Dark Tides

by Philippa Gregory

  Glib bowed and palmed the coin.

  “And bring me any other news,” she added. “If he writes to say the house is to be opened. If he writes to say the house is to be closed. Tell me his plans.”

  “Won’t he write you himself?” Glib asked impertinently, but then wilted under the dark look of spite that she shot at him.

  “When I am Lady Avery, and you can be very sure that I will be Lady Avery, shall you want a place in my household? Because I will be Lady Avery and I will be the one that hires the household staff. Or dismisses them.”

  He dropped his head. “Yes, your ladyship. Of course I want to keep my place.”

  “Then I have told you how to earn it,” she said, and turned to the warehouse door, clicked the latch, and went in.

  * * *

  Alys was in the counting house at the high clerk’s desk. Livia came in taking off her cape and leaned against her sister-in-law’s shoulder, seeking comfort. Alys put an arm around her but kept the page open, finishing her work. Livia ran her eye down the column of figures. “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that’s all.”

  “It’s hardly worth doing?”

  “It keeps us.”

  “It wouldn’t have paid for my shoes in Venice!”

  “I expect you had very lovely shoes,” Alys said with a smile. “We earn enough to keep a household; but there’s very little profit. We’re too far from the legal quays to pick up waiting ships, and I can’t afford to bribe the lightermen for them to bring us trade.”

  “We have to buy a new warehouse. You have to borrow the money, Alys. We have to move upriver. You know I’ll help.”

  “I know.” Alys turned and kissed her sister-in-law on the lips. “You are the greatest good in my life, in every way.”

  “My second batch of antiquities will come soon,” Livia observed. “We should buy the warehouse now and show them there.”

  “Livia…” Alys took a breath, determined to tell Livia that Sarah would come home with the antiquities. “Livia, I have to tell you…”

  Livia crossed the room laid her cheek against Alys’s. “Mia amica del cuore.”

  “What does that mean?” Alys leaned from the clerk’s stool into Livia’s arms.

  “My sweetheart,” Livia whispered. “My heart.”

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  Sarah and Signor Russo dined in a little canalside restaurant and then he took her home by gondola, seating her in the stern and smiling at her delight. Behind her, standing tall, was the gondolier, who poled them down the canal with casual grace. When they entered the Grand Canal it was clear that all of Venice was boating on the clear frosty night. Some gondolas had little cabins and when the doors were closed and the lights flickered from the windows there were hidden lovers inside, enjoying an assignation. Other gondolas carried single ladies, robed in capes, masks held over their faces, weaving through the crowded river so that they could meet their friends and attract attention. Single noblemen reclined in the prow of their gondolas, scanning the boats for new beauty, novelty. Young men shared a bottle of wine and someone was singing, a clear tenor voice echoing over the water.

  “They meet? People meet each other?” Sarah asked, trying to hide her shock at the open licentiousness.

  Signor Russo smiled at her. “I told you everything was for sale,” he said. “And everyone.”

  They turned down the canal that washed at the great doors of the Russo house, and with careless skill the gondolier spun his craft around and swirled them into the internal quay. Signor Russo helped Sarah from the rocking boat and guided her up the stairs to the hall. The house was scented with the light smell of clean cold water.

  “And now, are you tired, would you like to go to your bed? Mamma will make you a hot chocolate to help you sleep? Or would you like to see the Nobildonna’s collection?”

  “I should like to see her collection,” Sarah replied. “If it’s not too late for you?”

  He smiled. “Ah, I am a night owl. Like justice, I never sleep.” He smiled at her. “That’s what they say at the Doge’s Palace, you know? That justice never sleeps. It’s to remind us all that they can arrest anyone at any moment.”

  “It must be…” Sarah could not find the words. “Uneasy?”

  “They do the torturing at night,” he remarked. “So as not to disturb the clerks working in the nearby offices during the day.”

  “They torture?”

