Page 70 of Dark Tides
“Most things,” Quiet Squirrel said with pleasure.
“Maybe marry,” Ned said. “Maybe not. What you think?”
The ferry reached the other side and nudged against the pier. It rocked as the women climbed off and Quiet Squirrel and her daughter kept a gentle hand on the little girl.
“I think you would make a good husband,” she told him seriously. “But if you married and had a family you would become a greedy farmer like all the rest. And you would not be your own man. And I think you want to be your own man, just as we want to be ourselves.”
She spoke too fast and used too many strange words for Ned to understand, and without trying to explain she handed him some dried deer meat wrapped in woven cattail leaves. “Wrap it tight, keep it dry,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. “And don’t you marry.”
SEPTEMBER 1670, LONDON
Sarah went down the newly washed steps to the kitchen door of Avery House and tapped on the panel.
“Who is it now?” came the irritable shout from inside.
“Sarah Stoney,” she said inaudibly. She raised her voice and repeated: “Sarah Stoney.”
“Never ’eard of ’er,” came the discouraging reply.
Sarah stepped up and peered over the half door. “Sarah Stoney for Nobildonna da Ricci,” she said. “I’ve come to see the antiquities. She said I might.”
“Step in, step in,” came the shout. “I can’t leave this.”
Sarah opened the door and came into the kitchen to see a brawny red-faced woman, floured to the elbows, kneading a huge mound of pastry at a stone-topped table in the middle of the kitchen. Copper pans gleamed over the closed stove in the yawning hearth, a pump over the sink ran icy water, a dog in the corner growled at the stranger and sat down again.
“Come in. For Lady Peachey, are you?”
Sarah, at a loss at the strange name, replied: “To see the statues.”
“Glib will take you,” the woman nodded. “Shout out of that door. It’s just the backstairs. Shout for Glib.”
Sarah, horribly embarrassed, crossed the kitchen and opened the door that the cook had indicated. “Glib!” she called.
A clatter of shoes on the wooden stairs preceded Glib, a gangling youth.
“Take the young lady to Lady Peachey, she’s in the gallery,” thecook ordered him. “And then come straight back here. I’ll need you to fetch the fruit from the store.” She turned to Sarah. “Follow him,” she commanded. “You shouldn’t have come in this door anyway, unless you’re Trade. Which of course you may be. As might be her ladyship, Her Highness. For all anybody knows.”
Sarah followed Glib’s skinny shoulders in too-large livery up the short flight of stairs from the basement kitchen, through the green baize door into the startlingly high and bright hall. He crossed the black-and-white marble slabs and led the way up a stone staircase to the gallery at the top. It ran the length of the front of the house and, at the end, standing before a column of pure white marble, Sarah recognized the dark silhouette of the Italian widow.
“Aunt Livia!”
“Ah, Sarah,” she said, turning around and offering her cool cheek for a kiss. “You found your way, then.”
“It’s very grand,” Sarah whispered, turning to see that Glib was retreating back down the stairs. “I did not expect it to be so very—”
“Yes, I’m pleased,” Livia interrupted her. “See, here is the column you liked so much, it looks very handsome here. I have put it here, and on either side of the gallery I have six, just six each side, heads of Caesars. That’s all I am having up here—I don’t want it to be crowded. It must not look like…”
But she had already lost the girl. Sarah had stepped back and was craning her head to see the statues. Twice as large as life, the blind bronze eyes stared into the gallery, unseeing. Each stone head stood on a fluted column of creamy marble, each one crowned with shining laurel leaves of bronze. The faces, rounded or beaky, indulgent or stern, seemed to look back at the girl who gazed up at them, rapt, going from one to another and stretching out her hand to touch the cool column.
“They are extraordinary,” the girl whispered. “Are they real?”
The widow glanced quickly behind, as if afraid that Glib had heard. “Whatever d’you mean?” she demanded, her voice sharp. “What are you saying? Are they real? What a question!”
“Were they really like this? Was this one really so fat in life? Did he not mind being shown with such a pursy little mouth?”
“Oh! I misunderstood you. Well, I don’t know. I think they were made later, not at the time. Perhaps from the coins, or perhaps from a drawing? They must have been made at the same time, for they were made as a set.”
“Who made them?”
