“No, no. My grandma asked me to come, and she’ll have told my mother by now. She asked me to come and find my uncle Rob. He was reported drowned, you see, but my grandma is sure… she felt…” Sarah trailed off.

“Your grandma—the healer?”

Sarah nodded.

“And she wanted you to find her son?”

Sarah nodded again.

“The drowned one!” he exclaimed.

“Yes, she doesn’t think he drowned.”

“But why not send your brother? Or Mrs. Stoney herself? I’d have been proud to carry her. She could have had a cabin for free!”

She had no answer. “It was only my grandma who wanted me to come. She was certain, she felt she just knew.”

“Does she have the sight?” he lowered his voice to ask. “The sailors who buy her teas against fever say she has a gift. Do you have it?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said cautiously. “It depends who’s asking.”

He laughed unwillingly at that. “You’re your mother’s daughter,” he said. “No fool. But—Lord—you’ve got us into trouble here. How will you set about finding him?”

“That’s why I came to see you,” she said. “Someone told me that my uncle was not drowned, but in the well. D’you know what that means?”

The Captain’s anxious face was suddenly as grave as if she had told him of a death. “Of course, I know what it means. They make sure that everyone knows. It means he is lost to you, child. The well is the stone cellars of the Doge’s Palace, the worst of prisons. Nobody comes out from there, but to the scaffold.”

“There must be people who are released! People who prove their innocence?”

He looked at her. “Maid, I’m sorry for you. This isn’t England. They’re denounced, they’re taken up, they’re tried, and then they’re gone. If they ever come out at all it’s to be hanged in the square, but mostly they just disappear, no one ever speaks of them again. If they’re in the piombi—the cells under the lead roof—they die of the heat in summer. In winter, they die of cold. If they’re in the well, they get sick from the mists and the damp of the canal. And if they’re accused of heresy or treason, they put them in a cage and dangle them over the canal and let them starve to death in public.”

“He won’t have been a heretic,” Sarah said firmly. “None of us would die for our beliefs. We’re a family that wants to live. But what could he have done that someone would denounce him? He was a doctor, a physician. He made people better and saved lives! I spoke to someone who knew him—he was trying to find a cure for quatrain fever. Who would denounce a man like that?”

Captain Shore shrugged. “That’s what the Bocca are for. Anyone could have denounced him for anything. An unhappy patient? A rival physician? A woman? Someone who thought he was a spy because he was English? Probably, we’ll never know. Did he make enemies?”

“I know nothing about him but that he married the Nobildonna, on the death of her first husband!” she exclaimed.

“Nobildonna da Ricci, or Peachey, or whatever she calls herself today?” he asked. “Her that has more furniture than any woman on God’s earth?”

“You call her da Peachey?” Sarah confirmed.

He shrugged. “I call her what she tells me to call her. That’s the name she had put on the cargo manifest.”

She nodded. “I’m staying with her steward. He doesn’t know I’m her niece. I gave him my false name.”

“Signor Russo?” he asked, looking at her under his sandy eyebrows. “Handsome as a devil and charming as a snake?”

Sarah blinked at the critical description of her only friend in Venice. “That’s him,” she agreed uncertainly.

“Not a good place for you,” he said flatly.

She drew closer. “Captain Shore, why not?”

“Not my place to say,” he hesitated.

“You wouldn’t want me to be in danger…”

“I don’t want you to be here at all!” he said, goaded.

“My ma would want you to protect me if you could.”

“I know! I know!” he said miserably.

“When we get home, I will tell her how kind you have been to me.”

“If we ever get home at all!”

“Help me,” Sarah urged him. “It’s my mother’s brother.”

“Step over here.” He led her to the prow of the ship and they faced out over the water, so that no one on the quay could see their faces or guess what they were saying from the movement of their lips. “That Russo—he’s not just a collector of antiquities.”

She waited. “He was my aunt’s steward,” she volunteered, and saw him quickly shake his head.

“He’s an ambidexter, a cheat. He’s got more statues than could ever have come from one house. I’ve shipped hundreds of big crates for him, stones, friezes, figures, statues, one so big that it had to lie on deck and we had to clamber round it.”

Sarah looked down the deck of the galleon, trying to imagine a statue as big as he described.

“He sells a lot?”

“That’s what I’m saying, he’s a trader, the biggest trader. He handles them in their hundreds.”

“But surely, that’s not illegal?”

“Not illegal if he buys them, and doesn’t steal them,” he confirmed. “Not illegal if he has the paperwork to export them. Not illegal if he doesn’t falsify the paperwork, saying he’s sending one thing when really he’s sending something else. Not illegal if he’s not forging them: copying and then chipping them and darkening them to pass them off as old. Not illegal if he’s not putting lots of different parts together and then saying it’s a rarity—a whole figure.”

“Are all these crimes?”

“The Venetians don’t want all their statues and old goods flying away to the new houses of France and Germany and England,” he said. “You’re only allowed to ship so much. You have to have a permit, and you can only get a permit if you’re an ambassador. Didn’t your mother herself tell me it was the Lady’s furniture—not antiquities but furniture?”

Sarah nodded fearfully. “I thought that was so the Nobildonna could avoid paying duty in England.”

“She should have paid in both countries,” he said dourly. “She’s committing a crime in two countries. And so is anyone who ships and stores for her. She’s got your mother smuggling for her.”

“My mother! You didn’t warn her?”

He scowled at her. “She wouldn’t hear a word against the widow.”

Sarah checked at the thought of the trust her mother had put in Livia. “They’re sisters-in-law,” she said.

“Not very sisterly to get your mother into a crime that could ruin her and her warehouse. The fines would bankrupt her.”

Sarah was white. “But all this is nothing to do with my uncle. Why was he denounced?”

Captain Shore shrugged. “Look, maid: Lord knows what she and that steward of hers were doing. Your uncle was in a nest of thieves, if not a thief himself.”