Dark Tides Read online

  He had no answer for her, but she did not wait for one. In a moment, she was gone and only her rose-petal perfume was left on the heavy summer air.

  * * *

  Sarah and Johnnie took supper in the kitchen with their mother, then walked down the quay to London Bridge and crossed to the north side of the river. They walked together arm in arm, their steps matching, to Sarah’s millinery workshop.

  “That was odd, that Sir James,” Johnnie remarked. “What d’you think he wanted? What d’you think he really said to Grandma?”

  “I’ve never seen Ma so flustered,” Sarah agreed.

  “But why would he turn up? And why speak to Grandma about a refuge? What can he mean: a refuge?”

  “Perhaps he’s something to do with our Lady Aunt?” Sarah suggested.

  “Odd that they should have just met on her walk?”

  “D’you think they’re working together? I’ll ask at the milliner’s if anyone has ever heard of him.”

  “In a milliner’s?” Johnnie asked skeptically.

  “If he’s ever bought a hat for a woman in this town, they’ll know.”

  “I suppose so. I’ll ask at Mr. Watson’s if they know his name, if his credit is good.”

  “He looks like a wealthy man. That collar alone was worth ten shillings.”

  They paused at a bow window, the shop front of Sarah’s workplace. “That’s one of mine.” Sarah pointed to a wisp of golden net and some glass flowers.

  “How much?” Her brother strained to see. “Two pounds for what? Some beads and some wire?”

  “It’s not the beads and wire, it’s the art of putting it together,” she said with assumed dignity, then she giggled. “It’s the name on the hatbox to tell the truth,” she admitted. “I’d give the world to be able to open my own shop and have my own name on the hatbox, and not to have to work for someone else.”

  “When Uncle Ned’s ship comes in,” her brother replied. “From America. Filled with Indian gold.”

  * * *

  At bedtime in the warehouse, Livia paused on the stairs and asked Alys: “May I stay in your room again? The attic room is so stuffy and hot.”

  “Of course,” Alys replied a little awkwardly. “I was going to ask if you… but then I thought…”

  “I sleep so much better with someone in the bed,” Livia confided. “I miss your brother so much in my sleep. I wake and wonder where he is. But beside you, I am at peace.”

  The two women went into Alys’s bedroom. “Don’t undress under your gown like that,” Livia told her. “We are just women, the same as each other. There’s no need for shame. Here—let me help you.” Gently, hands on her shoulders, she turned Alys around, and undid the fastenings at the back of her gown and lowered it for her to step out. “And you can be my maid in return.”

  “All right,” Alys said, blushing furiously as she stood in her underdress and undid Livia’s gown and helped her slide it from her shoulders over her slim hips till it lay in a pool of black silk at her feet. Livia stepped out of it, and let Alys pick it up and spread it gently in the chest.

  “So pretty!” Alys exclaimed as she turned and saw Livia in her shift of silk trimmed with black lace.

  “Roberto always liked me to have the best.” Livia took the hem in her hands and pulled it over her head. She stood before her sister-in-law, quite naked. Alys took the shift, shook it out, and laid it flat in the chest, her hands trembling. When she turned back, Livia was pulling her nightshift over her head, and then she turned and sat on the edge of the bed. “Will you do my hair?”

  Alys pulled the ivory pins from the thick black hair and it tumbled over Livia’s bare shoulders. “It’s a pity to plait it up,” she remarked.

  “Perhaps tomorrow you will help me wash it?” Livia asked. “Roberto used to help me wash and dry it.”

  “Of course,” Alys said. “If you want.”

  She turned her back and whipped off her own dayshift and pulled on her nightgown as quickly as she could. But when she turned back to the bed there was no need for self-consciousness, Livia was not watching her. She had climbed into the big soft bed and was lying back on the pillows. She reached out her arms. “Come and hold me! Hold me and let me sleep like a little girl in your arms.”

