Page 131 of Dark Tides
“He won’t have been a heretic,” Sarah said firmly. “None of us would die for our beliefs. We’re a family that wants to live. But what could he have done that someone would denounce him? He was a doctor, a physician. He made people better and saved lives! I spoke to someone who knew him—he was trying to find a cure for quatrain fever. Who would denounce a man like that?”
Captain Shore shrugged. “That’s what the Bocca are for. Anyone could have denounced him for anything. An unhappy patient? A rival physician? A woman? Someone who thought he was a spy because he was English? Probably, we’ll never know. Did he make enemies?”
“I know nothing about him but that he married the Nobildonna, on the death of her first husband!” she exclaimed.
“Nobildonna da Ricci, or Peachey, or whatever she calls herself today?” he asked. “Her that has more furniture than any woman on God’s earth?”
“You call her da Peachey?” Sarah confirmed.
He shrugged. “I call her what she tells me to call her. That’s the name she had put on the cargo manifest.”
She nodded. “I’m staying with her steward. He doesn’t know I’m her niece. I gave him my false name.”
“Signor Russo?” he asked, looking at her under his sandy eyebrows. “Handsome as a devil and charming as a snake?”
Sarah blinked at the critical description of her only friend in Venice. “That’s him,” she agreed uncertainly.
“Not a good place for you,” he said flatly.
She drew closer. “Captain Shore, why not?”
“Not my place to say,” he hesitated.
“You wouldn’t want me to be in danger…”
“I don’t want you to be here at all!” he said, goaded.
“My ma would want you to protect me if you could.”
“I know! I know!” he said miserably.
“When we get home, I will tell her how kind you have been to me.”
“If we ever get home at all!”
“Help me,” Sarah urged him. “It’s my mother’s brother.”
“Step over here.” He led her to the prow of the ship and they faced out over the water, so that no one on the quay could see their faces or guess what they were saying from the movement of their lips. “That Russo—he’s not just a collector of antiquities.”
She waited. “He was my aunt’s steward,” she volunteered, and saw him quickly shake his head.
“He’s an ambidexter, a cheat. He’s got more statues than could ever have come from one house. I’ve shipped hundreds of big crates for him, stones, friezes, figures, statues, one so big that it had to lie on deck and we had to clamber round it.”
Sarah looked down the deck of the galleon, trying to imagine a statue as big as he described.
“He sells a lot?”
“That’s what I’m saying, he’s a trader, the biggest trader. He handles them in their hundreds.”
“But surely, that’s not illegal?”
“Not illegal if he buys them, and doesn’t steal them,” he confirmed. “Not illegal if he has the paperwork to export them. Not illegal if he doesn’t falsify the paperwork, saying he’s sending one thing when really he’s sending something else. Not illegal if he’s not forging them: copying and then chipping them and darkening them to pass them off as old. Not illegal if he’s not putting lots of different parts together and then saying it’s a rarity—a whole figure.”
“Are all these crimes?”
“The Venetians don’t want all their statues and old goods flying away to the new houses of France and Germany and England,” he said. “You’re only allowed to ship so much. You have to have a permit, and you can only get a permit if you’re an ambassador. Didn’t yourmother herself tell me it was the Lady’s furniture—not antiquities but furniture?”
Sarah nodded fearfully. “I thought that was so the Nobildonna could avoid paying duty in England.”
