Dark Tides

by Philippa Gregory

  “But why was it forbidden?” he asked.

  “Oliver Cromwell,” she said shortly. “And the minister said it was pagan. But now it’s all turned around.”

  “The court takes two weeks to celebrate,” he said. “Drunk for a fortnight. And then they start all over again for Twelfth Night.”

  Alys laughed. “You’re a puritan like your uncle Ned,” she told him, as he helped her down. “Our minister, the puritan one at St. Wilfrid’s, used to say—where does it say in the Bible that you should get drunk to celebrate the coming of the Lord? And Old Ellie from East Beach would shout from the back: ‘He didn’t turn water into wine to make vinegar to put on His cabbage, you know!’ ”

  “She did?”

  “Aye, they would punish her every Twelfth Night for one thing or another. But they didn’t even call it Twelfth Night when I was a young woman. We didn’t have Twelfth Night nor Christmas.”

  “Did you have presents?”

  She turned from him to put berries on the coat hook on the back of the door. “We had no money for presents. But Rob and I used to look for the little tokens that your grandma loves so much. We’d search for them all year, and give them to her for Christmas. And she’d give us fairings, anything sweet. Lord, we loved anything with sugar.”

  “You and your brother, Rob,” he confirmed.

  “Yes, God bless him.”

  “And Sarah is away, looking for him, this Christmas Day?”

  She gave her son a long level look. “Oh—so you know too? You’ve known all along? And kept it from me? The three of you knew: your grandma and Sarah and you?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry, Ma.”

  “You should have told me, Johnnie. We’ve become a family of secrets.”

  He hesitated. “We’ve always been a family with secrets.”

  She shook her head. “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”

  He looked awkward. “She thought you’d tell Livia.”

  “I would have done!” Alys exclaimed. “I should have done! Who better than her to tell your grandma and my daughter that they were chasing after rainbows! What does she think? That Livia is not Rob’s widow? That he’s not dead?”

  “They’re very sure that something’s wrong,” Johnnie said gently. “Grandma was convinced.”

  “She’s taken it into her head that Rob is alive, and that Sarah will somehow find him, and Sarah took it as an excuse to go off on an adventure. Of course there’s nothing to it. God keep my daughter safe and bring her home.”

  “Amen,” Johnnie said. “I miss her.”

  “I miss her,” his mother confirmed. “And what are we going to tell Livia when Sarah steps off the ship from Venice? Tell me that!”

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  The feather market was held in one of the great warehouses not far from the Rialto Bridge. Sarah and Felipe Russo walked through the narrow streets, across the market, where the money changers and moneylenders were setting up their stalls, under the arches of the court. Each man had a scale weight, and an abacus on his stall, a quill and paper to write a note of the debts, and a chest of coins safely underneath the table, guarded by a young man who stood behind the money changer and never took his eyes from the box.

  “You’d do better to change your English money into gold,” Felipe told her. “You’re sure it’s a good coin?”

  She nodded. “Will they give me the true weight for it?”

  “They would not dare to cheat a Christian,” he said. “They’re Jews. They lend money and change gold and ply their trade in usury and sin by permission of the Doge. If any one of them so much as dreams of cheating he’d be denounced and publicly executed by sunset. They’re probably the most honest men in Venice. Certainly, they’re the most frightened.”

  “You’d have to be a reckless man to break the law in this city,” Sarah remarked.

  “Only for a very great profit,” he agreed.

  “How do I choose which moneylender?” Sarah asked, hanging back from the downcast faces of the men in their long black gowns, each with a yellow star sewed on the front of his black coat. “They all look equally… tormented.”

  “I use this man,” Felipe pointed out. “Mordecai.” He guided her up to the stall. “English guinea for gold,” he said shortly.

  The man bowed, and took up his scales. “May I have the coin, your ladyship?” he asked Sarah in perfect English.

  “How did you know I was English?” she asked, startled.