  Shyly, Alys climbed in beside her, and felt the warm lithe body slide against her own. “Isn’t this better than being alone?” Livia asked as her head dropped to Alys’s shoulder. “I hate sleeping alone.”

  JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  The morning after the town meeting the iron bar clanged on the far side of the bank and Ned left his breakfast to climb the embankment and look at the other side. Quiet Squirrel was standing there with her fishing creel in her hands, her daughter and two other women beside her.

  He raised a hand to them, stepped onto his ferry, and hauled the raft across, going hand over hand on the damp rope. He ran it to the pebble shore and the Norwottuck women stepped on board, saying “Netop, Netop” one after another. Last on board was Quiet Squirrel. “Netop, Nippe Sannup,” she said.

  “Netop, Quiet Squirrel, you’re selling fish today?”

  “Is it true they will pay more?”

  “How you know that?” Ned asked, smiling. “Quick!”

  “We listened at the meetinghouse window,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’re not such fools as to be deaf to our neighbors. Especially when they talk about us—at the tops of their voices.”

  Ned understood only some of this. But he smiled. “Glad see you. We want friends with Norwottuck.”

  Her smile crinkled the skin around her dark eyes. “Didn’t sound like it,” she said cynically. But when she could tell from his trusting face that he did not understand her, she spoke more slowly. “You Coatmen want land,” she said flatly. “You want servants. You want people to feed you and hunt for you. I don’t think you really want friendship.”

  Ned understood most of this; he spread his hands. “I’m friendly,” he said. “Hopeful. We’re all good people. Try harder. Why not?”

  “Why not?” she agreed. “You can be hopeful.”

  JUNE 1670, LONDON

  The three women took breakfast together in Alinor’s room, the noise of the Monday morning quayside below them, the brightness of the sunshine muted by the linen curtains, the seabirds outside calling over the high tide and diving for fish into the water.

  “May I speak of a little matter of business?” Livia asked when Tabs had cleared the plates and the jug of small ale.

  “Business?” Alinor asked.

  “Indeed yes,” she replied. “I hope to be a help to you here, and not a burden. If I had known that it was so small a house and so mean a business, I would not have thrown myself on your kindness—but Roberto did not tell me.”

  “I’m sorry if that’s so,” Alinor said a little stiffly. “We’ve never pretended to be more than we are.”

  “No, it is I that am sorry that I have no fortune to bring you! But I have prospects. This is what I want to discuss.”

  Alys glanced at her mother and opened the curtain halfway so she could look down at the quayside below. “I’m expecting a cargo,” she remarked. “I’ll have to go when the ship comes in.”

  “Of course,” Livia said politely. “I know that the little ships come before everything! I will be quick. It is this: my first husband was a wealthy and noble man. His family had a large collection of antiquities—marble busts, statues, columns, and friezes—beautiful things from the old days of Greece and Rome. You know the sort of things I mean?”

  The two women nodded.

  “He taught me how to identify the beautiful things, you know they are become so fashionable now? He taught me their value and how to know a real antiquity from one newly made and sold as counterfeit.”

  “People do that?” Alys asked, curious.

  “They do. It is a crime of course. But our collection was all good. He made me the keeper, and I acquired pieces, and I sold some that did not suit our tast
e, especially to the visitors from France and the Germans too. They love the old beautiful things, but the greatest collectors, and those with the most money to spend, are the English.” She paused, looking from one face to another. “You can see what I am thinking!” she asked with a charming smile.

  Clearly, they could not. “When my husband died, his family claimed our palazzo—our palace, our beautiful house on the Grand Canal. The palace and everything in it, the tapestries on the walls and even the beautiful pastellone of the floor, they valued everything and took it all from me. They went through my trunks of clothes as I left, to see that I took nothing, as if I were a thief! They checked the smallest cameo, the tiniest coin. Even the things that he had given me as a wife were taken from me as a widow. The family jewels, the family fine linen… Roberto was most shocked.”

