Page 162 of Dark Tides
“No, he’s told me everything, I think.”
“Sarah, it was he that arrested me and threw me into the well. Nobody gets out of the well. They only freed me to go to my death on the Lazzaretto Nuovo.”
“Could have sent you to the Lazzaretto Vecchio,” Felipe pointed out, provocatively. “Far worse. Far more certain a death. And life is always a chance, here or in the well.”
Rob ignored him. “He plotted my death so that he could steal and trade antiquities with my wife,” he told Sarah. He expected her to be shocked but the face she turned to him was completely calm.
“I know this,” she said. “He told me himself. And now, in turn, Livia has betrayed him. She’s in England, selling the antiquities for her own profit and planning to marry an English lord.”
“Livia? She’s in England?”
“She came to us,” Sarah told him. “She went to your ma and told her you were dead—drowned.”
Rob was horrified. “She never told Ma that I was drowned! Not drowned!”
“It wasn’t as wicked as it seems,” Sarah said fairly. “She didn’t know your ma wouldn’t be able to bear such a thought. She didn’t know what she was saying to people like us, people from Foulmire.”
He shook his head as if to clear his thoughts. “How did Ma bear the news?” He looked quickly at Sarah: “It didn’t make her ill?”
She beamed. “That’s what’s amazing. She was unhurt. She didn’t believe Livia for a moment!”
“She didn’t? But why not?”
“There’s something about Livia that Grandma doesn’t like,” Sarahsaid honestly. “She’s never said what. But she never believed her, not from the first. Livia is beautiful, and so tragic—you know—she told a story that would break your heart. But Grandma just looked at her and said, ‘Oh yes.’?”
“Oh yes?” Rob repeated.
Sarah felt a little bubble of laughter at the thought of her idiosyncratic grandmother. “It was when Livia put Matteo into her arms and said he would comfort her and be in the place of you.”
Rob was smiling now too, imagining his mother. “She didn’t like that?”
“It should have been really moving; but apparently your ma just held him, looked into his face, and said: ‘I don’t think it quite works like that.’?”
“Lord, I can hear her! I can see her!”
“But why?” Felipe asked. “This woman is like a stone!”
“She’s not a fool to be played by a mountebank,” Rob snapped. “She’d see right through you.”
“Later, when she asked me to look for you, she told me she would know if her son was dead and I believed her,” Sarah told him. “I knew what she meant. I’d know if Johnnie was sick or dead. I’d just know it. Grandma never believed that you were dead, and she was certain you weren’t drowned. The only time she had a doubt was just when I was leaving, and then she was afraid. She asked me to bring back something of yours that could go into her coffin at her death. And to put flowers on the water where they lost you.”
“What flowers?”
“Why does that matter?” Felipe asked, who had been following the rapid speech.
“Forget-me-nots.”
Rob grimaced. “Ah God, I’d never have wanted her grieved! And all this time, in the well and on the island, I’ve been thinking that Livia was breaking her heart and going to everyone for my release.” He glanced at Felipe. “I thought you’d acted on your own, and that she would be fighting you, trying to get me freed. I imagined her entrapped by you, fighting to be free.”
Felipe shook his head. “Not the Nobildonna! You never knew herat all. She left at once for England, the moment they issued a warrant for your arrest. She was afraid they would call her as a witness to the death of her first husband. The day you were arrested was the day she sailed for London. She went like a princess, with a beautiful trousseau of black gowns—from when she was mourning the Conte—and she hired a maid to care for Matteo.”
“And we took her in,” Sarah told him. “And Ma believed her. She showed her antiquities in London, she sold them, and she said she would use the money to buy a bigger warehouse, in a better part of town, with better rooms for us.”
“Her antiquities?” Rob turned to Felipe.
“Indeed.” He gave a little bow. “Those that she stole from her husband and those that I make. And now she has ordered more from my store. We’ve got them on board now. We’re taking them to her.”
“She doesn’t know that Ma sent you to Venice?” Rob asked Sarah.
