

DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

Johnnie’s master called him into the inner office on Christmas Eve, and he stood before the great desk, loaded with ledgers, while Mr. Watson finished checking a column of figures and then peered at him over the top of a set of small eyeglasses.

“Ah, Master Stoney,” he said pompously. “Your time with us is up.”

“Yes, sir,” Johnnie replied.

“You have your contract of apprenticeship?”

Johnnie unrolled the scroll with the fat red seals at the bottom and Alys’s plain signature beside his master’s scrawl.

“Completed to the day,” Mr. Watson said. “You sign there.”

Johnnie made a clerkly signature at the foot of the page and Mr. Watson signed his own name with a swirl.

“You will stay on?” Mr. Watson inquired. “Senior clerk at five shillings a week?”

“I should be glad to,” Johnnie said. “Till Easter, if I may?”

“You hope to move to another House?”

“I have been fortunate,” Johnnie told him. “More fortunate than I could have hoped. I have a patron who has mentioned my name. I have visited the East India Company and they have offered me a post. They say I may start at Easter.”

“Good God!” Johnnie’s master dropped his chair back to four legs. “You’re flying very high,” he said with a hint of resentment. “I’ve not got a place at that table. Who got you in?”

“My aunt from Venice knows an investor,” Johnnie said. “He was so good as to recommend me.”

“You have an aunt from Venice?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s new, isn’t it?”

“It is, sir, and unexpected. But my uncle has just recently died and his widow has come, and is living with us.”

“And what do you have to do for her? For your patron? For this is a more than cousinly favor you have here?”

Johnnie laughed, a little embarrassed. “It seems I have to be her advisor, and her friend,” he said. “She lives with my mother and grandmother at the warehouse, and—it seems that she wants my support in a plan that she has for the business.”

Mr. Watson looked dourly at the young man. “Well, you can go home to your family, befriend your aunt over the holiday. If she wants to invest any money in cargoes I rely upon you to bring her here; bear in mind what I’ve done for you, lad. I expect to see her in the New Year.”

“She has only her dower,” Johnnie said. “She’s not a wealthy woman.”

“She has wealthy friends,” the merchant said flatly. “I’d like to meet them too.”

“I’ll tell her,” Johnnie said awkwardly. “I’ll definitely mention your name.”

“Aye. Well and good. Off you go now. Start again, day after Christmas, and God bless you all.”

Johnnie hesitated, in case there was a Christmas box—and left without any gift.

DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

Early in the morning, before the household was stirring, Sarah woke and dressed in silence, in the half-light of the moon reflected from the canal to her dappled ceiling. As she moved to leave the room, Chiara, still asleep in bed, stirred, and muttered something. Sarah froze, and then crept to the door on the creaking floorboards. She made no sound at all on the stone stair, and with her slippers in her hand she slipped down to the street door like a ghost. It was unlocked, the kitchenmaid had already come in and climbed up the stairs to the kitchen, to light the fire and start baking, so Sarah swung it open and went out into the quiet streets.

Venice was awake—Venice never slept. There were street sweepers plying their brushes, pushing the dust into the canal where it floated like a pale scum, and there were street waterers, hauling water from the canal and sloshing it over the pavements. The sellers were walking to the markets, their wares in balanced baskets swinging from the yokes on their shoulders. There were plain wooden gondolas and sandoli going up and down the canal carrying goods. The collectors of trash and soil were heaving the neighborhood baskets into their boat. There were one or two glossy black gondolas laden with drunks wallowing low in the water, heading home from a late night. One gondola with a closed cabin showed a flickering candlelight where clandestine lovers were holding back the day.

Sarah retraced her steps from yesterday, to the Rialto square where the moneylenders had their tables. She was too early for all of them, but one young boy, dressed in black with a skull cap on his head, and a betraying yellow star of cloth sewed on his little shirt, was waiting for his father by the fountain. Sarah went up to him.

“I’m looking for Mordecai the money changer.”

He bowed low, clasping his shaking hands before him, too afraid of the Christian woman to find his voice.

“Mordecai, the money changer,” she repeated.

“He walks here,” he replied reluctantly. “He will come at eight of the clock.”

“Can I go to meet him?”

“Your ladyship must do as you please,” he said in his little-boy treble.

“Will you guide me?”

His anxious look around the square showed her that he did not want to walk with her, but he knew he could not refuse a Christian lady anything that she might demand.

“Of course, your ladyship,” he said.

He trotted away from the square; Sarah strode beside him. “Where are we going?”

“Towards the ghetto, your ladyship.”

“What is that?”

“The old iron foundries… where the people of the Book have to live, all together. Locked in at night.”

She was going to ask more, when the boy looked up, and said with evident relief: “There is Mordecai now,” and she saw the man walking towards them, the deep canal on one side of him, the dark wall on the other, with his young apprentice following his footsteps, carrying the chest of money.

“Signor Mordecai?”

The boy shot an imploring look of apology to the older man. “I am sorry, signor,” he said in Italian. “She insisted, and I could not refuse.” He vanished into the shadows of the lane.

“Your ladyship,” Mordecai said in English, showing no surprise.

“You knew me for English, yesterday?”

He bowed. “I did.”