  “At night. We never forget that we are being watched,” he told her. “We never forget that they are listening. To be a Venetian is to be continually under suspicion. But there is a pleasure in knowing that your neighbor, your friend, even your husband is under constant suspicion too.” He laughed at her shocked face. “So! We trust nobody.”

  He opened his jacket and took a key from around his neck. He went across the grand hall towards the back of the house, and opened a small locked door. “The Nobildonna’s collection,” he said. “And my humble store.”

  * * *

  The long vaulted room was cold and eerie in the light of the candles. All around, on the floor, on tables, and mounted on their own ivy-winding columns, were bodies, and pieces of beautiful bodies, their sightless eyes gazing at Sarah as if they were a frozen ballroom of dancers. Sarah recoiled on the threshold and looked around her, towards the back where cleft and clipped torsos were stored on shelves, where odd arms faced right and left with exquisite fingers and perfect nails. At the foot of the shelves were beautifully shaped calves and the dainty feet of nymphs and the sandaled feet of heroes with arched insteps. On the top shelf were chipped heads with braided stone hair, ribbons fluttering forever in an ancient wind, and the occasional noble profile and the strong smile of a hero.

  Stone dust made the floor snow white, ghosts filled the room like stone mist.

  “They were real people?” the girl whispered.

  “I don’t know,” he said casually, as if it did not matter. “They are beautiful. And old. That’s all we care about now.”

  “But this woman—” Sarah gestured to the top half of a face, sliced by a plow, whose eyelids still crinkled in a smile. “We don’t know who she was, nor where she came from? Not who she’s looking at, to make her smile on him?”

  Signor Russo was interested, for a moment. “She’s looking down, so perhaps she was smiling at a baby in her lap. Venus with Cupid? But we don’t know. It’s not our task to—you know—part the veils of time. It’s our task to find the lost, to show, to admire. Of course, to sell!”

  “And how much of this is… the Nobildonna’s dower?”

  He threw a grand gesture. “She can claim all of it!” he declared. “Her husband was an outstanding collector of ancient sculpture. I store it for her. I have my own collection, of course, and on the floor below I have my workshop where I make, repair, and polish, but it is nothing to hers. You can choose from all of this.”

  “All of these things are hers?” Sarah pursued.

  He shrugged. “We don’t quarrel about who owns what. We have an agreement.”

  “An agreement?”

  “A partnership. But you know what she wants to ship? Or was the list stolen with the letter of authorization?”

  Sarah picked her words with care. “The list was stolen with her letter to you. But I know what she wants.”

  The chill of the storehouse, filled with icy marble so near to the dark, slowly moving canal, made her shiver. “The Caesar heads sold well, and the smaller pieces, like the fawn.”

  His warm smile never wavered, she could not tell if he believed her.

  “So let me show you some things, and you shall choose.”

  He led her deeper into the warehouse where the shelves were filled with little scraps of things, the heads of babies, the wings of cherubs, a fat little foot of a child not yet walking, a clenched fist held against a giggling mouth. The farther they went into the gloom the more that Sarah felt that these were real children, horribly frozen babies.

  “Nothing
like this,” she said faintly. “She can’t sell anything like this.”

  “It distresses you?” he asked acutely. “The row on row of stone babies?”

  She felt herself choking, as if on the dust of their bones. She nodded.

  He laughed as if he found her charming. “Then let me show you this…” He turned her around the shelves to another rack where small animals seemed to play. “Mostly off friezes. We think the country people sawed them from the facades of old palaces and temples. Made them into little gods. People are such fools. But they are pretty? Are they not?”

  It was like being in a wonderland of an English forest. Little rabbits stood up on their hind legs, their ears pricked, squirrels flirted fat tails. Nests of baby birds opened their beaks and harassed mother birds bent to feed them, a wriggling worm rendered in stone before the open maws. There was even a stone pond with stone ripples and a leaping salmon.

  “Oh! It is exquisite!” Sarah exclaimed, and then turned to the birds: blackbirds and robins and a speckled thrush, tits with long tails and tipped heads, and the adorable nest of a house martin with the mother bird hanging on the lip and half a dozen nestlings craning out.

