Homeport

coffee and breakfast cakes reluctantly, and shuffled over to frown at the card, at her face, then back at the card. He seemed to sigh as he unlocked the door.
    “You’re very early, Dottoressa Jones.”
    “I have work.”
    Americans, as far as the guard was concerned, thought of little else. “You must sign the logbook.”
    “Of course.” As she approached the counter, the scent of his coffee reached out and grabbed her by the throat. She did her best not to drool as she scrawled her name and noted the time of arrival in the log.
    “Grazie.”
    “Prego,” she murmured, then started toward the elevator. So she’d make coffee first, she told herself. She could hardly expect to be sharp before she’d had at least one jolt of caffeine.
    She used her key card to access the correct floor, then entered her code once she was at the security post outside the lab. When she hit the switches, banks of fluorescent lights blinked on. A quick glance told her everything was in place, that work in progress had been tidily stored at the end of the workday.
    Her mother would expect that, she thought. She would tolerate nothing less than neat efficiency in her employees. And in her children. Miranda shrugged as if to shift the resentment off her shoulders.
    Within moments she had coffee brewing, her computer booted, and was transcribing her notes from the evening before onto the hard drive.
    If she moaned at the first taste of hot, rich coffee, there was no one to hear. If she leaned back in her chair, eyes closed, smile dreamy, there was no one to see. For five minutes she allowed herself to indulge, to be a woman lost in one of life’s small pleasures. Her feet slipped out of her practical pumps, her sharp-boned face softened. She all but purred.
    If the guard had seen her now, he would have approved completely.
    Then she rose, poured a second cup, donned her lab coat, and got to work.
    She retested the dirt from the site first, measuring the radiation, running figures. Once again she tested the clay that had been carefully extracted. She put a smear of each on a slide, then made a third with the scrapings of bronze and patina, and studied each under the microscope.
    She was studying her computer screen when the first of the staff began to trickle in. It was there Giovanni hunted her down with a fresh cup of coffee and a delicately sugared roll.
    “Tell me what you see,” she demanded, and continued to study the colors and shapes on the screen.
    “I see a woman who doesn’t know how to relax.” He laid his hands on her shoulders, rubbed gently. “Miranda, you’ve been here a week now, and haven’t taken an hour to yourself.”
    “The imaging, Giovanni.”
    “Ah.” Still massaging, he shifted so that their heads were close. “The primary decay process, corrosion. The white line there indicates the original surface of the bronze, no ?”
    “Yes.”
    “The corrosion is thick on the surface, and it grows downward, deep into the metal, which would be typical of a bronze of four hundred years.”
    “We need to pinpoint the rate of growth.”
    “Never easy,” he said. “And she was in a damp basement. The corrosion would have grown quickly there.”
    “I’m taking that into account.” She removed her glasses to pinch out the pressure in the bridge of her nose. “The temperature and the humidity. We can calculate an average there. I’ve never heard of corrosion levels like this being faked. They’re there, Giovanni, inside her.”
    “The cloth is no more than a hundred years old. Less, I think by a decade or two.”
    “A hundred?” Irritated, Miranda turned to face him. “You’re certain?”
    “Yes. You’ll run tests of your own, but you’ll find I’m right. Eighty to a hundred years. No more.”
    She turned back to the computer. Her eyes saw what they saw, her brain knew what it knew. “All right. Then we’re to believe that the bronze was wrapped in that cloth and in that cellar for eighty to a hundred years. But all tests indicate the bronze itself is a great deal older.”
    “Perhaps. Here, eat your breakfast.”
    “Um.” She took the roll absently and bit in. “Eighty years ago—the early part of the century. World War One. Valuables are often hidden during wartime.”
    “True enough.”
    “But where was she before that? Why have we never heard of her? Hidden again,” she murmured. “When Piero Medici was expelled from the city. During the Italian Wars perhaps. Hidden, yes, that