  “Roberto was there?” Alinor asked.

  “Of course, as my husband’s doctor, he was there all through his last illness, and at the end. But what they did not know, and I did not tell them, was that not all the antiquities were in the house. Many of them were in my store, guarded by my husband’s steward, being restored and cleaned. I did not tell my late husband’s cruel family about them! They were my treasures, I thought, not theirs. So I kept them safe, Roberto and I planned to send them to you by ship—here to your warehouse—and to sell them to your friends in the City.”

  “Rob thought of this?” Alinor asked blankly.

  “Oh yes!” Livia responded. “It was all his idea. The best prices for the antiquities are paid by the English lords building their houses and making their collections. Is that not true?”

  “It might be true,” Alys conceded. “But we don’t move in those circles.”

  “I know that now!” Livia said with a hint of impatience. “But still it is my hope that I might bring my collection from Venice and sell here. Sir James knows these people, and I think he will introduce me, so that I can sell the treasures. Roberto’s treasures, his inheritance to his son. And I hope you will ship them for me and store them here, so that I can sell them with Sir James?”

  “Not Sir James,” Alinor said at once.

  “Do you know another nobleman?”

  “We don’t know him,” Alinor corrected her.

  “Forgive me,” Livia said rapidly. “Of course, I know that you refused him, but I thought that you held him… in some esteem?”

  Alinor rested her hand at the base of her throat and gestured to Alys to open the top half of the door to the balcony. The wind was coming from the east, and the stink of the tallow and burning fat from the tanneries on the Neckinger billowed in like a cloud of grease.

  “If we sold the antiquities, we could buy a better warehouse further upriver where the air is cleaner,” Livia observed.

  Alinor sat back in her chair. “Forgive me,” she said, clearing her throat with a cough.

  “You are distressed that Sir James helps me?” Livia asked. “May I not ask him? When it is Roberto’s legacy to his son? What objection do you have to him when he offers you so much, so freely? How has he offended you?”

  Alys closed the window as if she did not want even the seagulls, wheeling over the high tide, to hear what her mother was going to say.

  “I was carrying his child when there was an accident,” Alinor admitted.

  Livia nodded gravely, alert to every quiet word.

  “My mother was nearly drowned.”

  “And I lost the baby.”

  “She nearly died herself,” Alys said quietly. “We came away—we could not live there after that. My husband’s family would not have me in their house, and we found a refuge here. I gave birth to my twins here. My uncle Ned left our home too, and Rob went to train at Padua as soon as he finished his apprenticeship in Chichester. We’ve none of us ever been back.”

  “How you must have suffered!” Livia exclaimed.

  “At first we did. Not now.”

  Livia wrinkled her forehead as if she were puzzled. “You were expecting babies together? Both at the same time? But you had twins, Alys? And my Cara Suocera miscarried her baby?”

  “Yes.”

  “How very unlucky!”

  “Yes,” Alinor confirmed without a tremor.

  “But you made your living from what you had?”

  “Yes. We have done.”

  “But that is all that I want to do,” she said simply. “My son’s inheritance and my dower are in carved marble and bronze in my store in Venice. I want to sell them in London. I want to make a living out of what I have. You, of all people, would not tell me that is wrong.”

  “No,” Alinor agreed. “If they’re yours, I am sure you’re right.”

  “It was Roberto’s own plan. He said that you would send a ship for the antiquities and you would sell them for us.”

  “We could try,” Alys said. “I suppose we could advertise that we have these goods? But people would not come down here to see them, we would have to find an agent who sells them?” She hesitated. “Do you have money for the rent of a gallery or a saleroom?”

  Livia spread her little hands. “I have nothing. Roberto spent all his time on poor patients who could not pay. He left me and his son penniless.”

  “That’s not like him,” Alinor observed quietly.

