OCTOBER 1670, LONDON
Livia was seated in a high-backed chair in the black-and-white checkerboard hall of Avery House by half past nine on the day of the viewing breakfast. In the basement kitchen the servants prepared silver salvers of biscuits, pastries, and fruits. Bottles of wine chilled in buckets of cold well water. Great jugs of freshly squeezed lemonade were cooling in the sink. Everything was ready.
Sir James stood in his study door admiring Livia, seated in the hall. She was dwarfed by the thick wooden arms and the high back of the chair, but she radiated self-possession and a pretty dignity of her own. He knew that she was nervous; but she did not fidget or run from kitchen to garden to check that everything was ready. She contained her nerves behind a calm smile and only the rise and fall of her black lace bodice showed that her heart was pounding.
“They will come.” He stepped into the hall to reassure her. “But they will come throughout the day. We can’t expect anyone to come on the striking of the ten o’clock bell.”
The face she tilted up towards him was serene. “I know,” she said. “And besides, you have a beautiful house that anyone would be glad to visit, and I am showing genuine rare antiquities. I know that we are together offering the very best. People are bound to come, and if they come: they are bound to admire.”
He thought she showed her quality in her self-control. That she was—just as she said of her antiquities—something rare and beautiful He was glad that he had opened his house for her, that his memories of his wife’s awkward silences could be overlaid by this dainty little woman and the occasion she had single-handedly created. The ten o’clock church bell rang at St. Clement Danes and all over the house there were silvery chimes of ten from clocks in the study and in the drawing room, and loud pealing from all the neighborhood churches.
“Will you take a glass of lemonade?” he said. “We cannot expect people to be on the very dot—”
There was a hammer on the door and the noise of a carriage outside. With a triumphant smile at him she motioned Glib to open the door and the nominated maid to stand ready to take the hats and sticks. As the door opened, she rose to her feet and waited, like a queen, for her first guest.
Sir James recognized Lady Barton and her daughter, old friends of his mother, and, stepping forwards, made the introductions. Livia curtseyed to precisely the right level as he introduced her and gave her hand to her ladyship and led the two of them upstairs. She did not glance back at him and beam, as he had been afraid she would do. She was perfectly dignified. As she went up the stairs, her black silk skirt brushing the worked-iron bannister, there was another knock on the door and a well-known landowner, famous for his park and gardens, was there, hat and cane in hand, coming to visit the antiquities. Sir James realized that it was he who was beaming, like a schoolboy, up at Livia.
They closed the front doors on the last guest at three in the afternoon. “Come into the parlor,” Sir James said. “You must be exhausted.”
Livia dropped into a chair. “How many people?” was all she asked. “I lost count.”
“As many as a hundred,” he confirmed, taking a seat opposite hers. “Were there any actual orders?”
She showed him a little notebook that she had on a silver chain at her waist. “Three for sure, and two others who are going to measure their dining hall to make sure they have enough space. Most people said they would write within a few days. But three promised to buy.”
He shook his head. “You were magnificent!” he said. “And so calm!”
“Because you were there,” she assured him. “And because I was in Avery House. How could I be anything but calm when the house is so beautiful and there have been such wonderful women in this place before me? I thought of what you have told me of your mother, and I wanted her to be proud of the house… and even of me,” she added.
“She would have been,” he said. “She would have seen, as I have done, how hard you work and how easy you make it look.”
She glowed with pleasure and came across the room to his chair. She bent quickly and put her lips to his cheek. “Thank you for saying that,” she said. “That is the best of the day. It has been a wonderful day; but that is the best.”
He could smell her perfume, sun-warmed roses, and for a moment he thought that he could put his hands on her slim waist and pull her down to sit on his lap and kiss her lips. He hesitated, half-afraid of his own desire, aware that this was a woman without protection in his house, and that she was the daughter-in-law of the woman that he had loved all his life.
“Forgive me…” he started, but she had already slipped away to the door.
“I shall leave you to dine in peace,” she said, as if she did not want him at all. “I must get back to the warehouse and tell them how well we have done. I shall be able to help them to buy new premises, and have a better life, and I am glad of it. Wait till they hear!”
“Will you tell them I send my best wishes, that I am glad of your success for them, and happy that I have been able to help?”
She came back to him and put her hand on his arm. “No,” she said tenderly. “Alas, they will not hear your name. They even warn me against trusting you.” She paused, her pretty face looking up at him. “I hope I don’t cause you pain when I tell you they have cut you out of their lives. You should think of yourself as free of them.”
“I am forgotten?”
She showed him a tentative smile. “Is it not for the best? Since there is nothing that binds you to them?”
