Page 54 of Dark Tides
“He knows that I came here to sell my goods, he knows that I have no money until I sell my treasures,” Livia replied. “It will take him no more than a few days to pack and get the permissions for them to leave the country.”
“If he can pack them so quickly, I can commission a captain here to take your instructions and bring back goods.”
Livia clapped her hands. “How clever you are! This is what it is to be a woman of business.”
Alinor smiled and looked from one young woman to the other. “You can find the money?” she asked Alys.
Alys nodded. “How much space will they take in our store?” she asked.
“They’ll be padded and crated, I should think they’ll take the whole of the ground floor. But they won’t be there for long, if you will send them on your wagon to Sir James’s house.”
Alys gave one of her rare smiles. “You’re excited.”
“This is going to make our fortune!” Livia exclaimed. “And your wharf will become known as a place to ship beautiful works of art and luxuries. You won’t be heaving coal anymore.” She caught Alys’s hands and did a little dance on the spot; her joy was infectious.
“We’ve never heaved coal,” Alinor said.
That night the two young women talked as they undressed, and brushed each other’s hair.
“Thank you for looking after my darling Matteo today,” Livia said. “Was he really very good for you?”
“I’d forgotten what it was like to spend time with a baby so young,” Alys said. “He was perfect. He had the milk that Carlotta left for him and he slept for most of the time. I worked in the counting house, with him in the cradle at my side, and he and I sat with Ma for most of the afternoon. When he woke and cried, I walked him on the wharf and he watched the boats and the seagulls, I’m sure he was taking notice. He smiled and waved his little hands as if he was excited, and when he saw—”
“Yes, he is very clever,” Livia said absentmindedly.
“And you? You are happy with the premises that you have found? His house is adequate?”
Livia noted that Sir James’s name was apparently not to be mentioned. “Yes,” she replied. “There’s a big hall and an open gallery, and a garden. I can show about twenty pieces, I should think. I can use them as examples and take orders for more.”
“You’ve got more than one load?”
“It was my husband’s great passion,” Livia said. “I hoped to make a business from it, buying and shipping and selling.”
“I am surprised there are so many objects, so many people buying them.”
Livia smoothed her pillow and got into bed. “People were making them for hundreds of years,” she said. “So they are there, all round, if you know where to look, and you care to pick them up.”
“You pick them up? For free?”
“My first husband started his collection from his own land. His quarry had been worked for years, and some pieces were just lying around, and there was a ruin of a house nearby with some beautiful urns—vases. Then all the little farmers who had ancient villas on their land or temples buried in their fields learned that people will pay more for the pieces of stone than for the olive crops! So now they dig them up and sell them to collectors and agents for collectors. You can go into the market in Venice and buy pieces of marble or old jewels and gold rings on the same stalls where they sell oil.”
“There must be treasures in England too then,” Alys remarked. “When my mother was a little girl she used to collect old coins—not gold or silver but the old clipped coins of base metal, just tokens.”
“What would be the point of that?” Livia asked. “Nobody is going to buy chips of copper. It’s not like gold. There’s no profit.”
Alys gave a superstitious shudder. “No, there was no real point,” she agreed, getting into bed beside Livia. “She just liked them. She had a purse of them. It was…”
“What?”
“Just a purse, of dross.”
“No point at all,” the young woman said flatly, and leaned over and blew out the candle so the room was plunged into darkness.
JULY 1670, LONDON
Alys walked west along the quay to the merchants’ coffeehouse where she did her morning business. As a woman wharfinger she was a rarity in the crowded meetinghouse. Most of the other women merchants, shipowners, ship wives, and carter widows sent an apprentice or a son into the coffeehouses to meet with customers and clients. But Alys had been a regular in two or three coffee shops for years and knew that Paton’s in Harp Lane was the best place to meet shipowners for the Mediterranean and Adriatic trade.
She looked for Captain Shore, master of theSweet Hope,who had taken Rob to Italy when he first went to study at Padua. The Captain usually met his customers at a table in a room at the rear of the warren of a building, and Alys glanced over the high-backed settles where a couple of captains were taking instructions and letters for their destinations. She approached a table where a broad man with thinning fair hair and a weather-beaten face was folding some papers into a wallet.
