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Pomona was struggling not to burst into hysterical tears. “I had you convinced? We both heard it!” She swallowed several times and tried to take deep breaths. “Well. I am glad that you find this all so amusing. This has been an absolutely dreadful morning. I am covered in mud, I am soaked to the bone, and I—I wish that I had never come!”

“Really? All of it was dreadful?”

She glared at him. “Yes. All of it.”

“Well. I am covered in chagrin.” West leaned the board against the wall and made her an ironic little bow. “I do apologize. Your grace.”

She realized too late how he’d interpreted her statement. Well, it would be far too awkward to explain it. Besides, it served him right for… for seducing her.

She was buttoning her damp spencer’s annoying number of buttons when the hollow clanging of church bells began, somewhere very close by. West pushed the door open. A breeze was blowing and the sky was clearing. Crystal drops of water on the weeds in the abandoned farmyard winked in the first beams of sunlight to peek through the clouds.

“We may as well lead the goat to the village and search for her owner, I suppose. Someone will be glad to get her back.”

The goat swung its head about and gave them a look of contempt.

They led the goat along yet another muddy path through the marsh grasses, then across some shorter grass and up a slope. A moment later, she found herself on the incongruously tidy canal-side riva of a village—complete with the church they’d seen from a distance.

She stared up and down the well-swept street in amazement. One minute, it seemed, they’d been lost in a trackless marsh. The next, they were in a tidy, picturesque little village. Fig trees grew against plaster walls. Brightly painted boats were tied up along the stone embankment. Behind the buildings vineyards stretched away in neat rows.

If this had been a gothic novel, the village would be filled with tumbledown hovels and menacing characters. Perhaps an old woman would appear, dressed entirely in black, holding an enormous black-bound book, and read from its dusty pages a prophecy of doom… or stare at Pomona with a terrifying gaze that turned her very blood to ice in her veins…

Just then, a tiny old woman dressed all in black did appear. She shouted at West, her hands waving angrily. A moment later she snatched the goat’s frayed halter from his hand and stomped away.

Pomona was almost too shocked to speak. “What was she saying? Is that her goat?”

“She spoke too quickly for me. I certainly hope so.”

A young man—fair-haired and tan—had wandered over to watch the excitement. “She says you try to kill her goat, which gives milk.”

“Kill her goat? Surely not.”

“Two people from this village saw a foresto with a gun in the marsh this morning.”

Pomona gasped. Until this moment, she’d been trying to convince herself that the gunman might somehow have been a trick of the light.

“Foresto?” West frowned. “I am sorry. I do not perfectly understand the Venetian dialect.”

“Straniero,” the man translated into Italian.

“Straniero? A foreigner? Well, my wife and I have neither a gun nor any desire to shoot farm animals, so it was not us. Why do they believe that he was a foreigner?”

“They never saw him before. It is not the hunting season.” He raised his hands in a shrug. “And his hat.”

“His hat?”

“His hat.” The man gestured toward his head, as though this was obvious. He strolled away, whistling.

How could it be a coincidence that another foreigner had happened to come to this same tiny, rural island on the same day as they had? Had he been lurking in wait? Had he followed them into the marsh?

She didn’t know what to think. If, in fact, the man was a foreigner, perhaps he simply didn’t realize that he ought not to be shooting ducks at this time of year. Although… everyone knew that you didn’t shoot ducks in spring, no matter where you were. She frowned.

West hired a boatman to take them back. She settled into the small sailboat and studied the sky. Already it was a deep and uninterrupted blue, as though there had never been a storm at all.

Pomona opened the shutters over her work table. She’d spent weeks sitting here in stuffy darkness. Well, no more. West had been right: At this time of day the sun didn’t shine into these windows anyway.

Behind her, of course, was the palazzo’s library. Its collection was disappointing, because apparently not long ago one of the heirs who owned the place now had removed most of the books to his much grander house outside Florence, leaving empty shelves. So it seemed particularly petty to have to worry about fading the spines of volumes that were no longer even here.

She sat down, intending to look over the letter that she’d written to Mr. Wynde. After what she'd been through today, it was difficult to believe that it was still only late afternoon. But even though she’d shed her mud and water-stained clothes and had a bath, she still felt like... not quite the same person who'd left the palazzo that morning. None of this, after all, was important. Perhaps she ought not to take the failure of her novel so seriously.