  He kept his head bent but she could see his smile. “Your fairness of face, ladyship,” he said quietly. “All the English have that fair skin.” He glanced at Felipe and spoke in Italian: “So like the Milord doctor.”

  “Just give her the money,” Felipe ordered quietly in Italian.

  Sarah kept her face impassive as she watched the moneylender’s lad open the chest under the stall and hand up gold coins and little pieces of gold chain. She did not betray for a moment that she had understood the brief exchange. She put her hand in the placket of her skirt, drew out Alinor’s guinea, hesitated for a moment, and then handed it over.

  Mordecai the moneylender put the coin on one side of the scale and added coins and links of a gold chain until they balanced exactly.

  “And some for luck,” Felipe said in English, a little edge to his voice.

  “Signor… it was fair measure and an agreed price.”

  “You’ll sell a good English guinea at a profit, you know you will, you old sinner. Give the lady a little, for luck.”

  “I don’t—” Sarah began.

  “As I say.”

  Without another word, Mordecai added three links of a gold chain and the scales tipped and wobbled to Sarah’s advantage.

  “Hold out your purse and he’ll pour it in,” Felipe instructed.

  Sarah did as she was told. “There you are,” he said as she pulled the strings of the purse shut and carefully tied it on her belt.

  He guided her away from the stall, and they left the square and climbed up the steeply canted Rialto Bridge. On either side were little stalls selling beautiful pieces of glassware, exquisite metalwork: daggers enameled with glass, set with jewels. Spice sellers had colored and scented powders that Sarah had never seen before, there were perfumed soaps and sprinkling dust and oils on another stall, while another had yards of silks and velvets in the shadow of a huge oiled and painted parasol. Even the air smelled strange and exotic, scents of patchouli and lemon and rose billowed about them as they walked. Sarah stopped to smell the sharp wintry scent of myrrh.

  “Does it make you dream?” Felipe asked her quietly as they arrived at the warehouse door.

  “I think it is a city of dreams,” she said. “I can’t understand how Liv… how my mistress can bear to live anywhere else.”

  “Ah, she left wearing black, her dreams drowned,” he said with ready sympathy. “Is she still in mourning black in London?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s the sort of woman who will never leave it off. She loved her husband very dearly. She grieved for him like a woman driven mad with sorrow.”

  “And it suits her,” Sarah pointed out, which made him laugh.

  “Yes it does.”

  “They were very much in love?”

  “At first they were inseparable. She would walk with him on the marshes and go with him on his visits. He insisted on going to the poor—he had an interest in quatrain fever—and she was quite unafraid. They went together, in doctors’ masks like a pair of black herons. You know?” He smiled.

  “Herons?” she repeated.

  “They wore the black gowns and the great masks of doctors, the long beaks stuffed with herbs to protect from infection, the eyes like holes. The gowns black. I used to laugh at them, going together like a pair of birds with big beaks like egrets on the marshes.”

  “Did she show him the antiquities?”

  “He saw them when he first met her, in her first home. She was enthroned among them, a beauty among beauties
, in her palazzo. She was a wealthy wife, rich in everything but happiness. When her first husband died and she condescended to marry the doctor, she brought all of the treasures to him as her dowry. Of course, he had no idea what we had in the store.” Felipe guided Sarah up some steps to a great storehouse.

  “Did he never see her store? Did he visit your house?”

  Felipe turned the handle of the pedestrian door in the great doorway. At once a wall of sound billowed out. He smiled. “Listen! That is the sound of people making money!”

  Sarah laughed.

  “Now, this is the weekly feather market,” he told her. “The great hunters and collectors go all around Europe, all around Asia and Africa, they deliver feathers in their millions. The feather merchants buy them here, in the raw, and also treat them, dye them, clean them, sculpt them, and bring them back here to sell to milliners and costumiers. This is where the feather dealers sell sacks of feathers to traders taking them on to London and Paris, to their own markets. So you will see everything here from a dirty pelt to a completely finished single feather. You can buy in any amount.”

