Page 136 of Dark Tides
“And why did she send you here?”
“To find her husband,” Sarah invented rapidly. “She’s so grieved—her heart is breaking—and she thought he might be alive. She thought he might be in prison: not dead. So she asked me to come…” Her lie tailed off as he rose and went to the window and looked out at thecanal. His face was hidden from her but she could see his shoulders were shaking. She thought he was weeping, perhaps for sorrow at the loss of Rob—so she rose too, uncertain what she should do. Carefully she approached him and put her hand gently on the velvet sleeve. “Are you distressed, Felipe? Did you know him?” she asked.
Felipe Russo turned, and showed her the tears in his dark eyes, but they were from laughing, he could hardly stop laughing to gasp: “Child, I swear that you will be the death of me! For God’s sake stop lying to me. That is the funniest thing I ever heard. You will never know how ridiculous! It’s a terrible lie, a stupid lie, a clumsy lie. She would never send a girl like you to save her husband from prison!”
“But why not?” Sarah demanded. “She loved him. She would want to know he is safe. She would surely want him found? Why should she not have sent me to get him out?”
“Never! Never!”
“But why never?”
“Because it was she who denounced him! Little fool! She put him in there, herself!”
DECEMBER 1670, LONDON
“And where is Sarah?” Livia asked the one question Alys had been dreading. The two women were in bed, wrapped up in shawls against the cold, ice flowers frosting the inside of the windows in the winter London dawn.
“Still at her friend’s house.”
“She does not come home? Not for Christmas? Is she coming for Twelfth Night? When will she come?”
Alys moved out of Livia’s embrace and leaned up on one elbow, so she could see the beautiful face on the pillow, the dark plait over the bronze shoulder.
“She will come soon,” she said.
“You do not send for her, and order her home?”
“No. She will come… perhaps next month.”
“So, tell me the truth.”
Alys felt dread in her belly. “The truth?” she repeated. She knew she could not bear to tell Livia that she was so deeply mistrusted, that her own mother-in-law would not love her, would not receive her money, would not accept her child as a grandson.
“Have you sent her away because you did not want her to see us?” Livia whispered.
“See us?” Alys repeated; she had no idea what Livia was saying.
“See us together?”
“Why should she not see us together?” the older woman repeated.
Livia stretched deliciously, like a lazy cat, her arms above her head, the dark hair in her armpits releasing an erotic scent of musk and oil of roses. “Since she would see—as your mother, for all her wisdom, does not see—that we are friends, that we are lovers who will never be parted, we will be together forever.”
Alys felt her world turning around her; she put a hand on the headboard, as if to anchor herself against seasickness. “We are sisters,” was all she could say. “We love each other as sisters.”
“Oh my dear, call it what you will! Do you not love me and want me to stay here forever? Do you not wait, through the long cold day, for when we shall be alone together at night? Have we not found, together, true happiness? We are loving sisters who have never found love like this before in our lives. No husband has understood me or been tender to me as you, and you have never had a husband at all. Am I not dearer to you than anyone you have ever known?”
“Except my children,” Alys temporized. “Except my mother.”
Livia waved them away. “Of course, of course, except our children. Is not this the first true love you have known?”
Alys thought of the young man who abandoned her on her wedding day and left her and her mother to face disaster alone. “All he gaveme was a cart,” she said with old bitterness. “And I had adored him, I risked everything for him.”
Livia laughed. “But I will give you a fortune,” she promised. “We will move to a bigger, better wharf with a beautiful storehouse where you will show art and antique collections and we will be true in love and true in business. The world will see us as loving sisters, and we will keep our desire hidden. I will never tell of it and you will be mine, heart and soul. Send for Sarah, she can come home. We will be discreet. I will let everyone think that I am pursuing Sir James—” She put up her hand before Alys could protest. “I know you don’t like him but let everyone think that I am chasing him for his money. That’s what your mother thinks already, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Alys admitted.
“So let her think that. I will visit him and work with him, but it is all, only, to make a fortune so we can have a business, a home, and a life together. Everything I do is for us to have our house together and we shall have a love that is true.”
