Long after he rode out of sight around the bend, she stared to where he had disappeared.
"Amy?" Robert tugged on her hand.
She turned and gazed into his eyes: pale blue, not green. They didn't make her melt inside, didn't make her feel anything.
Robert smiled, revealing teeth that overlapped a bit. She hadn't really noticed that before. "It's over," he said.
"Oh."
The sun set as they walked home to Cheapside, skirting merrymakers in the streets. Her father paused to unlock their door. Overhead, a wooden sign swung gently in the breeze. A nearby bonfire illuminated the image of a falcon and the gilt letters that proclaimed their shop GOLDSMITH & SONS, JEWELLERS.
There came a sudden brilliant flash and a stunned "Ooooh" from the crowd, as fireworks lit the sky. Amy dashed through the shop and up the stairs to their balcony.
Gazing toward the River Thames, she watched the great fiery streaks of light, heard the soaring rockets, smelled the sulfur in the air. It was the most spectacular display England had ever seen, and the sights and sounds filled her with a wondrous feeling.
If only life could be as exhilarating as a fireworks show.
When the last glittering tendril faded away, she listened to the fragments of song and rowdy laughter that filled the night air. Couples strolled by, arm in arm. Robert stepped onto the balcony and moved close.
His voice was quiet beside her. "This is a day I'll never forget."
"I'll never forget it, either," she said, thinking of the man on the black steed, the man with the emerald eyes.
Robert tilted her face up, bending his head to place a soft, chaste kiss on her lips. It was their first kiss; she was supposed to feel fireworks.
But she felt nothing.
Five years later
August 24, 1666
"ARE YOU telling me you made this bracelet? A girl? This shop is Goldsmith & Sons, is it not?" Robert Stanley puckered his freckled face and made his voice high and wavering. "Where are the sons?"
From where she stood by the stone oven, Amethyst Goldsmith's laughter rang through the workshop. "Lady Smythe! A perfect imitation."
"Well done, Robert." Her father smiled as he brushed past them both and through the archway into the shop's showroom.
Robert's pale blue eyes twinkled, but he stayed in character, cupping a hand to his ear. "Imitation? Imitation, did you say? I was led to believe this was a quality jewelry shop, madame. I expect genuine—"
"Stop!" Amy fought to control her giggles. "You'll make me slip and scald myself."
Robert's gaze fell to Amy's hands. As he watched her pour a thin stream of molten gold into a plaster mold, his expression sobered. "I like Lady Smythe," he muttered. "At least she buys the things I make."
"Oh, Robert." She sighed. "Why should it matter who made something, as long as we're selling a piece?"
"I'm a good goldsmith."
"You're an excellent goldsmith," Amy agreed. Although she also thought he was a bit unimaginative, she kept that to herself. "What does that have to do with anything?"
"You're a woman."
She clenched her jaw and tapped the mold on her workbench, imagining the gold flowing to fill every crevice of her design. "I'm also a jeweler," she said under her breath.
"Never mind." He walked to his own workbench and plopped onto his stool, lifting the pewter tankard of ale that sat ever-present amongst his tools.
Ignoring him, Amy picked up a knife and a chunk of wax, intending to whittle a new design while the gold hardened. The windowless workroom seemed stifling today—hot, close, and dark. She dragged a lantern nearer, but the artificial, yellowish glow did little to lift her mood.
Five years she'd lived and worked with Robert Stanley, and he still didn't understand her. She couldn't believe it. She was marrying him in two weeks, and she couldn't believe that, either.
Once it had seemed like a lifetime stretched ahead of her before she had to wed. She'd put it off, and put it off, then last spring her father had announced she was twenty-two and it was time to get on with it.
He'd set a date, and that had been that. No matter that Robert thought his wife should stay upstairs and mend his clothes; no matter that he resented it when her designs sold faster and she received more custom orders than he did.
No matter that she didn't love him. Not the way a wife should love a husband. Not the way it was in the French novels she read. Not the way she had felt, five years ago at the coronation procession, when that nobleman's emerald eyes had locked on hers.
She'd never forgotten that feeling.
She would learn to love Robert, her father said. But it hadn't happened—not yet, anyway. Not even close.
Amy sighed and lifted the plait off her neck, rubbing the hot skin beneath. She'd set out to talk to her father dozens of times, but her courage always failed her. Since the death of her mother in last year's Great Plague, it seemed she could take anything but her father's disapproval.
When the casting was set, Amy plunged it into the tub of water by Robert's workbench. She rubbed the mold's gritty plaster surface, feeling it dissolve away in her hands, watching Robert's knife send wax shavings flying as he sculpted a model.
She scowled at his curved back. "I believe I fancied you more as Lady Smythe."
Robert turned and stared at her for a moment, then hunched over suddenly. His face transformed, taking on a Lady Smythe look. "Are you certain, madame?" he asked in that high, wavering tone. "I hear tell you've had dancing lessons and speak fluent French. Such pretensions. I don't hold with women reckoning account books, you know. Not at all." His voice deepened into his own. "Or making jewelry, either."
Amy flinched. She pulled the casting from the water and carried it to her workbench to brush off the remaining
