Page 120 of Dark Tides
His mother smiled and raised her glass to the toast in English, which she could not understand. She asked her son a quick question in Italian.
“She asks me what I have said to make the English rose blush red?” he reported.
Sarah smiled and shook her head. But she knew that those had not been the words. The woman had spoken too quickly for her to follow, but she would have recognized the words “rose” and “English.” She was almost certain that she had heard Livia’s name in the stream of rapid Italian.
“If you had been raised as I have been, you would think the same,” she told him staunchly.
“No father?” he asked. “Me neither.”
“No father; but the hardest-working mother that ever blessed a home, and a grandmother who never complains, who understands more of this world and the next than any ordained minister. A home where we don’t really live together, we cling together while the world turns upside down and back again.”
“A little business?” he asked sympathetically.
“Clinging on,” she said. “So my brother and I had to make our own livings. He—Johnnie—is doing well, he has a head for numbers. He’s apprenticed to a merchant and they think well of him, and I have my millinery papers. When I go home, I’ll look for work as a milliner and leave service.”
“And is that what you want?” Signor Russo asked, his dark eyes on her animated face. “Now you have come so far and seen Venice? Is that all you want—to go home to a new millinery shop, with a box of feathers?”
She hesitated. “It’s hard not to want more,” she admitted. “Now I’m here, even though I’ve seen only the port and the streets on the way to here… it’s hard not to imagine more.”
He got up from his seat, came to the foot of the table, and leaned over her chair to pour her another glass of wine. “Imagine more,” he counseled softly in her ear. “This is a city where imaginings can come to life. Marco Polo went from here, overland to the court of China: just because he dreamed it was possible. We live here without a king, without an emperor: because we thought it could be done. We won’t run out of great leaders and fetch a king back like the English did. This is a republic that is built to last. Every wall here is painted by a Master: because we love beauty; look up when you walk around and every corner is beautiful. Even the courtesans make a fortune: because we know that beauty is fleeting and precious. Imagine more, Bathsheba, and see where your dreams take you.”
She found she was smiling, filled with excitement. “I must be drunk.” She resisted the spell his words were weaving around her. “I can’t be imagining and dreaming. I have too much to do. I have to pack up my mistress’s goods and go home.”
He laughed. “Then I will light your candle for you to go to bed, you drunkard,” he said. “Good night, Bathsheba.”
“Good night, Signor Russo, good night, signora,” she replied, rising from the table and going to the beautiful marble-topped side table where her candle stood ready in a beautifully wrought gold candlestick.
He lit her candle from one of the branch on the dining table and as she took it, he held her hand. “You may call me Felipe,” he said quietly. “You can say:Buonanotte, Felipe.”
She glanced at his mother and saw her smiling, dark-eyed nod, and then turned back to his intense gaze. “Buonanotte, Felipe,” she repeated, and took her candle and walked from the dining room. She felt him watch her all the way to the foot of the stone stairs, and she walked, shoulders back, head set, proudly like a little queen, as beautiful as a statue, all the way up the stairs while the candle flame bobbed excitedly beside her.
DECEMBER 1670, LONDON
Johnnie came home the Sunday before Christmas and found his mother standing precariously high, on a clerk’s stool, pinning greenery above the corner cupboard in the parlor.
“You know, when I was young, it was forbidden to take a holiday on Christmas Day?” she said, stretching to make the last adjustment. “This is such a pleasure.”
“But why was it forbidden?” he asked.
“Oliver Cromwell,” she said shortly. “And the minister said it was pagan. But now it’s all turned around.”
“The court takes two weeks to celebrate,” he said. “Drunk for a fortnight. And then they start all over again for Twelfth Night.”
Alys laughed. “You’re a puritan like your uncle Ned,” she told him, as he helped her down. “Our minister, the puritan one at St. Wilfrid’s, used to say—where does it say in the Bible that you should get drunk to celebrate the coming of the Lord? And Old Ellie from East Beach would shout from the back: ‘He didn’t turn water into wine to make vinegar to put on His cabbage, you know!’?”
“She did?”
“Aye, they would punish her every Twelfth Night for one thing or another. But they didn’t even call it Twelfth Night when I was a young woman. We didn’t have Twelfth Night nor Christmas.”
“Did you have presents?”
She turned from him to put berries on the coat hook on the back of the door. “We had no money for presents. But Rob and I used to look for the little tokens that your grandma loves so much. We’d search for them all year, and give them to her for Christmas. And she’d give us fairings, anything sweet. Lord, we loved anything with sugar.”
“You and your brother, Rob,” he confirmed.
“Yes, God bless him.”
“And Sarah is away, looking for him, this Christmas Day?”
