Dark Tides Page 19

  Sarah and Livia stood back while Johnnie and his mother unfurled the canvas and dropped it to the floor. They pulled the fleeces away to reveal the pillar that stood tall in the debris of packing. The scent of lanolin from the fleeces wafted into the warehouse and behind that a stranger smell: exotic, dusty and spicy: “Venice,” Livia sighed. “That is the very scent of my home.”

  “Just this?” Johnnie asked. “Just a pillar? A stone pillar?”

  “But carved,” his mother pointed out.

  “It’s marble,” Livia defended her antiquity, “and very old.”

  “I thought it would be a Caesar head!”

  “I have Caesar heads. But you’re not opening every package to find them,” Livia countered.

  Only Sarah had not spoken. Now she turned to Livia. “Can I touch?”

  Livia laughed. “Yes. It was pulled down and buried in the ground and heaved up by a team of peasant farmers, before it was scraped clean and polished up. Of course you can touch.”

  Dazed, Sarah stepped closer over the canvas and fleeces, to put her fingers in the groove of the column. “It’s smooth,” she said. “Smooth as silk.”

  “The finest Carrara marble,” Livia confirmed. “The most valuable. Look at the color, like snow.”

  Sarah ran her fingers across the grooves as if she were a blind woman and could only trace the shape. She stretched up and came to a tracery of foliage and stopped. “This is honeysuckle,” she said. “It’s a honeysuckle, look at the flower!”

  “Yes,” Livia agreed.

  “It’s like a flower that is frozen, like it froze into stone. It’s like life. How old?”

  Livia shrugged. “A thousand years?”

  “There was honeysuckle growing in Italy a thousand years ago? And a craftsman looked at it so closely that he sculpted it into this stone? So that I, a thousand years later, can see honeysuckle?”

  “At last one of you who admires my treasure!” Livia said with a sideways glance at Johnnie. “You were clamoring to see it, but you do not love it as Sarah and I.”

  “If we could only see them all…” Sarah hinted.

  “No, no, no,” Livia laughed. “When I unpack them for showing at the house, you may come and see them there. Not you,” she twinkled to Johnnie, “not you, as you don’t love my treasures. But Sarah, you may come when I am unpacking and we will look at them by ourselves. Not at the party,” she added with a reassuring nod to Alys.

  “I don’t want to come to the party,” Sarah said surprisingly. “It’s not the people I want to see, but the statues. When can I come? My next afternoon off is Wednesday.”

  “Come on Wednesday,” Livia assured her. “And I will show you everything.”

  “I love it,” Sarah said, resting a lingering hand on the column. “It is like a hat, but bigger.”

  “A hat, but bigger?” Johnnie exclaimed, and they all laughed at the girl.

  She flushed but she would not deny her feelings. “A hat, a really beautiful hat, is well made, and perfectly finished, and you can look at it from any side and it is a thing of beauty,” she said. “You can’t see the work that has been put in, it looks easy, not labored. And this stone is the same.”

  “It is a work of craft and of art,” Livia agreed with her. “And—luckily for us, just like hats—in fashion right now. But I am glad that you see it, Sarah. You are my niece indeed.” Sarah glowed at the praise but her aunt was looking past her, at Johnnie. “But you,” she exclaimed to him flirtatiously, “you are nothing more than a barbarian!”

  * * *

  That night Alys went into her mother’s room to say good night to her, and found her sitting in darkness in her chair, looking over the shining water of the river to where the moon was low on the horizon, a harvest moon, a golden moon with a shimmering yellow reflection in the water below.

  “Ma?” she said uncertainly. “Are you all right?”

  “Aye,” the older woman said quietly. “Just looking. Just dreaming.”

  “Are you ready to go to bed?” her daughter asked. “It’s late.”

  Gently Alys helped her mother to the bed, drew the curtains on the window, and turned back to the pale beautiful face on the white pillow.

  “And so she has her treasures safe in our warehouse,” Alinor said quietly in the dark.

  “As we agreed.”

  “And she takes them to him, and shows them in his house, as if they were partners?”

