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He stepped back and drew on his gloves. “Well. Then I shall look forward to our expedition tomorrow.”

Long after she’d heard him leave the palazzo, she sat at her work table doing nothing. Her hands were trembling.

Chapter Eleven

“Well?”

Pomona eyed the ground beneath her light nankeen boots. “I do hope that we will find a path that is not so... muddy.”

“No doubt once we get a little way inland it will not be so wet.” He wasn’t confident that this was actually true, but it sounded plausible.

Pomona glanced back toward the city. “What extraordinarily tall clouds!” She shaded her eyes with her hand. “Do you know, I used to think that Italian artists must be inventing such spectacular clouds. And then I came to Italy and discovered that they simply paint the clouds exactly as they are here. Except with cherubs and angels flying through them, of course.”

This was the Pomona he remembered—the whimsical Pomona who noticed details that other people did not. The Pomona who saw magic in the world. The Pomona who made him feel alive.

But then he glanced at the clouds himself and felt a twinge of alarm. Yes, they were tall and fluffy… but… were they also developing the sheered-off tops that gave them the anvil shapes of thunderheads? He told himself that they were not. Pomona disliked thunderstorms.

Besides, it was too late to return to Venice. The small boat that had brought them here had cast off again and was tacking back toward the city, which was somewhere in the distance, hidden in humid sea mist.

The weathered dock—its wood so sun-bleached that it was nearly white—stood out amidst the dark green reeds fringing the shore. The place didn’t look altogether welcoming. But the bell tower of a church was just visible in the distance. He squared his shoulders. “Well. Let us walk across the island to that village.” After all, it could not be more than twenty or thirty minutes away—and if it began to rain once they got there, they could take shelter.

They set off. For the first few minutes the track they were following seemed well-marked. A vineyard stretched away to the right. A small farmhouse was visible beyond it.

The dirt path was worn into the surrounding grasses and overhung with a hedgerow that mixed familiar plants like hawthorn with more exotic scrubby palms and thorny sprays of red bougainvillea. In the distance a rooster crowed.

But at some point, they seemed to leave the reassuring signs of farming behind them. The track grew narrower until they were walking single file. The thickets of coarse marsh grasses became taller and taller. Soon they were deep in the salt marsh. The reeds were easily eight feet high, and blocked his view in all directions. It would be all too easy to become lost.

Pomona, ahead of him on the trail, glanced over her shoulder. “Do you suppose that this was what Venice was like—before the city was built?”

He found himself distracted from his anxious thoughts, imagining the first settlers arriving on marshy islands exactly like this one… hoping that they would be safe from the invading Huns. Once again, he was struck by the way Pomona's lively mind worked, and the way she made him see the world around him in a new way.

But when he went to say all this, what came out was, “No doubt you are quite right.”

A moment later they emerged at the edge of a narrow channel of water. A flock of white cranes was picking its way across a mud bank. There was no sign of the village that they’d been walking toward, and he had not the slightest idea where they were. They must have somehow taken a wrong turn. Still. They could not be far from a farm or—well, some other form of civilization. This was Italy, after all. He cleared his throat. “Will this do for a sketch?”

She looked around. “The light has become rather dull. And there is nowhere to sit that is not muddy.”

A gust of wind swirled through the reeds that surrounded them. Pomona clapped her hand to her bonnet, but the wind died away again just as suddenly. He frowned at the sky. The clouds that had been so heavenly when they’d landed had already become a dense grey layer that stretched most of the way across the sky, obscuring the sun.

And… was that momentary low noise the rising wind in the reeds? Or was it a distant rumble of thunder? He frowned. A salt marsh was the last place that they ought to be in a lightning storm. He didn’t want to frighten Pomona, but he began to think that they should make for the village as quickly as possible. “I believe that we may have taken the wrong path. The road to the village must have been the fork to the right.”

“But there was no fork. It was merely a lane to that farm that we passed.”

He thought back. She might be right. “Well, the fact remains that we must bear north.”

She looked at him as though he were mad. “But there is only one path through this marsh. So we have no choice but to follow it—whether it bears north or not.”

He had to admit to himself that her logic was indisputable.

They set off again. The path continued along the shore for only a short distance before plunging back into the tall reeds. The ground became muddier and muddier. Every so often they startled flocks of ducks, which exploded out of the marsh ahead of them, quacking angrily. The path twisted and turned around clay hummocks and large puddles until he lost all sense of direction under the grey sky.

Still, he told himself, the important thing was that being out of doors seemed to have improved Pomona’s spirits. They emerged into a small clearing. The coarse marsh reeds towered around them. The rising wind made a hissing, whistling sound, and the reeds shivered before it, parting here and there as though invisible figures were rushing through it. It was—well, eerie.

Pomona frowned at the sky. “It has got very dark. Does it look like rain?”

He cleared his throat. “It does appear that we may get a shower today. But we must be very nearly at that church and the village. We are merely unable to see them because the grasses are so tall.”

“Unless we are walking in circles.”