Page 71 of Dark Tides
“Oh, it’s too long ago for us to know that. But they were found all together in what had been a great hall so perhaps some wealthy man in ancient times wanted to dine with all the Caesars. And now, I hope, another wealthy man will see them and want to repeat the experience.”
“They’re not beautiful…” The girl struggled to understand her sense of awe.
“It hardly matters,” Livia remarked, stepping back and looking not at the Caesars but at the upturned face of her niece. “It hardly matters.”
“Beauty doesn’t matter?”
Livia was astounded. “Have you understood nothing? What matters is that they sell! Have you understood nothing from working in a shop?”
“But your husband, your first husband?”
“What about him?”
“Did he not collect them for their beauty?”
Livia tossed her head, and then recollected herself. “It is him I am thinking about,” she said very soberly. “He would not have wanted me to fall so far as a little wharf on the Thames. He would not want me to live in such a place. He would have wanted his collection to be my dower—for me to live as I should, as the Nobildonna da Picci.”
“Reekie,” Sarah corrected.
The widow shrugged her black satin shoulders and gave her pretty tinkling laugh. “I cannot say it, try as I might. Roberto always laughed at me. I will have to call it Picci. It is a pretty compliment to the Sussex family. Now, would you like to see the statues in the garden?”
“But wasn’t Peachey the name of the lord at Foulmire? Uncle Rob’s patron.”
“Yes, as I say, a pretty compliment to him, don’t you think? And amusing, that when I turn my name from Italian to English it sounds like his?”
“I don’t know…”
“Do you want to see the statues in the garden? I can’t waste my time.”
“Yes, yes, I do, please.”
The widow led the way down the grand staircase to the black-and-white paved hall, her black skirts hushing on the marble. Sarah thought how well she suited the classical beauty of this house; in the warehouse she always seemed too exotic, her color too vivid.
“Do you love coming here?” she asked as they passed through the high glazed doors to the terrace, and then she gasped at the garden laid out below them, studded with statues, and the silver of the river at the end of the garden. “Oh! This is beautiful!”
Livia ran down the steps and led Sarah from one statue to another, one just a fragment of a bigger piece—a water vase, a hydria that had once been held, thousands of years ago, by a marble hand, whose stone fingers and nails were still clasped on the handle.
“Oh!” Sarah breathed. “Look!”
Livia smiled and pointed farther down the garden where part of a frieze had been laid on the ground so that visitors could see the story of the horses riding out to battle, the riders stern and beautiful holding the rippling manes.
The girl knelt beside them as if she were praying. “May I touch?” she asked. Livia nodded, and Sarah bent over the figures, tracing nostril and nose, ears pricked, arching neck and the strong muscled torsos of the riders.
“You can look at them all,” Livia said. “I will wait for you on the terrace.”
She turned and went back up the steps to sit on a stone bench set back against the sun-warmed wall. Sir James stepped through the glazed door to his study and found her there. From the garden below, Sarah saw his polite bow, and the way that Livia rose at once and came so close that he stepped back. Livia shot a secretive little glance back towards the garden as if she did not want Sarah to see them. She slid her hand in his arm and drew him indoors, out of sight, as if they were lovers in hiding.
“A viewing?” James asked her, as she closed the door to the terrace behind them.
“Just the child from the warehouse. I would prefer if she did not seeyou. Or rather—her mother would prefer it, and I cannot cross her.”
“I want nothing to do with her,” he said gently. “I understand she is not mine. I see no resemblance. She is a pretty girl, with her dark hair and eyes, but I don’t dream that she is mine.”
“Hardly pretty,” she amended. “They are both poor little things. She is a millinery girl without an education. But she has a sense of beauty that she has learned from lace and tinsel that I could make something of.”
“Would you want to make something of her?” he asked curiously.
She looked up at him, her creamy skin flushed a little from the sunshine. “No,” she said. “I have no time for a strange child of common stock from a warehouse. Why would I want a child such as that, when I can breed and raise a noble one?”
