FEBRUARY 1671, AT SEA

True to his word, Rob had gone straight into the cabin that Felipe hastily vacated and did not come out for forty days, a self-imposed quarantine that he would not break. His food and beer were left at the door, and he returned the plates scraped clean, throwing the scraps and his slop bucket from the porthole. A bowl of vinegar stood outside his door and his plates and cups were soaked in it before they were collected. An old sailor, who had survived the triangular trade to the killing coasts of West Africa with one of Mrs. Reekie’s plague purses sewn around his neck, swore he would catch nothing, and served Rob, steeping his clothes in seawater and vinegar and then boiling them in hot water, pressing them with a scorching iron to kill the lice.

“He’s cleaner than I am,” he said with satisfaction on the fortieth day of the voyage when it was thought safe that Rob should come out.

“Really, that’s not the highest accolade in the world,” Felipe said.

Sarah giggled, but tapped on Rob’s cabin door. “Will you come out?” she said.

“Does the Captain give permission?” he asked from inside.

“He does.”

They heard the noise of the bolt being shot and then Rob opened the door and stood before them, newly washed, newly shaved, in pressed plain clothes. He was a strikingly handsome young man of thirty-four years old, brown-haired, brown-eyed, with a square open trusting face and an easy smile that warmed his face and lit his eyes when he saw Sarah. “My little angel,” he said. “You were just a child when I left London and look at you now!” But then he saw Felipe, and the smile was wiped from his face and he fell back.

“You! What are you doing here? You damned serpent! God! What trick is this that you have played on me?” Furiously he turned on Sarah. “What have you done? Tricked me? Where are we going? How could you?”

“I didn’t, I didn’t,” Sarah said hastily.

He would have flung himself back in his cabin and slammed the door on them but they both went forward with him and Felipe caught the door with his shoulder.

“She hasn’t betrayed you, fool,” he said sharply. “You blame the wrong woman. You misunderstand—as usual. Dio! I had forgotten how persistently stupid you are!”

“Traitor!” Rob accused Sarah. “You sent me my mother’s coins and I trusted—”

“I freed you,” Sarah said quickly. “That’s the truth. The ship’s sailing to London and the Captain is honest. I am who I say I am, your niece and your friend. It’s all as you thought. It’s Felipe that is different. He’s with us now.”

“My enemy!”

“Not now. He’s on our side.”

“He’s only ever on his own side!” Rob accused.

Felipe gave a little ironic bow. “Alas, that was once too true. But listen and stop raving. I helped Sarah set you free, I didn’t realize she was going to be quite so”—he paused to search for the word—“dramatic. I didn’t realize she was going to fling herself off the boat, nearly drown herself, nearly freeze to death, and bring back a plague carrier. But I did tell her where you were, I did help her find you.”

“It wasn’t very hard to find me!” Rob spat. “Since I was committed to the prison where you sent me.”

“True,” Felipe conceded. “But nonetheless we did find you.”

“You left me to die in there.”

“I did, but she rescued you. You’ve nothing to fear from her. She’s always been true to you, came here to find you, and wouldn’t stop till she did.”

“You are?” Rob turned to Sarah, desperate to believe in her. “You are true to me? You are my niece? You did come for me?”

Sarah nodded, and put her hand to her heart. “I did come to find you, I did rescue you. I promised your ma that I would find you, or I would put flowers on your grave.”

Rob nodded. “But him? Do you know what this man is? This coldhearted brute?”

“Yes,” she said boldly, “I know the worst of him; but he helped me. I could not have found you if he hadn’t helped me. And he’s coming to London to accuse Livia. He’s turned against her. It was her who stole the goods from her husband’s collection and now she’s using our family to sell the goods.”

“You have nothing to fear from me. I am your friend,” Felipe told him cheerfully.

“You will never be my friend,” Rob assured him.

Felipe hesitated in the face of such determined hostility. “Very well, as you wish; but we share an enemy.” He glanced down at Sarah. “And we share a most gallant friend.”

Rob turned from him and took Sarah’s hands. “You are truly my niece, Sarah?”

“Yes, I am.”

“And you came here to Venice to find me?”

“Yes. It was your mother who asked me to come.”

“You have been misled and betrayed by this man,” Rob warned her. “He can be no friend to you.”

“No, he’s told me everything, I think.”

“Sarah, it was he that arrested me and threw me into the well. Nobody gets out of the well. They only freed me to go to my death on the Lazzaretto Nuovo.”

“Could have sent you to the Lazzaretto Vecchio,” Felipe pointed out, provocatively. “Far worse. Far more certain a death. And life is always a chance, here or in the well.”

Rob ignored him. “He plotted my death so that he could steal and trade antiquities with my wife,” he told Sarah. He expected her to be shocked but the face she turned to him was completely calm.

“I know this,” she said. “He told me himself. And now, in turn, Livia has betrayed him. She’s in England, selling the antiquities for her own profit and planning to marry an English lord.”

“Livia? She’s in England?”

“She came to us,” Sarah told him. “She went to your ma and told her you were dead—drowned.”

Rob was horrified. “She never told Ma that I was drowned! Not drowned!”

“It wasn’t as wicked as it seems,” Sarah said fairly. “She didn’t know your ma wouldn’t be able to bear such a thought. She didn’t know what she was saying to people like us, people from Foulmire.”

He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts. “How did Ma bear the news?” He looked quickly at Sarah: “It didn’t make her ill?”

She beamed. “That’s what’s amazing. She was unhurt. She didn’t believe Livia for a moment!”

“She didn’t? But why not?”

