Page 133 of Dark Tides
“Nobildonna Reekie?” the man asked.
“Da Ricci,” she corrected him. “Yes.”
“A letter,” he said, and handed it over. It was franked by Sir James, with his name signed in the corner, so there was nothing to pay.
“I’ll read it in the kitchen!” Livia called through the doorway, not wanting to face them in the parlor, and went down the hall to the kitchen where Tabs was scouring pans. “Out,” she said shortly.
“Out where?” Tabs replied mutinously. “For I’m not going out into the yard; it’s freezing.”
“Oh, stay there then!” Livia said irritably. She glanced at Carlotta, nursing Matteo before the fire. “Isn’t it time he went to bed?”
“No, your ladyship.”
“Take him up,” she said irritably. She found she was shaking with apprehension. This should be an invitation to come to the distant house in Yorkshire. There should be a guinea under the seal to pay for her travel. Better yet, if it announced the carriage would come for her the next day. Best of all, if he was coming himself.
She seated herself in Tabs’s chair by the fire, took a knife from the table, and slit open the paper.
My dear Livia,
For so I shall call you.
First news! I am snowed in and not able to come to London, nor send for you until the ways are clear. I don’t even know how long this letter will take to reach you. We have had extraordinary weather, and my aunt and I have been housebound for days. We doubt if we shall get out till the New Year. Quite an adventure. It’s not uncommon for us to have snow, but this is early and uncommonly deep.
I hope you are well, and that you are not troubled with such harsh weather. I have often observed that the south of the countries are warmer than the northern regions, and I hope that is the case for you in London.
Livia paused in her reading and gritted her teeth on her temper at her fiancé’s untimely interest in climate.
As soon as the snow clears, I will come to you, and—good news—my aunt is determined to make the long journey to see you also. As soon as we have arrived at Avery House I will send for you. I am sorry for this delay, but I am sure you are having a happy time with your family, and I can only trust you will be glad to greet—
Your obdt servant
James Avery
“Cattive notizie?”Carlotta asked her, disobediently hovering in the doorway, holding the baby. “Bad news?”
“No!” Livia lied. “Not at all. Sir James writes to me that he is coming to London, as soon as the roads clear.”
“Un matrimonio?”Carlotta asked her, gleaming.
Livia glanced at Tabs, who was openly listening. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said coldly. “To sell the antiquities of course. They will be here soon.”
DECEMBER 1670, VENICE
Sarah slept and then woke with a start, but it was still night; the shutters threw bars of the shadow and moonlight on the floor, the canal outside the window was quiet, except for the lapping sound of a passing boat or the call of a disturbed gull. Sarah slid from under the covers, drew a shawl around her shoulders, and tiptoed to the door and down the stairs into the hall. The warehouse door was locked, but she knew the key was kept under one of the statues on a shelf in the hall. She went down the row, sliding her fingers under the base of each one to feel underneath, until she touched the cold shank. Quietly she drew it out, went to the warehouse door, fitted it into the keyhole, and turned.
The warehouse was ghostly in the moonlight that filtered through the greenish glass windows. Sarah went silently down the rows of shelves, past the looming pale statues, till she reached the curtained door, set in the curve of the wall around the secret stair.
It was locked, but it was a double door, slumped on its hinges, and she could just pull it apart, leaning on one heavy door and pushingagainst the other until there was enough of a gap between the two of them for the old lock to release and she could slip through. These service stairs spiraled upwards to the kitchen and downwards into darkness. The cold dank smell of the canal rose up to greet her. Sarah blinked into the gloom, trying to see, but all she could make out was the pallor of the stone stairs, winding down into blackness, the only sound was the eerie lap of invisible waters against the bottom steps.
Sliding a bare foot along each step to make sure that she could feel her way, her hand against the rough stone of the curved wall of the staircase, Sarah went down, one step after another, the sound of lapping water becoming louder, almost as if it were coming to meet her, as if a flood were rising. Finally, she was at the bottom, and there was a door before her; she put out a trembling hand. It was unlocked.
Gently, she pushed the door and found herself in a downstairs warehouse, a match for the one above, in almost complete darkness. The noise of lapping water from the water gate and the greenish light from the far end of the room guided her down a narrow path between benches loaded with more goods. The door at the end to the water gate was bolted from the inside, but the bolts were well oiled and slid silently back. There was no more than a little click from them and then she opened the door to the dancing illumination of moonlight on the canal. She found herself standing on a little quay, in the Russo water gate. To her left the marble steps ran up to the main house; opposite her, beside the bigger quay, the Russo gondola rocked, its head bobbing up and down like an eerie black horse.
Sarah was on the narrow storehouse quay, on the opposite side from the great steps, a place for unloading household goods; she turned and went back into the store, leaving the door open for the light.
At first glance it was a mirror image of the storerooms upstairs. Under the windows set high, away from the water, was a disorganized heap of statues, some big rounded amphorae and a jumble of little animals curled noses to paws, who looked as if they had been frozen and turned to stone as they slept together on the broad shelves.
There was a big workbench in the middle of the room, and towering over it, supported by a hawser on a pulley set in the roof beam, was a huge block of stone, the base carved roughly to look like a cliff, andon it, farther up, arms spread as if preparing to leap off the precipice into flight, an angel, a boy, naked but for a pair of exquisitely carved wings, plumage like an eagle. Sarah looked up into the sculpted face of Icarus and saw a creature as beautiful as Michelangelo’sDavid,feathered like an archangel.
