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 taste, 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.”