“There’s something about Livia that Grandma doesn’t like,” Sarah said honestly. “She’s never said what. But she never believed her, not from the first. Livia is beautiful, and so tragic—you know—she told a story that would break your heart. But Grandma just looked at her and said, ‘Oh yes.’ ”

“Oh yes?” Rob repeated.

Sarah felt a little bubble of laughter at the thought of her idiosyncratic grandmother. “It was when Livia put Matteo into her arms and said he would comfort her and be in the place of you.”

Rob was smiling now too, imagining his mother. “She didn’t like that?”

“It should have been really moving; but apparently your ma just held him, looked into his face, and said: ‘I don’t think it quite works like that.’ ”

“Lord, I can hear her! I can see her!”

“But why?” Felipe asked. “This woman is like a stone!”

“She’s not a fool to be played by a mountebank,” Rob snapped. “She’d see right through you.”

“Later, when she asked me to look for you, she told me she would know if her son was dead and I believed her,” Sarah told him. “I knew what she meant. I’d know if Johnnie was sick or dead. I’d just know it. Grandma never believed that you were dead, and she was certain you weren’t drowned. The only time she had a doubt was just when I was leaving, and then she was afraid. She asked me to bring back something of yours that could go into her coffin at her death. And to put flowers on the water where they lost you.”

“What flowers?”

“Why does that matter?” Felipe asked, who had been following the rapid speech.

“Forget-me-nots.”

Rob grimaced. “Ah God, I’d never have wanted her grieved! And all this time, in the well and on the island, I’ve been thinking that Livia was breaking her heart and going to everyone for my release.” He glanced at Felipe. “I thought you’d acted on your own, and that she would be fighting you, trying to get me freed. I imagined her entrapped by you, fighting to be free.”

Felipe shook his head. “Not the Nobildonna! You never knew her at all. She left at once for England, the moment they issued a warrant for your arrest. She was afraid they would call her as a witness to the death of her first husband. The day you were arrested was the day she sailed for London. She went like a princess, with a beautiful trousseau of black gowns—from when she was mourning the Conte—and she hired a maid to care for Matteo.”

“And we took her in,” Sarah told him. “And Ma believed her. She showed her antiquities in London, she sold them, and she said she would use the money to buy a bigger warehouse, in a better part of town, with better rooms for us.”

“Her antiquities?” Rob turned to Felipe.

“Indeed.” He gave a little bow. “Those that she stole from her husband and those that I make. And now she has ordered more from my store. We’ve got them on board now. We’re taking them to her.”

“She doesn’t know that Ma sent you to Venice?” Rob asked Sarah.

Sarah nodded. “She doesn’t know. At least—she didn’t know when I left. I don’t know what she’ll have got out of my ma while I’ve been away.”

“She won’t know that you’re coming to London with her antiquities?” He turned to Felipe.

The Italian smiled. “She can’t know that. I did not know it myself.”

“Why did you bring him?” Rob turned to Sarah.

“Perhaps she is going to save me?” Felipe said provocatively.

“In fact, it’s an ambush,” Rob named it.

“She deserves it,” Sarah said grimly.

“She’s still my wife.”

There was a pause. “You can’t still love her?” Sarah asked cautiously. “Are you going to forgive her? She nearly killed you.”

“I have thought of her night and day for nearly ten months. I can’t suddenly see her as an enemy. I can’t believe that she has done what you say. I can’t change how I feel, like that!” He snapped his fingers. “In a moment.”

Felipe raised his eyebrows at Sarah. “As I say,” he reminded her: “persistently stupid.”

“I can’t understand how she can have done the things you say, when I think of how she was with me,” Rob explained to Sarah, ignoring Felipe. “It’s as if you’re talking about a stranger. The thought of her trying to rescue me was all that kept me alive. I knew she would never stop trying to save me—and now you tell me it was she who put me there?”

“But this is her!” Felipe exclaimed. “This is what I love about her—the very thing that you never saw! That she can change her very self in a moment! She understands that the only way to make money is to be constantly deceitful—she stops at nothing.”

Rob shook his head, as if he could not follow his own thoughts. “When I first met her, she was a young wife, lonely and ill-treated by her husband’s family, a beautiful widow, lost in a grand palazzo with a family that hated her. I loved her. I fell deeply in love with her. I rescued her from them. I can’t imagine any other Livia.”

“There are a dozen others,” Felipe told him. “And you’re not the first man to love the face that she showed him.”

“And not the last!” Sarah added. “She’s doing it right now! She turned to Rob. “I’m sorry that you still love her, Uncle Rob. But I think she’s planning to marry this English lord. The one who helped her to sell the antiquities to other gentlemen.”

“Who is he?” he asked.

“Sir James Avery,” she told him.

He thought for a moment and shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

“He came to the warehouse,” Sarah told him. “Someone from the old days at Foulmire? Ma hates him, but Grandma said she would see him, just once. Wasn’t he your tutor? When you were a boy? On Foulmire?”

“That was James Summer,” he exclaimed. “James Summer was my tutor. Not Avery. But I suppose—could it be the same man?” He looked astounded. “He came back to Ma? But how does Livia know him?”

“Livia got her claws in him on his first visit. He let her use his house to show the antiquities. By the time I left, she’d persuaded him to do a second show. That’s what this shipment is for. She was very sure of him, in and out of his house, acting like she owned it. It looked to me as if she planned to marry him.”

Felipe waited, his eyes on Rob’s stunned expression. “Slow,” he remarked quietly to Sarah. “Persistently…”

“She can’t marry him; she’s married to me!” Rob said simply.

“Ecco!” Felipe said triumphantly. “Finalmente! Exactly.”