  “You like this? She would want this? This is what they like in England?”

  “I love it!” Sarah declared. “We should have many small pieces. But she wants big pieces too. Grand pieces.”

  “Grand?”

  “The king is back on his throne and they all want portraits of Caesars and great men,” Sarah tried to explain. “All the lords are building big houses, they want to feel like returning heroes. They want to believe they are part of the Greeks, of the Romans, that great power descends to the new men, even though none of them ever risked anything, and none of them fought a battle.”

  “You sound as if you despise them!”

  “I do!” she said. She remembered she was supposed to be a servant and corrected herself: “Not that it’s my business, I know. I’m just a milliner.”

  “And so who are the true heroes now in England? In the opinion of a pretty milliner?”

  “People like Mrs. Reekie,” she told him truthfully. “People who have a vision, and hold to a vision. Not because they think they are better than everyone else; but because they know what is right in their hearts. People like Mrs. Stoney, her daughter, whose word is her bond, who smiles only rarely, but who is full of love that she doesn’t show. She never changes either. People like Mr. Ferryman, who left England and may never come back, because he will not live under a king again, after being free.”

  “You sound as if you love them, your employers?”

  “I do!” Sarah said, and then corrected herself with a shrug. “They’re good mistresses,” she said. “And that’s hard to find.”

  “We live in changeable times,” he observed. “Most people prefer not to give their hearts and find it easier to change with the tides.”

  “Good people know what’s right,” she argued. “And she—Mrs. Reekie—is like a lodestone. She can’t help but point the direction.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Was it she who told you to come here?”

  Sarah recovered herself, and smiled into his handsome face. “She allowed me to come, but it was Lady Reekie, the Nobildonna’s business, of course.”

  “They like her? These good women in this great London merchant house? They admire her? She is happy? Does she say when she plans to return here?”

  “They adore her,” Sarah said firmly. “Everyone adores her.”

  “She has many friends?”

  “Only Sir James, who shows her statues in his house.”

  “Ah, she has an admirer? He’s a young man?”

  “No, he’s quite old.”

  “And what do you think of her? What is the opinion of the milliner of the Nobildonna, her Italian mistress?”

  “I think she is the most wonderful woman,” she assured him, sounding completely sincere. “But I don’t say that I understand her.”

  He laughed shortly. “Ah, she’s a woman!” he said. “If you cannot understand her, a woman and her own maid, I am sure I would never try to do so. Now, see here…”

  He led her into a second room, off the first, crammed full of treasures, carefully arranged and stacked, some of them packed for travel, some of them laid on the floor. There were pillars piled one on another like carved logs. In the middle of the room were the larger pieces, many of them seated women. Some of them had been designed to serve as fountains, tipping empty jars into the darkness. All around them were random pieces of stone, some of them half-carved, others were blocks cut or fallen from a bigger piece, like a giant puzzle. And there were heads of great men, their stern brows crowned with laurel, and shields with inscribed poetry proclaiming heroism.

  “I had no idea she had so much!” Sarah said. “How will she ever…”

  “Sell it all?” he asked. “It is the collection of a lifetime, for a lifelong fortune. She can only sell a dozen or so pieces at a time. The English collectors want their statues one by one, not in their hundreds. I would never show a customer all of this, all at once. This is for you, only. When we have established a name, she will not have to sell pieces one at a time. The agents will come to us from England and France and Germany, we will have a showroom with just a few, a very few big pieces and they will order what they need and we will send it. The buyers like to see only a few pieces at a time, it makes them look rare.”

  “They’re not rare?”

  He held up the lamp so that she could see that every part of the room was filled. “They were carved for centuries in great numbers,” he said. “For tombs and public places, for houses and temples, for libraries and government offices, for roads and for overlooking the harbors. We are a country that has carved stone since the beginning of time. Of course, there are more statues than there are people in Venice! Now that they are admired, now that they are given a value, we find them, we dig for them all over and we trade them.”