He knew it was. “Then I may forget too?” he asked her.
“You forget too,” she assured him lightly. “It is the past. It was long ago. A boy’s error. Nothing from the past shall haunt us. You are making a new England here, you can be free of the ghosts and sorrows of the past! The war is over, the plague has finished, the fire is out. All the old heartaches are healed. There is no need to feel old pain.”
He knew she was right; she was inviting him to enter a new world that had been here all along, but he had not realized he could enter it. He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. “At last, it’s over.”
He sent Glib the footman to walk her to the wherry and pay for it, to cross with her and escort her to the warehouse door. The lad waited, hoping for a tip, but she slipped inside without a word to him and closed the door and leaned her back against it, savoring the success of her day—with the antiquities, with the buyers, and with James himself.
Alys came out of the counting house, frowning. “You’re very late,” was all she said in her level tone. “Ma and I have eaten, but I saved some soup for you.”
Livia’s frustration at the dullness of the woman in her poky poor little hall, with her offers of boiled-up soup and her complaint of lateness, suddenly burst out. “I don’t want soup. I’ve had the most wonderful day; I don’t want to come home to soup!”
Alys’s welcoming smile drained from her face. “Did you want something else? There might be—”
“Nothing! I’ve had the finest of food, a wonderful start. It was a wonderful day!”
“Your things sold well?”
“Beyond my dreams! James said—” She bit off his name. “It was a triumph. A hundred people came!”
“If you give me the money, I’ll put it in the cashbox?” Alys held out her hand. “I’ll take it to the goldsmith’s in the morning.”
Livia’s rage at the poverty of her home and the contrast with her triumph at Avery House spilled out in a torrent of words. “Look at you with your hand held out! Like a beggar! Of course, I don’t have the money now! D’you think I’m running a market stall? D’you think I haggle and trade and spit on my hand and shake it? That’s not how I do business.”
Alys flushed a deep red as her hand dropped awkwardly to her side. “What other way is there? You sell something, and you take the money. How else do you do business? Have you taken no money at all?”
“Of course, you have no idea! I create an interest, I make a fashion, everyone in London is talking about my antiquities. I have sold nothing! I would be mad to do so! But I have spoken to everyone. Between now and next month the orders will pour in and compete with each other. Of course, no money changes hands today! Do you think I am some grubby shopkeeper? A poor workingwoman?”
Alys was stunned into silence. Livia took off her bonnet and handed it to her, as if she were a servant. “Oh, tell Tabs to bring my soup, if that’s all there is?” she ordered. “And a little bread? And a glass of wine?”
“Of course,” Alys said, her voice flatter than ever. She stalked down the hall to the kitchen door and put her head around it and gave the order to Tabs. She paused outside the parlor; she could not bring herself to go in, hurt by Livia’s words but angry at the injustice. She opened the door, ready to speak but at once she saw that Livia’s mood had changed. She was stretched in the chair, her head flung back, her eyelids closed, a smile on her lips.
“You ought to have a bell for Tabs,” she remarked. “It is ridiculous to have to go to the kitchen for everything you want.” When Alys did not answer, she opened her eyes. “It was the most wonderful day,” she repeated dreamily.
“I don’t see how; if you come home as poor as you went out,” Alys returned.
Livia’s sloe eyes showed a gleam. “I know you don’t, my dear,” she said. “Which is why a woman like you runs a sufferance wharf—under sufferance to trade, and under sufferance to live—but I am, tonight, the acknowledged provider of the best and most beautiful architectural antiquities in London.”
“It is a sufferance wharf,” Alys conceded, resentment making her Sussex accent stronger. “Honestly run, with steady trade. You’re right we live in this world on sufferance. My mother was not suffered to be herself; but horribly pursued and punished. My husband’s family would not suffer my presence; and I was driven from my home. I don’t blame you for looking down on us; but Rob would never’ve done so. He never allowed anyone to say a word against his ma or me. Rob was proud of us, proud of our surviving: poor women though we are, unfashionable women though we are!”
She turned and went quietly upstairs, as Tabs brought in the soup and the fresh bread roll and the glass of wine.
Much later, Livia came into the darkened bedroom. “Alys,” she said to the shadowy bed. There was no answer.
In the dark, she slipped off her beautiful gown and her silk undergown. Alys could hear the whisper of the material but she lay still and closed her eyes, pretending sleep. Livia did not feel for her nightgown under her pillow, she lifted the sheets and slipped into bed naked. The ropes of the bed creaked beneath her weight. Alys was far away over her own side, a cold space between them.
