Page 163 of Dark Tides
Sarah nodded. “She doesn’t know. At least—she didn’t know when I left. I don’t know what she’ll have got out of my ma while I’ve been away.”
“She won’t know that you’re coming to London with her antiquities?” He turned to Felipe.
The Italian smiled. “She can’t know that. I did not know it myself.”
“Why did you bring him?” Rob turned to Sarah.
“Perhaps she is going to save me?” Felipe said provocatively.
“In fact, it’s an ambush,” Rob named it.
“She deserves it,” Sarah said grimly.
“She’s still my wife.”
There was a pause. “You can’t still love her?” Sarah asked cautiously. “Are you going to forgive her? She nearly killed you.”
“I have thought of her night and day for nearly ten months. I can’t suddenly see her as an enemy. I can’t believe that she has done what you say. I can’t change how I feel, like that!” He snapped his fingers. “In a moment.”
Felipe raised his eyebrows at Sarah. “As I say,” he reminded her: “persistently stupid.”
“I can’t understand how she can have done the things you say, when I think of how she was with me,” Rob explained to Sarah, ignoringFelipe. “It’s as if you’re talking about a stranger. The thought of her trying to rescue me was all that kept me alive. I knew she would never stop trying to save me—and now you tell me it was she who put me there?”
“But this is her!” Felipe exclaimed. “This is what I love about her—the very thing that you never saw! That she can change her very self in a moment! She understands that the only way to make money is to be constantly deceitful—she stops at nothing.”
Rob shook his head, as if he could not follow his own thoughts. “When I first met her, she was a young wife, lonely and ill-treated by her husband’s family, a beautiful widow, lost in a grand palazzo with a family that hated her. I loved her. I fell deeply in love with her. I rescued her from them. I can’t imagine any other Livia.”
“There are a dozen others,” Felipe told him. “And you’re not the first man to love the face that she showed him.”
“And not the last!” Sarah added. “She’s doing it right now! She turned to Rob. “I’m sorry that you still love her, Uncle Rob. But I think she’s planning to marry this English lord. The one who helped her to sell the antiquities to other gentlemen.”
“Who is he?” he asked.
“Sir James Avery,” she told him.
He thought for a moment and shook his head. “Never heard of him.”
“He came to the warehouse,” Sarah told him. “Someone from the old days at Foulmire? Ma hates him, but Grandma said she would see him, just once. Wasn’t he your tutor? When you were a boy? On Foulmire?”
“That was James Summer,” he exclaimed. “James Summer was my tutor. Not Avery. But I suppose—could it be the same man?” He looked astounded. “He came back to Ma? But how does Livia know him?”
“Livia got her claws in him on his first visit. He let her use his house to show the antiquities. By the time I left, she’d persuaded him to do a second show. That’s what this shipment is for. She was very sure of him, in and out of his house, acting like she owned it. It looked to me as if she planned to marry him.”
Felipe waited, his eyes on Rob’s stunned expression. “Slow,” he remarked quietly to Sarah. “Persistently…”
“She can’t marry him; she’s married to me!” Rob said simply.
“Ecco!”Felipe said triumphantly. “Finalmente!Exactly.”
FEBRUARY 1671, LONDON
The line of ships waiting for the legal quays trailed down the river. Captain Shore, staring upriver, his blue eyes squinting against the light drizzle of a cold morning, called for a skiff to take him to the Custom House to ask permission to go straight to the Reekie Wharf and meet a custom officer there.
“You don’t have to unload at the Custom House?” Felipe asked with interest, looking up to the quarterdeck and the Captain.
“Only if you’re carrying special cargo, cargo that pays a royal duty, like coffee or spices, or from the East Indies, or cargo of high value. Our manifest says private goods, furniture and the like.” Captain Shore scowled down at the handsome younger man. “And some barrels of oil, and wine. We can unload them all at Reekie Wharf and pay the duty there. If theywereprivate goods, furniture and the like, then I would have no worries. You tell me they are?”
“I do. And you have an export license that confirms my word.”
