She seated herself in Tabs’s chair by the fire, took a knife from the table, and slit open the paper.

My dear Livia,

For so I shall call you.

First news! I am snowed in and not able to come to London, nor send for you until the ways are clear. I don’t even know how long this letter will take to reach you. We have had extraordinary weather, and my aunt and I have been housebound for days. We doubt if we shall get out till the New Year. Quite an adventure. It’s not uncommon for us to have snow, but this is early and uncommonly deep.

I hope you are well, and that you are not troubled with such harsh weather. I have often observed that the south of the countries are warmer than the northern regions, and I hope that is the case for you in London.

Livia paused in her reading and gritted her teeth on her temper at her fiancé’s untimely interest in climate.

As soon as the snow clears, I will come to you, and—good news—my aunt is determined to make the long journey to see you also. As soon as we have arrived at Avery House I will send for you. I am sorry for this delay, but I am sure you are having a happy time with your family, and I can only trust you will be glad to greet—

Your obdt servant

James Avery

“Cattive notizie?” Carlotta asked her, disobediently hovering in the doorway, holding the baby. “Bad news?”

“No!” Livia lied. “Not at all. Sir James writes to me that he is coming to London, as soon as the roads clear.”

“Un matrimonio?” Carlotta asked her, gleaming.

Livia glanced at Tabs, who was openly listening. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said coldly. “To sell the antiquities of course. They will be here soon.”

DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

Sarah slept and then woke with a start, but it was still night; the shutters threw bars of the shadow and moonlight on the floor, the canal outside the window was quiet, except for the lapping sound of a passing boat or the call of a disturbed gull. Sarah slid from under the covers, drew a shawl around her shoulders, and tiptoed to the door and down the stairs into the hall. The warehouse door was locked, but she knew the key was kept under one of the statues on a shelf in the hall. She went down the row, sliding her fingers under the base of each one to feel underneath, until she touched the cold shank. Quietly she drew it out, went to the warehouse door, fitted it into the keyhole, and turned.

The warehouse was ghostly in the moonlight that filtered through the greenish glass windows. Sarah went silently down the rows of shelves, past the looming pale statues, till she reached the curtained door, set in the curve of the wall around the secret stair.

It was locked, but it was a double door, slumped on its hinges, and she could just pull it apart, leaning on one heavy door and pushing against the other until there was enough of a gap between the two of them for the old lock to release and she could slip through. These service stairs spiraled upwards to the kitchen and downwards into darkness. The cold dank smell of the canal rose up to greet her. Sarah blinked into the gloom, trying to see, but all she could make out was the pallor of the stone stairs, winding down into blackness, the only sound was the eerie lap of invisible waters against the bottom steps.

Sliding a bare foot along each step to make sure that she could feel her way, her hand against the rough stone of the curved wall of the staircase, Sarah went down, one step after another, the sound of lapping water becoming louder, almost as if it were coming to meet her, as if a flood were rising. Finally, she was at the bottom, and there was a door before her; she put out a trembling hand. It was unlocked.

Gently, she pushed the door and found herself in a downstairs warehouse, a match for the one above, in almost complete darkness. The noise of lapping water from the water gate and the greenish light from the far end of the room guided her down a narrow path between benches loaded with more goods. The door at the end to the water gate was bolted from the inside, but the bolts were well oiled and slid silently back. There was no more than a little click from them and then she opened the door to the dancing illumination of moonlight on the canal. She found herself standing on a little quay, in the Russo water gate. To her left the marble steps ran up to the main house; opposite her, beside the bigger quay, the Russo gondola rocked, its head bobbing up and down like an eerie black horse.

Sarah was on the narrow storehouse quay, on the opposite side from the great steps, a place for unloading household goods; she turned and went back into the store, leaving the door open for the light.

At first glance it was a mirror image of the storerooms upstairs. Under the windows set high, away from the water, was a disorganized heap of statues, some big rounded amphorae and a jumble of little animals curled noses to paws, who looked as if they had been frozen and turned to stone as they slept together on the broad shelves.

There was a big workbench in the middle of the room, and towering over it, supported by a hawser on a pulley set in the roof beam, was a huge block of stone, the base carved roughly to look like a cliff, and on it, farther up, arms spread as if preparing to leap off the precipice into flight, an angel, a boy, naked but for a pair of exquisitely carved wings, plumage like an eagle. Sarah looked up into the sculpted face of Icarus and saw a creature as beautiful as Michelangelo’s David, feathered like an archangel.

To her right was a small plaster cast of what the finished statue would look like, dotted with guide points so that the stone mason could measure from point to point to reproduce in stone what he had cast in plaster from his clay model.

For a moment Sarah was stunned by the beauty of the statue and by its size. It was at least twice life-size, carved to be seen from the ground on a tall pedestal or mounted on a building, high near the roof. The beautiful face looked down on her as if the boy were measuring his distance to earth, and something about those wide eyes and the formed lips made Sarah want to shout a warning to him, stone though he was, that he should not jump, not trust the fantastic feathered pinions that sprang from his muscled shoulders. As she checked her impulse, she realized why she wanted to speak to the stone face; it was compellingly real. Sarah realized she was looking at a work of art of exceptional beauty and importance. But it was a new work, in the process of carving from the plaster model. This was the workshop where Signor Russo’s stone mason carved exquisite fakes.

Behind her, on the back wall, were slabs of marble, each as thick as a tabletop, stacked one on another. Each shelf had a pile of them, some of them nearly as long as the entire wall, others were shorter, some of them showing new cuts, where the whiteness of the inner stone contrasted with the aged patina of the surface. These were genuine, these were old, probably ancient. Raised on her toes Sarah could see the top of one pile of slabs and understood why they were so long and thin—each one was a single side of a stone box, plain on the inside, magnificently carved on the outer side. As she went along the shelf, she saw more and more pieces that matched in length, two long pieces, beside two short. Sarah imagined it assembled into a magnificent frieze, rider following rider or grand horses with tossing manes and tails in a long ribbon of marble. She could tell it was old, the marble was stained brown as if it had been buried in clay, and some of the horses were chipped and scarred and missing their tack. From the odd stud of a nail and a little of a rein, she guessed that the saddlery had been richly wrought, the horses bitted with gold and harnessed with bronze. But even disassembled, even shelved in a jumble, this was a band of stone fit for a palace wall.