“But you do have a warehouse?” he pressed. “I sent the first load? Reekie Wharf?”

“It’s just a little storehouse beside the wharf, we load corn and apples and coasters’ loads for shillings at a time. We don’t earn much, we could hardly afford the shipping for her first load.” He heard the resentment in her voice. “She talked my ma into paying for her.”

“We agreed she should arrive penniless.” He laughed shortly. “We thought it would be more persuasive. We thought you were wealthy and you would be bound to help her if she came in, in tears, with the baby in her arms.”

Sarah scowled as she remembered Livia’s tragic appearance. “Oh, she did that, she did all of that. And we did help her. She’s got my mother wrapped around her little finger, risking our whole business in not declaring the goods. When you bring goods into England you have to pay the Excise—but the Nobildonna didn’t declare it.”

He gave a little laugh. “Of course not!”

“The first rich man she met was Sir James, and straightaway she got him to let her sell the antiquities at his big house on the Strand. I saw them together, as close as lovers. She sat at his desk to open her letters, she looks like she owns the place.”

Sarah betrayed all of the Nobildonna’s secrets without hesitation. “If she catches him, she’ll surely have no interest in trading antiquities, she’ll never want to see you again. She’ll want to leave you far behind, and us—she won’t come back to our wharf when she’s Lady Avery; she’ll be an English lady then, thinking of nothing but her children and her dogs.”

“But he’s an old man? You said he was old?”

“He is, he must be about forty.”

“Forty is no age at all!”

“It seems very old to me,” she replied. “Old enough to be my father.”

He looked at her from under his dark eyebrows “I am thirty-four. Do I seem very old to you?”

She could not help but laugh. “No! You’re…”

She blushed and could not describe him and he understood her stammering halt, and beamed back at her. “Thank God for that,” he remarked. “Did she really send for a second order of antiquities? That was true?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, recovering from her betraying embarrassment. “She said she made a fortune on the first load. Did she send any money back to you? Captain Shore could have carried a letter? Have you heard nothing from her at all?”

He rose from the table and went to the window, looking down at the canal as if he would find an answer in the green lapping waters and the crisscrossing boats.

Sarah rose from the table to stand beside him and follow his gaze. “So… now you know this of her, will you help me to get Rob released? There’s no reason for you to leave him in prison now. Not now that she’s betraying you. You’ve done all this: you’ve lied for her and denounced an innocent man, and smuggled for her, and now she’s gone away with your money and will marry someone else.”

“You talk like a child,” he said angrily. He turned from the window and threw himself in his ornate chair at the head of the table.

Sarah stood before him. “I speak simply,” she conceded. “And I’ll tell you why. Just because she is complicated, doesn’t make me stupid. I’m no fool. She’s played me for a fool, and she plays my mother for a fool, and plays Sir James for a fool, and even—I think—she’s made a fool of you. But not my grandmother, who knew the truth the moment she saw her and her baby. We don’t all have to dance to Livia’s tune. You can help me save Rob, and that will be one thing where she has not had her own way. My uncle is a good man, I believe, and his mother loves him. There’s no reason that we should help Livia to have him imprisoned, and maybe die in prison, and break my grandmother’s heart.”

He was silent, considering this. “One should never do business for spite,” he remarked.

“But why should you do so much, and risk so much, to get her into Sir James’s beautiful London house? With the next shipment of antiquities you will lie for her, supply her with forged goods, help her marry another man, and you’re not even going to be paid!”

He nodded slowly. “I am not disposed to do that.”

“Then help me.”

“Perhaps I could save Roberto,” he conceded. “Unless he is already dead. But it will not be easy, and why should I?”

“Because I believe you are a good man,” she said earnestly, putting her hand on his. “A good man who has done bad things. But this can be put right. You can put it right; indeed, you should put it right.”

He looked at her with a smile in his dark eyes. “For the sake of goodness and justice?” he asked her. “So that I can be a better person? You talk like a Protestant!”

“Yes.” She did not flinch at his cynicism. “But there is another reason.”

“I’m listening.”

She smiled at him, suddenly confident. “If you get Rob released, and he comes home with me to England, then she can’t marry anyone, can she? She’s still married to him. Her plan to break her promise to you, and steal your goods, and marry another man and take Matteo with her—it all fails. She can’t marry Sir James: she’s already married.”

There was silence in the cold room. Outside on the canal, a boatman went by singing a love song. Gently, Felipe took up her hand from the table and kissed it. She could feel the warmth of his lips on her fingers. “What a clever girl you are,” he said caressingly. “Under that straight gaze, under that fair skin, what a clever mind works so quickly! Almost, you could be Italian. Almost you could be the Nobildonna herself. She made a grave mistake when she did not enchant you along with all the rest of your family!”

Sarah felt her cheeks warm at the kiss on her hand, and at his words of praise. “I don’t think she even saw me,” she told him. “She was far too busy being charming to my mother, and my brother, and then Sir James.”

“Foolish,” the Signor said. “Foolish to miss such a one as you. I imagine you are as clever as all of them together.”

DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

James Avery rushed to pull out a chair for Livia. “Please, sit!” he begged her.

She sank down into the chair opposite him and found her sweetest smile. “I’m so glad you are home!” she said. “I could not wait to see you! I could not wait another moment for you to send for me!”

He flushed, shuffled papers, stacked them into a pile, and then put them in a drawer. “I should have sent the coach tomorrow,” he said. “I have only just arrived. The house is not ready for visitors.”

“I’m no visitor!” She made her eyes warm on his face, her gaze on his mouth to make him think of kisses. “I am the mistress of the house. I am ready, Beloved.”

“There were difficulties at home,” he said awkwardly.

“This is your home.”

“No, no, this is my London house. The London house of my family. I always think of my home as Northallerton. Northside Manor, Northallerton. And there were difficulties. My aunt…”