Dark Tides

by Philippa Gregory

  “Signor Russo?” Sarah mimed beckoning, asking if he was coming home.

  The old woman shook her head. “Domani,” she said.

  She made a gesture to indicate prayer.

  “Oh,” Sarah said. “At church. Christmas, I suppose. Oh well. Demain!” she said, as if she only spoke French. “Tomorrow! Ah well! So, good night, signora!” She took her single candle, lit it from the glorious candelabra, and went carefully up the stairs to her bedroom. Chiara, having dined well with her mother in the kitchen, was already asleep in the bed. Sarah undressed, slipped in beside her, and waited for the house to be quiet.

  DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

  A messenger came down the quay to the Reekie warehouse, disdainfully picking his way as if he might stain his shoes. “This must be for you,” Alys said to Livia as the three women in the parlor saw the cockaded hat go past the window.

  Alinor looked up from the cheesecloth bags. “You can get it,” she said quietly, as Livia hesitated and then quickly went to open the front door before the man had even knocked.

  “Nobildonna Reekie?” the man asked.

  “Da Ricci,” she corrected him. “Yes.”

  “A letter,” he said, and handed it over. It was franked by Sir James, with his name signed in the corner, so there was nothing to pay.

  “I’ll read it in the kitchen!” Livia called through the doorway, not wanting to face them in the parlor, and went down the hall to the kitchen where Tabs was scouring pans. “Out,” she said shortly.

  “Out where?” Tabs replied mutinously. “For I’m not going out into the yard; it’s freezing.”

  “Oh, stay there then!” Livia said irritably. She glanced at Carlotta, nursing Matteo before the fire. “Isn’t it time he went to bed?”

  “No, your ladyship.”

  “Take him up,” she said irritably. She found she was shaking with apprehension. This should be an invitation to come to the distant house in Yorkshire. There should be a guinea under the seal to pay for her travel. Better yet, if it announced the carriage would come for her the next day. Best of all, if he was coming himself.

  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.

  She was so dazzled by the beauty of it that she went one step after another, deeper into the warehouse, hardly aware of where she was going; until the last stone panel gave way to a collection of what she took to be more statues, wrapped in packing material. They were stiff still figures, without spreading arms or angel wings, feet bound together, not proudly astride, but rolled in cloth or loosely wrapped, some white with dust and some discolored. Sarah looked closer, took one of the heads in her hand to gaze into the wrapped face, took the end of a sheet of packing cloth to lift and see the carving beneath and then froze. It was the smell that alerted her that there was something wrong, terribly wrong. It was not the scent of stone, clean stone, but of earth, of decay.

  Sarah froze and gently replaced the head that she had thought was stone back in its place, at the top of a line of white vertebrae, dropped the winding cloth that she held in her hand. Convulsively she wiped her palm down her nightgown again and again. Staring, her eyes widened in horror, she could now make out the jumbled goods piled on the open shelves. They were bodies, human bodies, some long dead, some more recent, pulled from their stone coffins and thrown into the shelves, like so much waste. Some were stiff from death, locked rigid into the coffin shape, bandaged arms strapped over their chests, hair growing grotesquely through the bandages which bound their heads; others had been broken by being dragged from the ground, heaved from their last resting place, with arms hanging limp and the shrouds torn to show gray decaying toes and lolling blackened heads. Some were even older and the flesh had rotted away and gray bones of toes protruded from worm-eaten feet.

  Sarah’s sharp gasp of horror frightened her, as if it were them panting at her, and she clamped her hand over her mouth. But she still heard her little whimper of fear. She could not take her eyes from the horror before her, and she could not press past corpses to get to the safety of the inner stair.

  She could hear her breath rasping against her throat as she fought not to retch in disgust at the smell, at the sight of the rotting limbs. She knew she must move but it was as if she were frozen, as still as they, whose bodies were piled one on top of another like the dead in a plague pit. At the thought of plague she heard herself give another little moan, her feverish mind thinking that the smell of decay was the stink of infection and that she too would become a tumbled corpse, piled up here with the others.