  Sarah was starting through the door when he put a hand on her arm. “But not with that face,” he said.

  She turned to him, surprised. “Am I dirty?” she asked, brushing her gloved palm across her cheek.

  He smiled. “You are eager,” he said. “Never look eager in Venice. You put up the price just by the way you walk into a market. This is a market for haggling, in a city which admires indifference. You will show me what you like—discreetly show me—and I will halve the price. But I cannot do it if you look like a child on the morning of Christmas Eve, opening presents.”

  She laughed and composed her expression. She did not know it; but she was enacting Livia, at her most disdainful. “There? Do I look above it all, and very indifferent to everything? Very bored?”

  “Like a queen,” he said, and stepped back to let her precede him into the hall.

  * * *

  She was glad he had warned her of what to expect. One side of the hall was like a butchers’ shambles, piled high with bleeding pelts, some of them stinking of the dead birds’ dung, some of them inadequately cleaned and rotting already, sharp with the stink of vinegar that had been poured over them during quarantine to prevent the spread of disease. Wings that had been savagely hacked off dying birds lay in mountainous piles, birds that had sported fine crests had been roughly beheaded so that the crests were perfect but the necks were blood-clotted stumps. Bodies with beautiful breast plumage, showing long colorful tails, were piled on the floor. Sarah turned her head: “Disgusting.”

  “Allora, every trade has its dirty side,” Felipe said philosophically. “And all these have been in quarantine on the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo. Anything that might bring an infection into Venice has to go to the island and be cleaned—aired, or smoked, or soaked with vinegar. Only when it’s clean may it come here.”

  “Oh, the Captain, Captain Shore on my ship, said something about this.”

  “Yes, of course. If you had sickness in London, the Captain, his crew, and even you would have to kick your heels for forty days on the island before you were allowed into Venice. Any goods you brought in would be cleaned while you waited, to see if any infection showed. The merchants hate the delay; but it keeps us free from illness.”

  “And after forty days they are released?”

  “Of course,” he said smoothly. “So everything here is clean. It might stink but it’s not infectious.”

  “But it is…” She could not find the word. “Cruel?”

  “A severed head? Of a bird? And this from the nation that beheaded a king? I thought you were bolder than that! You know, someone always gets hurt if there’s a profit. But if you are so squeamish, come and see the finished feathers. There are no broken necks here!”

  There were a hundred stalls made from boards on trestles lining the long hall and a double passageway down the middle, each heaped with a speciality. Sarah could see sheaves of peacock tails, the strangely sculpted feathers of birds of paradise. There were drifts of snowy white feathers from egrets, and the enchanting dapple—like speckled bronze on marble—of barn owl feathers. Cormorant pelts shone an iridescent green-black, a pile of parrot tails showed a violent almost luminous blue. There were sacks of tiny feathers sold by weight, sorted by color, the deep reddish-brown of feathers shaved from dead pochard heads, the black-cobalt of male mallards.

  On the middle stalls the feathers had been cleaned and dyed. Jet-black feathers—the hardest color to achieve—made a pool of darkness in sack after sack, graded by size. There were feathers that had been expertly styled and finished, cut into scalloped edges, shaved to a single bobbing frond. Some had been dusted with gold so they glinted and glittered, some had been set with sequins, all of them were beautifully worked and stroked so the fronds sat together in lustrous perfection.

  “Oh,” Sarah said, taking in the riches all around her.

  “Face,” Felipe said.

  Sarah bit down a giggle and composed herself. “But I have no more than half my guinea for spending,” she whispered urgently.

  “Do you want quantity or quality?” he asked.

  He could see her yearning look at the perfect single plumes, then she resolutely returned to the sack of kingfisher feathers. “How much of these would I get for my half a guinea?” she asked.

  He turned and spoke in rapid Italian to the stallholder.

  “They charge by their weight in gold,” he said. “Do you want a guinea’s worth of this sort?”

