“It takes time to arrange a proper burial,” he said. “Sometimes we have to keep the bodies for a little while. I am sorry that you had such a fright.”

She shook her head, her eyes fixed on her face. “What?”

“My dear,” he said gently. “Every profit comes at someone’s cost. We make a great deal of money by tomb raiding. Yes—for that is what it is. And the people who paid for their beautiful burials are robbed. But they know nothing of it. What harm is it?”

Again she shook her head.

“But—of course—you were spying. I had not invited you into that part of the warehouse. You were not invited there, no one but my stone masons go there. It is not the behavior of a good guest to—how do you say it? Intrude.”

“I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I wanted…” She realized she had no excuse. “I wanted to look at the Nobildonna’s dower, her beautiful pieces, for packing tomorrow, and I went farther down the warehouse and then through the door.”

“Through the locked door? The one that is hidden behind a curtain?” he pointed out.

She felt simply in the wrong. “I was just working…”

“No you weren’t,” he said coldly, and she swallowed a little gasp on her new fear of him.

“Suppose you tell me the truth?” he suggested. “It is nearly morning, and my mother has told me you had your dinner and you went early to bed. I know you are lying with this talk of working for the Nobildonna; but I don’t know why, nor what you are really doing here?”

She trembled again, her mind frozen in this new shock. “I’m not lying.”

“Obviously you are.” There was ice beneath his pleasant tone. “You are lying to my face and spying on me. First of all: what is your real name?”

She shivered; she did not know what she should say.

“Better that you say.” His voice was silky.

“My name is Sarah,” she said in a very small voice. “Sarah Stoney.”

“And how do you know the Nobildonna?”

She looked towards the door, to the windows overlooking the canal. There was no escape from this interrogation. “I want to go to bed,” she said childishly.

“Not till you have answered my questions. Remember, you are in my house under a false name. I could denounce you for spying right now and I would be paid a fee for arresting you.”

“I’m just a milliner!” she protested.

“Now, that, I believe,” he agreed. “You truly loved the feathers.”

“I did. I really did.”

“So, are you the Nobildonna’s milliner?”

“Yes,” she said, grasping at the lie.

“And why did she send you here?”

“To find her husband,” Sarah invented rapidly. “She’s so grieved—her heart is breaking—and she thought he might be alive. She thought he might be in prison: not dead. So she asked me to come…” Her lie tailed off as he rose and went to the window and looked out at the canal. His face was hidden from her but she could see his shoulders were shaking. She thought he was weeping, perhaps for sorrow at the loss of Rob—so she rose too, uncertain what she should do. Carefully she approached him and put her hand gently on the velvet sleeve. “Are you distressed, Felipe? Did you know him?” she asked.

Felipe Russo turned, and showed her the tears in his dark eyes, but they were from laughing, he could hardly stop laughing to gasp: “Child, I swear that you will be the death of me! For God’s sake stop lying to me. That is the funniest thing I ever heard. You will never know how ridiculous! It’s a terrible lie, a stupid lie, a clumsy lie. She would never send a girl like you to save her husband from prison!”

“But why not?” Sarah demanded. “She loved him. She would want to know he is safe. She would surely want him found? Why should she not have sent me to get him out?”

“Never! Never!”

“But why never?”

“Because it was she who denounced him! Little fool! She put him in there, herself!”

DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

“And where is Sarah?” Livia asked the one question Alys had been dreading. The two women were in bed, wrapped up in shawls against the cold, ice flowers frosting the inside of the windows in the winter London dawn.

“Still at her friend’s house.”

“She does not come home? Not for Christmas? Is she coming for Twelfth Night? When will she come?”

Alys moved out of Livia’s embrace and leaned up on one elbow, so she could see the beautiful face on the pillow, the dark plait over the bronze shoulder.

“She will come soon,” she said.

“You do not send for her, and order her home?”

“No. She will come… perhaps next month.”

“So, tell me the truth.”

Alys felt dread in her belly. “The truth?” she repeated. She knew she could not bear to tell Livia that she was so deeply mistrusted, that her own mother-in-law would not love her, would not receive her money, would not accept her child as a grandson.

“Have you sent her away because you did not want her to see us?” Livia whispered.

“See us?” Alys repeated; she had no idea what Livia was saying.

“See us together?”

“Why should she not see us together?” the older woman repeated.

Livia stretched deliciously, like a lazy cat, her arms above her head, the dark hair in her armpits releasing an erotic scent of musk and oil of roses. “Since she would see—as your mother, for all her wisdom, does not see—that we are friends, that we are lovers who will never be parted, we will be together forever.”

Alys felt her world turning around her; she put a hand on the headboard, as if to anchor herself against seasickness. “We are sisters,” was all she could say. “We love each other as sisters.”

“Oh my dear, call it what you will! Do you not love me and want me to stay here forever? Do you not wait, through the long cold day, for when we shall be alone together at night? Have we not found, together, true happiness? We are loving sisters who have never found love like this before in our lives. No husband has understood me or been tender to me as you, and you have never had a husband at all. Am I not dearer to you than anyone you have ever known?”

“Except my children,” Alys temporized. “Except my mother.”

Livia waved them away. “Of course, of course, except our children. Is not this the first true love you have known?”

Alys thought of the young man who abandoned her on her wedding day and left her and her mother to face disaster alone. “All he gave me was a cart,” she said with old bitterness. “And I had adored him, I risked everything for him.”

Livia laughed. “But I will give you a fortune,” she promised. “We will move to a bigger, better wharf with a beautiful storehouse where you will show art and antique collections and we will be true in love and true in business. The world will see us as loving sisters, and we will keep our desire hidden. I will never tell of it and you will be mine, heart and soul. Send for Sarah, she can come home. We will be discreet. I will let everyone think that I am pursuing Sir James—” She put up her hand before Alys could protest. “I know you don’t like him but let everyone think that I am chasing him for his money. That’s what your mother thinks already, isn’t it?”