  She could not take her eyes off the bodies, she was too horrified to turn her head, fearful that if she once turned away from them, turned her back to them, that they would rise up behind her and follow her down the long workshop, that she would look back to see them stiffly approaching, their bandaged eyes staring, their desiccated hands reaching out bony fingers, extending towards her. Instead of turning and running—and she knew her legs could not run, it would be like a nightmarish dream of slowness—Sarah stepped backwards towards the far end of the room, the water gate, one hand holding her steady on the shelves that held the sarcophagi of the tumbled dead, her eyes never leaving the awkward reaching hands, the pathetic bony feet.

  The soft touch of the sacking curtain behind her made her jump and shudder, but then she realized she was at last at the door. She parted the curtain, and stepped out over the floodguard onto the narrow quay, reached inside, and slammed the storehouse door on the secret charnel house inside. As soon as the door was closed she heard her own whimper turn into frightened sobs, tears of terror cold on her face. She turned to the brightening water gate, the light of dawn reflecting on the lapping water, and there, on the opposite side, on the grand marble staircase, was Felipe Russo in a red velvet cape, with a candle in a gold candlestick, watching her.

  * * *

  Sarah did not hesitate for a moment. Crying hysterically, she ran around the narrow quayside at the back of the water gate, and Felipe dumped his candlestick on the steps, and received her into his arms.

  “You know! You must know!” she gabbled, her teeth chattering so that she could hardly speak. “You know what’s in there.”

  “Hush,” he said. “You’ve had a fright. Yes, I know. Come.”

  “You know!” she cried.

  “Yes, yes.” Skillfully he drew her up the stairs, one step after another as her knees buckled beneath her, until they reached the beautiful hall, where she shook with horror and could not release her convulsive grip on his velvet sleeve. She turned her face into his shoulder and breathed in the smell of warm fabric, the scent of vanilla and bay, the smell of his skin, so warm and alive, so safe.

  “My God,” she whispered. “You know? But you must know!”

  “Come,” he said again, and led her up the inner marble stairs to the dining room, holding her firmly under the elbow so her knees did not give way beneath her. “Come in,” he repeated gently, and led her into his private study beside the dining room.

  “I did… I did… I went…”

  “Hush,” he ordered her, and turned to the sideboard and poured her a large glass of deep red wine. “Drink this, before you say anything.” He pressed her into a chair and took a stool to sit beside her. In the room, watched by the sightless statues on the walls, she sipped until he saw the color come back into her white face.

  “Now, you can tell me,” he said quietly.

  “I have nothing to tell you! It is for you to explain! You must know what I have seen!” She was trembling, the wineglass shaking in her hand. “You must know what is down there!”

  He bowed. “I am sorry that you had such a shock.”

  “What are they? They are dead, aren’t they? They have been pulled from their graves?”

  He spread his hands as if in apology. “Alas, if you want antiquities you have to seek them with the ancients.”

  She put down her glass and gripped her hands under the table to stop herself from crying out. She felt so far from home, and so incapable of understanding what was happening. “What d’you mean? What d’you mean?”

  He went to the sideboard and poured a glass of wine for himself, and poured more in her glass. “Drink. You have had a fright.”

  Obediently, she took another sip and still felt the terrible tremor inside her belly as if she were going to vomit.

  “Did you see the beautiful panels?” he asked her. “The stone panels?”

  She nodded.

  “They were carved by artists, craftsmen—you agree?”

  Silently, she assented.

 
; “They should be seen, don’t you think? Works of such beauty should not be hidden?”

  “I don’t kn—”

  “They are stone coffins, coffins of pagans, not Christians. There is no reason that they should not be taken up, and shown to people who will love them, collectors. Connoisseurs. Cognoscenti!”

  “But the bodies!” was all she could whisper.

  “Of course there are bodies! These are coffins, they were each one carrying a body. But they are all so very old. It is not as if they were family! They were not Christians, they are not from a churchyard. And I make sure that we rebury them, reverently, respectfully.”

  She did not have the voice to argue but she could still see, behind her closed eyelids, the tumbled heap of corpses, the rotting flesh.

  “Just thrown in…” was all she could whisper.

  “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.”