  Sarah gulped, but she knew that she could sell them for five times that price in London. “Half,” she said. “I have to keep some back, in case of trouble.”

  He laughed. “I will keep you safe, little cautious one! There will be no trouble for you! But half a guinea, it shall be.”

  The woman behind the stall proffered a large set of scales with a tray for money on one side and a basket on the other. She showed that they weighed true with matching Venetian coins on either side, and then Sarah put a handful of her gold into the tray. The woman tipped an avalanche of turquoise feathers into the basket until the scales trembled and swung, and then balanced themselves evenly.

  “And for luck?” Felipe reminded her, and she threw in another handful.

  “You are content with your purchase?” he asked Sarah.

  Dazzled by the color, the basket of sapphire, she nodded, and the woman poured them like a stream of light into a bundle of soft cloth, tied the top into a loop for easy carrying, and shoveled the gold into a pocket of her apron.

  DECEMBER 1670, LONDON

  Johnnie’s master called him into the inner office on Christmas Eve, and he stood before the great desk, loaded with ledgers, while Mr. Watson finished checking a column of figures and then peered at him over the top of a set of small eyeglasses.

  “Ah, Master Stoney,” he said pompously. “Your time with us is up.”

  “Yes, sir,” Johnnie replied.

  “You have your contract of apprenticeship?”

  Johnnie unrolled the scroll with the fat red seals at the bottom and Alys’s plain signature beside his master’s scrawl.

  “Completed to the day,” Mr. Watson said. “You sign there.”

  Johnnie made a clerkly signature at the foot of the page and Mr. Watson signed his own name with a swirl.

  “You will stay on?” Mr. Watson inquired. “Senior clerk at five shillings a week?”

  “I should be glad to,” Johnnie said. “Till Easter, if I may?”

  “You hope to move to another House?”

  “I have been fortunate,” Johnnie told him. “More fortunate than I could have hoped. I have a patron who has mentioned my name. I have visited the East India Company and they have offered me a post. They say I may start at Easter.”

  “Good God!” Johnnie’s master dropped his chair back to four legs. “You’re flying very high,” he said with a hint of resentment. “I’ve not got a plac
e at that table. Who got you in?”

  “My aunt from Venice knows an investor,” Johnnie said. “He was so good as to recommend me.”

  “You have an aunt from Venice?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s new, isn’t it?”

  “It is, sir, and unexpected. But my uncle has just recently died and his widow has come, and is living with us.”

  “And what do you have to do for her? For your patron? For this is a more than cousinly favor you have here?”

  Johnnie laughed, a little embarrassed. “It seems I have to be her advisor, and her friend,” he said. “She lives with my mother and grandmother at the warehouse, and—it seems that she wants my support in a plan that she has for the business.”

  Mr. Watson looked dourly at the young man. “Well, you can go home to your family, befriend your aunt over the holiday. If she wants to invest any money in cargoes I rely upon you to bring her here; bear in mind what I’ve done for you, lad. I expect to see her in the New Year.”

  “She has only her dower,” Johnnie said. “She’s not a wealthy woman.”

  “She has wealthy friends,” the merchant said flatly. “I’d like to meet them too.”

  “I’ll tell her,” Johnnie said awkwardly. “I’ll definitely mention your name.”

  “Aye. Well and good. Off you go now. Start again, day after Christmas, and God bless you all.”

  Johnnie hesitated, in case there was a Christmas box—and left without any gift.

  DECEMBER 1670, VENICE

  Early in the morning, before the household was stirring, Sarah woke and dressed in silence, in the half-light of the moon reflected from the canal to her dappled ceiling. As she moved to leave the room, Chiara, still asleep in bed, stirred, and muttered something. Sarah froze, and then crept to the door on the creaking floorboards. She made no sound at all on the stone stair, and with her slippers in her hand she slipped down to the street door like a ghost. It was unlocked, the kitchenmaid had already come in and climbed up the stairs to the kitchen, to light the fire and start baking, so Sarah swung it open and went out into the quiet streets.