Smiling, I looked down at my wife and little girls, lying close together in the bunk. Pearl had a thin mattress on the floor, as did I, with Paolo’s cradle between us. Susannah had wished to share mine but I though it unwise, when we were not good at resisting each other. And we would be in Rome in two days or so. I kissed her. Even that was, perhaps, unwise.
She brought her hand up to my face. ‘I love you,’ she whispered. The little girls watched us, both smiling.
I lay on my back, thinking of Rome and remembering my three years there, when I had trained under Carlo Lanfranco, one of the most renowned of the city’s jewellers. And how could I not think of my affair with Valentina Gentileschi in her sumptuous villa beside the Tiber, which had brought me Francesca. Then, of course, the tho