  “Oh no! For I have my treasures,” the widow assured her. “But I have to sell them! Surely I may ask Sir James to show them for me, to the people that he knows. If you would only allow me to use him for our good? You need never meet him again. I would manage him. I would never bring him here.”

  Alys looked at her mother for refusal. “We can do it without him,” she said stubbornly. “We don’t need him.”

  “He will keep coming here, and keep coming here, until he knows about his son,” Livia warned her. “Why should I not meet him for you and tell him? You owe him nothing! Let me tell him there is no son, and no hope; but that I will work with him.”

  “I think you’ve made your mind up to do this?” Alinor asked, and was rewarded by a gleam of Livia’s impertinent little smile.

  “Ah, you understand me,” she frankly admitted. “You see the sort of woman I am—like you, like you both. I am determined to survive this terrible loss, and I hope I am brave as you were. Yes, indeed, I am determined; but I have not spoken to him. If you allow me to do business with him you will never meet him again; but he can be of service to me, and to Roberto’s son.”

  Again, Alys looked at her mother for a refusal.

  “Very well.” Alinor turned to her daughter. “She’s right, Sir James knows these people and this is his world.” A twist of her mouth showed what she thought of Sir James’s world. “Let him introduce her—we can’t.”

  “You permit?” Livia turned to Alys. “You will let me share with you in this business? You will send a ship for my treasures and let me keep Sir James from you and your mother and the dear children?”

  The swift grimace that came and went on Alys’s face told Livia that she had guessed correctly that, more than anything, Alys wanted the wealthy nobleman kept away from her son.

  “I shall keep him from the children and from your mother,” Livia promised. “I will tell him that his own child died in the accident, and that the two children are yours. I will convince him of it. He will believe me, I shall persuade him. I am good at persuading people.”

  “Are you?” Alinor asked.

  “When it is the right thing.”

  “It’s such a great expense,” Alys said awkwardly. “It’s not the sort of thing we usually do. We’re not merchants, Livia. We just load and unload for the merchants and the captains.”

  Livia widened her eyes. “Do you not have enough money?” she asked. “Not for one voyage going only one way?”

  Alys flushed. “I could find it, I suppose. I could borrow some of it. But we’ve never borrowed. We’ve never put all our money in one venture.”

  “Shall I ask Sir James if he will pay for the shipping?” Livia asked. “I am sure that he woul
d.”

  “No!” Alys said abruptly. “Don’t do that.”

  “Then what?” Livia asked helplessly. “What shall we do?”

  Alys exchanged a glance with her mother. “I’ll find the money,” she said. “Just this once.”

  JUNE 1670, LONDON

  That afternoon, Sir James, waiting at the bridge over the canal, saw Livia come out of the warehouse front door, put up a black-trimmed parasol against the bright sunshine, and then beckon the nursemaid and baby to follow her. He was relieved to be chaperoned; but he feared that the presence of the maid would not prevent Livia from saying anything that she liked.

  “You don’t have a parasol for the baby?” he asked.

  “He is Italian,” she replied. “The sun is good for him.”

  “Half Italian,” he corrected her.

  “Of course, half Italian, half English, and perhaps he will be a—what do you say?—a York-shire-man.”

  The matter was too serious for him to return her smile. “Your ladyship, I don’t think that can be. I must say—”

  “No, no, don’t say a word!” she interrupted him. “Let us walk in the beautiful fields and I will tell you something that you should know. I have permission from La Suocera to tell you, and from her daughter too. I think the daughter is the strictest of the two, don’t you? But a mother of twins must be obeyed.”

  “Alys? You say twins? Both children are Alys’s children? You know that for sure?”

  She walked beside him, her hand lightly on his arm. “I will tell you it all,” she promised him. “When I am on my little seat.”

  He forced himself to speak of the weather and of the flock of sheep in the distance. She asked how far it was to the warehouse from his home, and how long it took him by boat, or by horse.

  “About half an hour by boat. If the tide is with me,” he said.