“I would not blame her if she had given the child away, or hidden him from me,” he spoke half to himself. “I wouldn’t blame her if she had found a family to take him and he had been adopted. I would forgive her even if I could never see him.”

“Yes, but she did not.” Livia had to nip her plump lower lip to contain her irritation. “She told me. Alys heard her tell me. Just as I said. He died, and she buried him.”

“I can see his grave?”

“At sea,” she said quietly. “They would not have received him in the churchyard. A miscarried bastard.”

That silenced him. He bowed his head. “God forgive me.”

“I swear this, on the life of my own son,” she said earnestly. “You have no child. He died. You are free.”

He took a little step away from the beautiful young woman seated, as if posed for a portrait, on the fallen tree with the midsummer green meadow all around her, and a flock of sheep in the middle distance. She turned and beckoned to the nursemaid, who picked up Matteo and gave him to his mother. When Sir James turned back to look at her, she was smiling down at her son. She looked up, and when she saw he was watching her, she kissed Matteo’s little head.

* * *

“And so, I told him,” Livia told Alys, seated on the bed as Alys brushed her black hair that night. “He took it very calmly.”

“He will leave us alone now?”

“I need his help to sell the antiquities; but he will never trouble you or Mia Suocera again. He may come to see me; but he will leave without seeing either of you.”

Alys finished plaiting Livia’s hair and got into bed, ready to insist that Sir James was never to come to the warehouse, that was their agreement. Slowly, Livia loosened her gown and stepped out of it, pulled her dayshift over her head and laid them both in the chest. Naked, she stood before the bed, as the candlelight played on her olive skin, made shadows between her breasts, between her legs, as beautiful as a statue and as alluring as a nymph. She unfolded her nightshift and tossed it high in the air, so for a moment she stood, arms raised, her head up, then she caught her shift over her head and pulled it down.

“You agree?”

Alys, stunned by Livia’s shameless beauty, could not speak.

Livia turned back the bedsheets and slid into Alys’s arms. She repeated the words she had said to Sir James. “It was very sad and surely very tragic. But we can be happy now. Sir James is forgiven and will not see your mother, you and your children are safe, and I”—she caught a little breath of anticipation—“I shall make my son’s fortune. Roberto’s son will be brought up as a gentleman.”

Alys could not speak, could not even think with the image of the upflung nightgown and the upreaching curved brown body, feeling the warmth of the beautiful young woman slowly enfolding her.

“You say nothing?” Livia whispered, her breath against Alys’s neck. “But I think we will all be happy.”

JUNE 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

At dusk Ned shut up the hens in their little coop, a lean-to beside the house, led the cow and calf to their pen and closed the gate on them, brought the two sheep into their little enclosure beside the cows, and threw them a shared armful of hay. The river chuckled and lapped in the darkness and a great flock of wild pigeons flew over Ned’s head, going to their roost in the forest, thousands of them darkening the sky like a storm cloud.

He tied his dog on a long rope in his kennel between the front door and the animals, to warn of foxes in the night, or any other predator—the settlers did not know for sure what animals hid in the forest and might threaten their stock. The dog gave a low growl and Ned felt the warm ruff of fur at his neck as his hackles went up.

“What’s up, Red? Something out there?” Ned asked quietly.

Quickly, he stepped into the house and lifted his gun down from the hooks over the front door, tapped a small measure of black powder into the pan so that it was ready to fire. Ned had been an infantryman for Oliver Cromwell in the New Model Army; they had all despised the old-fashioned musket, which needed the musketeer to blow a lit fuse into fiery redness and hold it to the pan for the gun to fire. Ned had bought a new flintlock that sparked its own fire and was ready in a moment. Now he swung open his front door, held his gun before him, pointed towards the silent darkness of the fields, his dog poised beside him, and said quietly: “Who’s there?”

If it were any of the People of the Dawnlands or any of the Indian nations, he knew they need not answer; they could be at the back of the house, coming silently up the riverbank as he peered, blind as a mole, out of the front door. They could be on the roof and only the dog would sense them. But Ned had traded with many men and women, talked with them, broken bread, shared salt, and trusted that nobody would come against him without warning. “Who’s there?” he repeated.

The clatter of shoes on the track told him that it was white men. “Halt! Who goes there?” Ned shouted. “I’m armed.” He held the gun in his right hand and stretched his left hand to the dog’s stout leather collar, ready to let him off the chain.

“Pax quaeritur bello,” came the whisper.

Ned put up his gun and clipped the chain back on the dog. It was the motto of Oliver Cromwell: “Peace comes through war.”

“Come forward,” he said. “I’m alone.”

William Goffe and Edward Whalley stepped forwards out of the darkness and, without a word, Ned lowered the cock on the gun, pushed open his front door, and they all went inside.

“No spies?” was all he asked. “No one see you pass?”

The two men shook their heads.

“Did you come up the common way?”

“Round the long way: out east to the forest, and then back along the riverbank.”

Ned opened the door and listened intently. He heard his dog settling down, turning round and round in his kennel and lying down, the call of hunting owls, and the noises of the forest at nighttime, familiar to him now after many nights alone. Beyond his door the voice of the river chattered softly in the darkness, there was no splash of an oar. Any white man following the two exiles around the margins of the town would have brushed against shrubs and low swinging branches, disturbed roosting birds, broken twigs, scattered stones on the path under heavy boots. Only an Indian could move in silence through the grasslands, brush, and swamp. Ned closed the door and the shutters so that there was no crack for any spy.

“We won’t stay,” William said.

“You can…”

“No, we’re going to live off the land for the summer. We’re tired of battening on old comrades.”

“It’s not battening,” Ned objected. “It’s what any of us would do for the other.”

“Aye, I know,” William agreed. “But this season we can live off our own, in the open, like free men, not like hibernating mice.”

“Where’ll you go?” Ned asked. “Stay near, and I can bring you some blankets and ale and the like. There’s a Norwottuck village just upriver, I know them—they’d shelter you.”

“I wouldn’t feel safe among them,” Edward ruled. “We’re going south to the coast, near where we were before. Can you take us back there for the summer? And bring us back here for the winter?”