  “And you mend them and polish them?”

  “No! Never say it!” he said laughing. “All we do is clean them and we sometimes mount them on a plinth so they can be seen. But we don’t alter them in any way. They have to be authentic.”

  “You don’t copy them? Or carve your own?”

  “The skills have been lost,” he said firmly. “That’s what gives these survivors their value: that they are so old and can never be made again. To pass off modern work as that of the ancients would be a fraud. These are worth a fortune because they are antiquities. A modern copy would be worth only the price of the stone and the wage of the mason. An ancient statue is worth ten times that. We take great care that all our things are truly old, truly beautiful.”

  “And you share everything?”

  “Let us say we are partners. We were partners when she first saw them in the Palazzo Fiori, we were partners when we rescued her share, and we are partners now, as we sell them.”

  “Her palace must have been very beautiful,” Sarah ventured.

  “It was one of the finest.”

  “And then she married Mrs. Reekie’s son. That was surely a comedown for her?”

  “Ah, the doctor? Little Roberto? Did you know him?”

  Sarah found that she was bristling at the casual dismissal of her uncle. “No, I never knew him. He’d gone to Venice before I went to work for Mrs. Reekie. I know of him, for they talk of him often. They loved him, they mourn him… But I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”

  “And of course, you’ll never see him,” he reminded her gently.

  “No, of course. It was a great shock for the household when the Nobildonna wrote and told us that he was dead.”

  “It was a great shock for us also,” he said. “A tragedy. So? You have seen our store. You can take your pick. How many things do you want?”

  “About twenty things,” Sarah said. “And Captain Shore is to ship them back to England, as before.”

  “Will you choose them now?” He handed her th
e candelabra and leaned against the wall as she walked around the crowded room, looking at one thing, stretching around something to inspect another, and bending down to admire the stored columns.

  “I should take columns,” she said. “I know she wants four or five. Some of the bigger animals—people like them for their gardens. Lions especially. Some vases, and I think—the Caesar heads, another set of them. And a few little things, for showing on tables.”

  “You like the Chimera?” he asked, showing her a lion with the head of a goat bursting from its spine, being bitten by the lion tail, which was itself a snake. Sarah recoiled. “It’s horrible!”

  He laughed. “Little Jolie—nothing is horrible. Nothing is beautiful. It is just what people like now and then. And this is amusing as it shows a brute that preys on itself. Like Man perhaps. It is not charming but it is in fashion. All we care for is fashion. All we want is money. You can start packing them tomorrow. Your taste is very good, it’s just what I would have chosen myself.”

  He led the way out of the room and closed the door behind him. Their nighttime candles were burning on the marble side table in the shadowy hall. Sarah was suddenly acutely aware that the house was silent and that they were alone together, and that his dark gaze was on her face.

  “Now,” he said quietly. “Would you like to sleep in your bedroom? Or would you prefer to come to mine?”

  Sarah shot one horrified glance at his smiling face. “No!” she said. “I’m not… I’m not…”

  “Not that sort of milliner,” he said understandingly, not the least embarrassed. “In that case I will give you your candle and bid you good night, Miss Jolie.”

  DECEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned went through the laborious process of loading his basket with goods, strapping on his snowshoes, shooing Red out of the door, and heading into town. Red bounded through the snow, sinking and leaping, his thick fur ice-tipped. Ned did not need to dig out his garden gate; the drifts were so high that they stepped over the top of it and onto the wide featureless snow plain that was the village common. On either side Ned could see the roofs and the shuttered top-floor windows of the houses. One or two settlers had dug out their front doors; but most had abandoned the front of their houses to the snow and only dug out their yard so they could feed their beasts and get to their stores. Every house carried a cap of snow, every house showed a streamer of smoke at the chimney, as if to say that the village was fighting to stay warm, burning huge stores of wood every day to try to get through the ordeal of winter.