  “Yes. But she never mentions his name to me, and I believe she never speaks of us to him. She knows we will not see him, nor speak of him.”

  “Does he stay here for her, d’you think? When his home is in the north? Why does he not go back there?”

  “We don’t care, do we?” Alys burst out, troubled at her mother’s dreamy voice. “We said he was to go, that we would never see him again. You don’t want him back, do you?”

  “No. But I can’t help but wonder what she thinks of him, and he of her.”

  Alys was shocked. “She thinks nothing of him! She’ll never recover from the loss of Rob. She still cries for him in the night. Her only comfort is to be with us, to be with me. She says that she’ll stay with us for always. We’re her family now. She does not think anything of… him.”

  “I’m glad of that,” Alinor said calmly. “If that’s what she says. I’m glad that we comfort her for her loss—if we do.”

  “Does it not comfort you?” Alys whispered. “To have Rob’s wife and his baby under our roof?”

  In the silence, Alinor shook her head.

  “Why not?” Alys demanded. “Why does she not comfort you, Ma?”

  “Ah,” said Alinor. “That I can’t say. I’m not yet sure enough to speak.”

  SEPTEMBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

  Ned was called to the ferry in the morning by a clang of a horseshoe on the far side, and when he went to the pier and looked across he could see Quiet Squirrel and some women from her village. One of them had a little girl, of about six, gripping her buckskin skirt.

  “Coming!” Ned called, and stepped from the pier to the ferry and pulled it across the wide river.

  Chattering among themselves, the women came down the shingle beach and stepped on board the grounded ferry. Quiet Squirrel was last on, taking one hand of the little girl while her mother held the other.

  “Netop,” Ned said to the child, and all the women on the ferry replied: “Netop, Nippe Sannup! Hello, Ferryman.”

  The little girl looked up at the tall Englishman, her dark eyes taking in his friendly open smile, his white linen shirt, his thick trousers. Her dark gaze scanned him from his tall black hat to his heavy shoes. She turned to her mother: “He smells very strange,” she said in their language. “And why does he stare at me?”

  “He can understand some of our speech, you know,” Quiet Squirrel told her. “Better not say he smells. Besides, he can’t help it, they spend all their time wrapped up in thick clothes as if it were winter.”

  “I think you strange,” Ned replied to the child. He did not know the word for “smell.”

  The little girl laughed. “Why does he speak like a baby?”

  “He speaks like a child, but he is a man,” Quiet Squirrel replied.

  Ned took hold of the rope, rocked the raft gently to free it from the beach, and then pulled it steadily across the river.

  “Can we pay in dried meat?” Quiet Squirrel asked. “You’ll want dried meat for your winter stores, Ferryman.”

  “Yes-yes,” Ned acknowledged. He smiled down at the little girl. “She too heavy! Pay twice!”

  There was a chorus of laughter from the women. “Pay by weight!” they exclaimed. “Quiet Squirrel costs nothing!” The little girl squirmed near to her mother and hid her face in her skirts, she was laughing so much.

  “You very fat!” Ned told her. “You sink my ferry.”

  The child had to sit on the planks as her legs buckled beneath her with laughter.

  “Nippe Sannup, you’re very funny,�
�� Quiet Squirrel told him. “This is my little granddaughter, Red Berries in Rain.”

  “Not little,” the child said, her eyes on Ned’s smiling face.

  “Very big,” Ned said in her language. “Married?”

  The child rocked with laughter. “I’ll marry you!”

  All the women cried out and laughed together. “No! No! Sannup! You must marry me!” one of the bolder ones cried, leading a chorus of proposals. “Marry me! Marry me!”

  “Aren’t you marrying the thin one with no home? The one who never pays full price?” Quiet Squirrel asked.

  “You know everything?” Ned demanded, easily recognizing Mrs. Rose from this description.

  “Most things,” Quiet Squirrel said with pleasure.

  “Maybe marry,” Ned said. “Maybe not. What you think?”