Livia slid up to Alys’s unresponsive back. She put a gentle hand on Alys’s hunched shoulder: “Forgive me, Alys. My sister, my love. Forgive me. I spoke unkindly. I cannot help that I am not like you, nor like your mother or your daughter. I’m a woman unlike any you have met before. I cannot be diminished, Alys. I would die if I were diminished.”
Alys said not a word; but Livia sensed she was holding her breath to listen.
“I could not bear to be like you, a woman driven down into work, driven out of her home. I wouldn’t stoop to it. I would rather die than be poor, Alys.”
Still, Alys said nothing,
“I’m not an honest woman, nor a straightforward woman, not in the way that you and your mother are. And I know I’m vain and flighty.” Her voice quavered with emotion. “I was vain this evening. I was cruel to you. I am a beautiful liar, if you like. I am all twists and turns and misdirection. You cannot trust me. I recommend that you do not trust me. I am not actually evil; but I am not straightforward. I am not simple.”
Alys breathed out and Livia continued: “You think that a woman should be honorable. I’ve seen you speak to the captains, to the warehousemen, even to the lumpers. You speak to them with respect and you demand that they respect you: a good trader. You think that a woman succeeds by being like a man. You think that if you act like a good honest man you will rise in a man’s world. You think you will succeed on your merits. You think hard work and God’s blessing will be rewarded.”
“I am honest,” Alys was driven into speech. “I learned it—the hardest way.”
“I’m not,” Livia replied quickly. “I am far more interesting than honest. I am far more successful than honesty could ever be. I am only ever honest to myself. My face in the mirror is the only one that I trust with my secrets. I never lie to myself, Alys, I know what I am doing when nobody else knows. And I don’t do things by accident. I never do something and not know why, I’m never driven by an unknown desire, I never run in one direction while yearning for the other. I always know who I am, and what I want, and I go to my way in a roundabout fashion so that no one can refuse me. The only honest word I utter is to myself.” She paused. “That is admirable, in a way. In its own way. I am admirable; in my own way.”
“But what do you want here?” Alys cried out to her, sitting up and turning round so that her sister-in-law could see—even in the shadowy room—her eyes red from crying and her face twisted with distress. “What d’you want here, if you despise us so much? Why stay in our home when it’s so poor? Why are you using our warehouse but going out to make money with our enemy? Why’ve you come here to distress us? Why d’you work with him? What d’you want? What were you planning, when you came here, all little and crushed and grieving? When you came so beautiful that a heart would break to see your face? And the first thing you did was reach out your hand to him? You held your handkerchief to your eyes and you reached for him! How can you boast of your pride when you flung yourself at him?”
Livia flung herself into Alys’s arms, kissed her hot face, wet with tears, lay along the lean length of her. “I want you,” she whispered in her ear. “That’s what I want. I know it now, and the moment I met you. I want to be like you: simple and honorable and brave. I want you to love me as I am: curious and duplicitous as I am. I want to belong here with you. I want to be yours: heart and soul. I want you to own me as a sister, I want to be the great love of your life. I want you to see past the beautiful surface of me, past my luster, and see me for myself.”
“Luster,” Alys repeated the unusual word.
“The shine on a beautiful marble, the gleam on a skin of bronze. The glow of my perfect skin.” She gave a low laugh.
“I can’t bear lies,” Alys whispered in reply. “You don’t know what they cost me, what they cost my ma. You don’t know how we both told lies until there was such a tangle of deceit that we were drowned under the weight of them. We weren’t punished for our crime, my crime. It was the lies that destroyed us. I can’t live with a pack of lies. I can’t bear it.”
“You must, you must bear me,” Livia urged her, pressing her warm breasts against Alys’s cool nightgown. “For you are the only person in the world that I speak the truth to. The only one in the world that I love and trust. I have to be with you. You have to love me in return. Please, Alys. Without you I have no one! I have nowhere to live, I have no friend. I am an orphan, alone in the world. I am a widow. How can you not love me? How can you not pity me? You are my sister: be a sister to me!”
Alys did not plunge into Livia’s arms but hesitated, scrutinized the beautiful face in the stripes of moonlight. “Can I trust you not to lie to me?” she demanded. “Even if you lie to everyone else? Can you be honest to me, here, when we are alone together, in this room? Even if you lie all the day to everyone else?”
Two tears like pearls rolled down Livia’s cheeks, her lips trembled. “Yes,” she said. “I swear I will be true to you; if you will love me.”
The two women looked at each other, unmoving for a long moment, and then Alys opened her arms and they kissed, deeply kissed, and fell asleep, enwrapped, Alys’s face buried in Livia’s dark hair, Livia’s hands linked behind Alys’s back, drawing her close and holding her close all night.