Page 81 of Dark Tides
“It’s pounds he wants, not shillings! I’ve got about fourteen pounds. I can just stretch to pay the first half, but I don’t have the rest.”
“But this doesn’t matter!” Livia smiled and took Alys’s anxious face in both hands and kissed her on the mouth. “Send him out with your little savings, and when he returns I will have sold the antiquities and I will pay him. Be happy!” she told her.
“It’s just that we never…”
“You’ve never had such profitable trade before.”
“It’s such a risk!”
“No it is not,” Livia ruled. “You are trusting me, as we agreed. You have to trust me.”
Alinor, in her bright high room, was drawing up a list of Sarah’s favorite dishes for the feast on Sunday. She had prepared her a gift, a soft shapeless pillow stuffed with lavender and rosemary for repelling moths, catnip and chamomile for repelling fleas. “You press it in a bonnet to help it keep shape.” She showed Livia. “And it keeps out the moths. Her mother is getting her a hatbox, and we are going to hire a signwriter to paint her name on the outside in curly letters, like a proper milliner.”
“But she can’t open her own business, can she?” Livia confirmed. “She’ll never have her own hatboxes?”
“Ah no, we couldn’t afford to set her up in a millinery business. Rents are impossible, a millinery shop needs to be in the City. She will have to sign on as a senior milliner where she is now. She’ll stay for a year, and only then perhaps look for another position.”
“It’s like slavery,” Livia exclaimed, who had been married younger than Sarah was now. “All she can hope for is a kind master. And what about Johnnie? Is he to be cast into slavery too, poor handsome boy?”
“He completes his apprenticeship at Christmas, and then he’ll be a senior clerk. His great ambition is to be a writer for the East India Company—but we can’t introduce him.”
“His merits are not enough? When he has served his time?”
“No. It’s not merit—you have to know the right people and they propose you. Even the lowliest clerk has a patron. Johnnie will never get into the Company without a patron.”
“What you need is a wealthy and well-positioned friend,” Livia observed.
Alinor gave her a grave level look. “We don’t have one,” was all she said. “Johnnie and Sarah will have to make their own way in the world. Like their uncle Rob did.”
“Ah yes,” Livia said, her hand on her heart at once. “My Roberto earned his success because he studied so hard and learned so much.”
“He would not have given one word to that man that you call a friend.” Alinor was steely. “They parted in a silence that Rob would never have broken.”
“He’s no friend of mine,” Livia said earnestly. She took Alinor’s hand and held it in her own. “I use his house, I use his name only to make our fortune,” she promised. “As soon as I can, I shall buy a house to show my goods and I will never see him again. You will never think of him again.”
Alinor withdrew her hand. “I would not think of him now if you were not at his house every day,” she said quietly.
Livia picked up the menu for Sunday. “But this is a feast!” she said.
Alinor let her turn the conversation. “We celebrate so seldom these days. When I was a girl there were feast days all the time. Harvest home and Christmas and Midsummer Day and Easter, and the quarter days as well, and the saints’ days, Plough Monday and Beating the Bounds…”
“Are they not all restored now?” Livia asked. “Now that the king has come back to London and everyone is happy again?”
“They were country festivals. They can’t happen in the town.” Alinor looked out over the river as if she could see the long horizon of the mire and the procession of people going to the little church with flowers in their hats.
“Would you like to live in the country again?” Livia inquired. “Roberto was always speaking of his home, and the tide coming in over the land. It’s what he loved about Venice—the marshes outside thecity and the sandbanks and the reeds. He said it was like the country of his childhood, half sea and half water and never certain.”
“He knew the lagoon?” Alinor asked. “He knew it well?”
“Oh yes. He could have found his way blindfolded. He was always out on it.”
OCTOBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND
It was a bitterly cold morning and Ned thought it unlikely that anyone from Hatfield, on the opposite bank of the river, would risk the ferry journey on the icy water even to attend the Sunday church service at Hadley meetinghouse. He heaped the embers of the fire under an earthenware cover and, smiling at himself for folly, he drew the little signs in the ashes that his mother had always made, to keep the house safe from an accidental fire in her absence. She had taught them to him and Alinor, and Alinor had taught them to Alys and Rob. He had no doubt that Sarah and Johnnie knew them too, and he wondered how far back in time the tradition stretched among the Ferryman family, and how many children, yet unborn, would be told that they—like the Pokanoket—could teach fire when to blaze, and when to lie quiet.
He glanced round the sparse cottage, pulled on his thick winter coat, and gave his well-worn shoes a quick rub with his sleeve. He left his dog on the chain in the kennel. “No, you can’t come,” he told Red. “It’s too cold for you to wait outside, and happen I’ll visit Mrs. Rose after the service.”
Red’s ears drooped and he went back into his kennel.