  The ferry reached the other side and nudged against the pier. It rocked as the women climbed off and Quiet Squirrel and her daughter kept a gentle hand on the little girl.

  “I think you would make a good husband,” she told him seriously. “But if you married and had a family you would become a greedy farmer like all the rest. And you would not be your own man. And I think you want to be your own man, just as we want to be ourselves.”

  She spoke too fast and used too many strange words for Ned to understand, and without trying to explain she handed him some dried deer meat wrapped in woven cattail leaves. “Wrap it tight, keep it dry,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “And don’t you marry.”

  SEPTEMBER 1670, LONDON

  Sarah went down the newly washed steps to the kitchen door of Avery House and tapped on the panel.

  “Who is it now?” came the irritable shout from inside.

  “Sarah Stoney,” she said inaudibly. She raised her voice and repeated: “Sarah Stoney.”

  “Never ’eard of ’er,” came the discouraging reply.

  Sarah stepped up and peered over the half door. “Sarah Stoney for Nobildonna da Ricci,” she said. “I’ve come to see the antiquities. She said I might.”

  “Step in, step in,” came the shout. “I can’t leave this.”

  Sarah opened the door and came into the kitchen to see a brawny red-faced woman, floured to the elbows, kneading a huge mound of pastry at a stone-topped table in the middle of the kitchen. Copper pans gleamed over the closed stove in the yawning hearth, a pump over the sink ran icy water, a dog in the corner growled at the stranger and sat down again.

  “Come in. For Lady Peachey, are you?”

  Sarah, at a loss at the strange name, replied: “To see the statues.”

  “Glib will take you,” the woman nodded. “Shout out of that door. It’s just the backstairs. Shout for Glib.”

  Sarah, horribly embarrassed, crossed the kitchen and opened the door that the cook had indicated. “Glib!” she called.

  A clatter of shoes on the wooden stairs preceded Glib, a gangling youth.

  “Take the young lady to Lady Peachey, she’s in the gallery,” the cook ordered him. “And then come straight back here. I’ll need you to fetch the fruit from the store.” She turned to Sarah. “Follow him,” she commanded. “You shouldn’t have come in this door anyway, unless you’re Trade. Which of course you may be. As might be her ladyship, Her Highness. For all anybody knows.”

  Sarah followed Glib’s skinny shoulders in too-large livery up the short flight of stairs from the basement kitchen, through the green baize door into the startlingly high and bright hall. He crossed the black-and-white marble slabs and led the way up a stone staircase to the gallery at the top. It ran the length of the front of the house and, at the end, standing before a column of pure white marble, Sarah recognized the dark silhouette of the Italian widow.

  “Aunt Livia!”

  “Ah, Sarah,” she said, turning around and offering her cool cheek for a kiss. “You found your way, then.”

  “It’s very grand,” Sarah whispered, turning to see that Glib was retreating back down the stairs. “I did not expect it to be so very—”

  “Yes, I’m pleased,” Livia interrupted her. “See, here is the column you liked so much, it looks very handsome here. I have put it here, and on either side of the gallery I have six, just six each side, heads of Caesars. That’s all I am having up here—I don’t want it to be crowded. It must not look like…”

  But she had already lost the girl. Sarah had stepped back and was craning her head to see the statues. Twice as large as life, the blind bronze eyes stared into the gallery, unseeing. Each stone head stood on a fluted column of creamy marble, each one crowned with shining laurel leaves of bronze. The faces, rounded or beaky, indulgent or stern, seemed to look back at the girl who gazed up at them, rapt, going from one to another and stretching out her hand to touch the cool column.

  “They are extraordinary,” the girl whispered. “Are they real?”

  The widow glanced quickly behind, as if afraid that Glib had heard. “Whatever d’you mean?” she demanded, her voice sharp. “What are you saying? Are they real? What a question!”

  “Were they really like this? Was this one really so fat in life? Did he not mind being shown with such a pursy little mouth?”

  “Oh! I misunderstood you. Well, I don’t know. I think they were made later, not at the time. Perhaps from the coins, or perhaps from a drawing? They must have been made at the same time, for they were made as a set.”

