Page 116 of Dark Tides
“Only Sir James, who shows her statues in his house.”
“Ah, she has an admirer? He’s a young man?”
“No, he’s quite old.”
“And what do you think of her? What is the opinion of the milliner of the Nobildonna, her Italian mistress?”
“I think she is the most wonderful woman,” she assured him, sounding completely sincere. “But I don’t say that I understand her.”
He laughed shortly. “Ah, she’s a woman!” he said. “If you cannotunderstand her, a woman and her own maid, I am sure I would never try to do so. Now, see here…”
He led her into a second room, off the first, crammed full of treasures, carefully arranged and stacked, some of them packed for travel, some of them laid on the floor. There were pillars piled one on another like carved logs. In the middle of the room were the larger pieces, many of them seated women. Some of them had been designed to serve as fountains, tipping empty jars into the darkness. All around them were random pieces of stone, some of them half-carved, others were blocks cut or fallen from a bigger piece, like a giant puzzle. And there were heads of great men, their stern brows crowned with laurel, and shields with inscribed poetry proclaiming heroism.
“I had no idea she had so much!” Sarah said. “How will she ever…”
“Sell it all?” he asked. “It is the collection of a lifetime, for a lifelong fortune. She can only sell a dozen or so pieces at a time. The English collectors want their statues one by one, not in their hundreds. I would never show a customer all of this, all at once. This is for you, only. When we have established a name, she will not have to sell pieces one at a time. The agents will come to us from England and France and Germany, we will have a showroom with just a few, a very few big pieces and they will order what they need and we will send it. The buyers like to see only a few pieces at a time, it makes them look rare.”
“They’re not rare?”
He held up the lamp so that she could see that every part of the room was filled. “They were carved for centuries in great numbers,” he said. “For tombs and public places, for houses and temples, for libraries and government offices, for roads and for overlooking the harbors. We are a country that has carved stone since the beginning of time. Of course, there are more statues than there are people in Venice! Now that they are admired, now that they are given a value, we find them, we dig for them all over and we trade them.”
“And you mend them and polish them?”
“No! Never say it!” he said laughing. “All we do is clean them and we sometimes mount them on a plinth so they can be seen. But we don’t alter them in any way. They have to be authentic.”
“You don’t copy them? Or carve your own?”
“The skills have been lost,” he said firmly. “That’s what gives these survivors their value: that they are so old and can never be made again. To pass off modern work as that of the ancients would be a fraud. These are worth a fortune because they are antiquities. A modern copy would be worth only the price of the stone and the wage of the mason. An ancient statue is worth ten times that. We take great care that all our things are truly old, truly beautiful.”
“And you share everything?”
“Let us say we are partners. We were partners when she first saw them in the Palazzo Fiori, we were partners when we rescued her share, and we are partners now, as we sell them.”
“Her palace must have been very beautiful,” Sarah ventured.
“It was one of the finest.”
“And then she married Mrs. Reekie’s son. That was surely a comedown for her?”
“Ah, the doctor? Little Roberto? Did you know him?”
Sarah found that she was bristling at the casual dismissal of her uncle. “No, I never knew him. He’d gone to Venice before I went to work for Mrs. Reekie. I know of him, for they talk of him often. They loved him, they mourn him… But I wouldn’t know him if I saw him.”
“And of course, you’ll never see him,” he reminded her gently.
“No, of course. It was a great shock for the household when the Nobildonna wrote and told us that he was dead.”
“It was a great shock for us also,” he said. “A tragedy. So? You have seen our store. You can take your pick. How many things do you want?”
“About twenty things,” Sarah said. “And Captain Shore is to ship them back to England, as before.”
“Will you choose them now?” He handed her the candelabra and leaned against the wall as she walked around the crowded room, looking at one thing, stretching around something to inspect another, and bending down to admire the stored columns.
“I should take columns,” she said. “I know she wants four or five. Some of the bigger animals—people like them for their gardens. Lions especially. Some vases, and I think—the Caesar heads, another set of them. And a few little things, for showing on tables.”
“You like the Chimera?” he asked, showing her a lion with the headof a goat bursting from its spine, being bitten by the lion tail, which was itself a snake. Sarah recoiled. “It’s horrible!”
He laughed. “Little Jolie—nothing is horrible. Nothing is beautiful. It is just what people like now and then. And this is amusing as it shows a brute that preys on itself. Like Man perhaps. It is not charming but it is in fashion. All we care for is fashion. All we want is money. You can start packing them tomorrow. Your taste is very good, it’s just what I would have chosen myself.”
