“And where does he go? Sir James? Does he have a town house?” Livia asked.
“I have no idea.”
“You don’t ask him? You don’t know if he stays at an inn or if he is so rich that he has a house of his own in London?”
“No.”
“I would ask him,” the younger woman asserted.
“I’d prefer you don’t,” Alys said, her awkwardness making her Sussex accent stronger. “He’s no friend to the family, he never was. You need not be more than…”
“Polite?” Livia suggested with a little gleam. “Polite and cold? Like you?”
“Yes.”
“Of course, I will always be polite to your guests.”
There was a little silence in the small, stuffy room.
“And what do you do now?” Livia asked. “For the rest of the day? Do you, perhaps, walk out to look at shops? Do we go out to visit friends?”
“No!” Alys exclaimed. “I work. I have goods coming in on the coastal trading ships, and I store them in the warehouse. I break them into smaller loads and send them to the London markets and shops and inns. I order the return load, and I pack the goods and send them out for their return journey. We trade along the coast, Kent and Sussex and Hampshire.”
“No society?” Livia asked.
“We are a working wharf,” Alys explained. “In the coastal trade. There’s no time for society.”
“But why only the little ships?”
“Sometimes we have big ships. But mostly they have to go to the legal quays to pay their taxes. Only the untaxed loads can come here. Sometimes, when the wait for the Excise officers is too long, the big ships will come here to declare their tax and unload. We’re called a sufferance wharf—we’re allowed to take the overspill from the legal quays. Some mornings I go to the coffeehouses to meet the captains and the shipowners and bid for their business.”
“They are pleasant places? For ladies? Could I come with you?”
Alys laughed at the thought of it. “No. You wouldn’t like it. They’re for business.”
The younger woman widened her dark eyes and rested her lips against her baby’s head. “You are a workingwoman—what do you call yourself? A storeman?”
“I’m a wharfinger.”
“You do it all?”
Alys flushed. “It’s how we live.”
“Roberto told me that he was raised in the country, on the side of marshes that stretched to the sea and you never knew where the dry paths were and only people who lived there could find their way through the waters.”
“That was more than twenty years ago,” Alys said unwillingly. “Rob was telling you of our childhood home. But, after the accident, we had to leave Foulmire and come here. At first, we worked for the woman that owned this quay, and we did her deliveries with our cart and horse, and then we were able to buy her out. Ma went out as a midwife to our neighbors, and made herbal teas and possets. She still has a good trade with the apothecaries and Uncle Ned sends us goods from New England, especially herbs.”
“You don’t have a warehouse in the City? You don’t own a ship?”
“This is all,” Alys confirmed.
“But why does your husband not do all this work for you? Where is Mr. Stoney?”
Alys flushed deeply. “Surely Rob told you? I’ve got no husband. I had to bear the twins and raise them on my own.”
“Ah, I am so sorry. No, he didn’t tell me. I begin to think he was not honest with me. He made me think that you were a grander family by far, related to the Peachey family, and he was brought up with the lord’s son, a friend of the family.”
Again, Alys shook her head, her mouth folded into a severe line. “No,” she said. “There’s no family anymore. Rob was just a companion to Sir William Peachey’s son; but only for one summer. Walter Peachey died years ago, his father too. Sir James Avery was their tutor. We’re not related to any lords, and we’re not friends with Sir James. And we never will be.” She hesitated, her face flamed red. “Maybe Rob was ashamed to tell you. Perhaps he was ashamed of us.”
“But Sir James comes to see your mother this afternoon?” Livia pursued. “There must be a friendship here, an acquaintance?”
“No,” Alys said flatly. “He’s coming just this once, and it makes no difference.”
* * *
As Alys went into her counting room, in the corner of the warehouse, and Alinor rested upstairs, Livia left the baby with the nursemaid, put on her hat, and walked out on the quayside where the incoming tide was running fast, slapping against the walls and sweeping away the rubbish upstream. Laborers fell back from her path with exaggerated respect, lounging sailors tipped their caps to her face and whistled behind her back. She ignored them all, walking through them as if she were deaf to the shouted suggestions and catcalls. She did not turn her head, she did not flush with embarrassment. Only once did she stop, when a tall broad man blocked her path and seized her hands.
“Gi’ us a kiss,” he said, bending down and breathing a warm gust of beer into her face. To his surprise, instead of shrinking back she instantly gripped him tightly and pulled him closer, so that she could kick him, hard, just under the kneecap with her pointed shoe. He let out a yelp of surprise and pain and jumped back.
“Vaffanculo!” she spat at him. “If you lay one finger on me, you’ll be sorry.”
He bent and rubbed his knee. “God’s blood, missis… I just…”
She turned her head and walked away before he could answer.
“Oy! Oy!” came the shout from his mates. “No luck, Jonas?”
He straightened up and made an obscene gesture, but he let Livia walk on, upriver. She turned inland from the quay along the little road that ran, potholed and muddy, behind the warehouses. She turned again, onto a cart track leading south, lined with small cottages with vegetable gardens. Behind them were green fields, and beyond them, a slow rise of green hills trimmed with darker hedges, capped with the soft billows of midsummer woods. Livia shaded her eyes and looked towards the horizon: nothing.
Nothing.
Livia, who had lived most of her life among the crowded squares and busy markets of Venice, saw nothing but emptiness: a waste of green, a few cows, a child watching them from the shade of an ash tree, and in the distance, the smoke from the chimney of an isolated farmhouse. Nothing.
“Dio!” she said horrified. “What a place!”
She gave a little “tut” of disapproval at the absence of activity, of shops, or diversion; she sighed irritably at the silence broken only by the cry of the seagulls over the river and the aspiring trill, high above her, of a lark. There was nothing here to give her any pleasure, and she turned her back on the fields, and went back the way she had come. The birds were singing in the hedges as she walked; she did not hear them.
* * *
“Where is she?” Alinor asked the maid who brought her some warm broth.
“Walking.”
“Where has she gone walking?” she asked Alys, who came in, still wearing her baize apron from the counting house, with an ink stain on her finger.