  “Who made them?”

  “Oh, it’s too long ago for us to know that. But they were found all together in what had been a great hall so perhaps some wealthy man in ancient times wanted to dine with all the Caesars. And now, I hope, another wealthy man will see them and want to repeat the experience.”

  “They’re not beautiful…” The girl struggled to understand her sense of awe.

  “It hardly matters,” Livia remarked, stepping back and looking not at the Caesars but at the upturned face of her niece. “It hardly matters.”

  “Beauty doesn’t matter?”

  Livia was astounded. “Have you understood nothing? What matters is that they sell! Have you understood nothing from working in a shop?”

  “But your husband, your first husband?”

  “What about him?”

  “Did he not collect them for their beauty?”

  Livia tossed her head, and then recollected herself. “It is him I am thinking about,” she said very soberly. “He would not have wanted me to fall so far as a little wharf on the Thames. He would not want me to live in such a place. He would have wanted his collection to be my dower—for me to live as I should, as the Nobildonna da Picci.”

  “Reekie,” Sarah corrected.

  The widow shrugged her black satin shoulders and gave her pretty tinkling laugh. “I cannot say it, try as I might. Roberto always laughed at me. I will have to call it Picci. It is a pretty compliment to the Sussex family. Now, would you like to see the statues in the garden?”

  “But wasn’t Peachey the name of the lord at Foulmire? Uncle Rob’s patron.”

  “Yes, as I say, a pretty compliment to him, don’t you think? And amusing, that when I turn my name from Italian to English it sounds like his?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Do you want to see the statues in the garden? I can’t waste my time.”

  “Yes, yes, I do, please.”

  The widow led the way down the grand staircase to the black-and-white paved hall, her black skirts hushing on the marble. Sarah thought how well she suited the classical beauty of this house; in the warehouse she always seemed too exotic, her color too vivid.

  “Do you love coming here?” she asked as they passed through the high glazed doors to the terrace, and then she gasped at the garden laid out below them, studded with statues, and the silver of the river at the end of the garden. “Oh! This is beautiful!”

  Livia ran down the steps and led Sarah from one statue to another, one just a fragment of a bigger piece—a water vase, a hydria that had once been held, thousands of years ago, by a ma
rble hand, whose stone fingers and nails were still clasped on the handle.

  “Oh!” Sarah breathed. “Look!”

  Livia smiled and pointed farther down the garden where part of a frieze had been laid on the ground so that visitors could see the story of the horses riding out to battle, the riders stern and beautiful holding the rippling manes.

  The girl knelt beside them as if she were praying. “May I touch?” she asked. Livia nodded, and Sarah bent over the figures, tracing nostril and nose, ears pricked, arching neck and the strong muscled torsos of the riders.

  “You can look at them all,” Livia said. “I will wait for you on the terrace.”

  She turned and went back up the steps to sit on a stone bench set back against the sun-warmed wall. Sir James stepped through the glazed door to his study and found her there. From the garden below, Sarah saw his polite bow, and the way that Livia rose at once and came so close that he stepped back. Livia shot a secretive little glance back towards the garden as if she did not want Sarah to see them. She slid her hand in his arm and drew him indoors, out of sight, as if they were lovers in hiding.

  “A viewing?” James asked her, as she closed the door to the terrace behind them.

  “Just the child from the warehouse. I would prefer if she did not see you. Or rather—her mother would prefer it, and I cannot cross her.”

  “I want nothing to do with her,” he said gently. “I understand she is not mine. I see no resemblance. She is a pretty girl, with her dark hair and eyes, but I don’t dream that she is mine.”

  “Hardly pretty,” she amended. “They are both poor little things. She is a millinery girl without an education. But she has a sense of beauty that she has learned from lace and tinsel that I could make something of.”

  “Would you want to make something of her?” he asked curiously.

  She looked up at him, her creamy skin flushed a little from the sunshine. “No,” she said. “I have no time for a strange child of common stock from a warehouse. Why would I want a child such as that, when I can breed and raise a noble one?”