Page 16 of The Beloved Escapade

Heads turned as he rode in. Not many heads. All of them.

He was used to it by now. Months in England had taught him what his face and his coat and his voice did to a village street. He removed his hat to the first person he reached, a woman standing in her doorway with a basket of little silver fish against her hip, and bowed to her from the saddle.

“Good morning, signora. Forgive me. I am looking for Greywick Manor.”

The woman stared at him with suspicion for a long moment. “For what, now?”

“Greywick Manor. A great house. It stands near this village, perhaps very near. Greywick.”

“There ain’t no Greywick round here.” She shifted the basket. “You’ll be wanting Berkeley, maybe. That be a castle, mind. ’Tis a fair way up the water.”

“Not a castle. A manor. Grey-wick.” He said it slowly, carefully, the way he would say it to a student, giving each syllable its full weight, as if the trouble were only in the hearing of it.

“Never heard of ’er.” And the door closed, softly, and took the fish with it.

He sat looking at the shut door, and the first cold finger of doubt touched the back of his neck.

No. No. The name was in the journal.

What if it has been torn down? It has been three hundred years since Matteo inked it in his journals.

Lorenzo pushed the thought aside, refusing to admit any doubts. Instead, he rode on.

He asked a carter loading barrels outside the chandler’s, a broad man who set his barrel down to think and then called into the shop for someone named Dan, and Dan came out wiping his hands, and the two of them turned the word Greywick over between them like a coin of unknown country, and offered him, in the end, a pig farm belonging to a man named Grey up Awre way.

“It is not a pig farm,” Lorenzo said. His voice came out louder than he had intended. “I thank you. It is not a pig farm.”

He asked the blacksmith, who said nothing at all and watched him with folded arms until Lorenzo backed his horse out of the yard. He asked two boys fishing off the quay wall with string and bent pins, and his accent undid them entirely. They laughed until they wept, hanging on each other, and one of them gasped out that he should ask the vicar, on account of the vicar knew Latin. Lorenzo thanked them with a gravity that set them off again, and rode back up the street with his ears burning.

The sun climbed. The doubt climbed with it.

He stopped in the middle of the only street in Little Severn and made himself breathe. He was a scholar. He knew what an attribution was worth when only one source supported it. Several instances in a single hand. A cipher, a dead language of one man, and one man’s spelling of a place he had perhaps only heard spoken aloud in an accent like Dan’s.

Dio mio. Lorenzo had ridden four days on the strength of it, and stood now in a village where the name Greywick meant nothing to a single living soul.

Three centuries. The whole weight of them came and sat on his shoulders, familiar as his own coat. His family had followed wrong threads before. His grandfather had gone to Bruges on the strength of a letter and come home two years older and no wiser. Perhaps this was Bruges. Perhaps he would ride home and take his place in the long line of di Bianchi men who had reached into the dark and found it empty.

“Been a-watchin’ thee.”

Lorenzo turned.

An old man sat on a bench against the harbor wall, in the full sun, with a net across his knees and a wooden needle going through it without haste. He was ancient, brown and creased as a walnut, white stubble, a pipe in the corner of his mouth that had gone out. He had clearly been enjoying Lorenzo’s progress up and down the street for some time.

“Thee’s been up street and down ’un,” the old man observed. “Askin’ after summat.”

Lorenzo swung down from the saddle. The hard ground hit the soles of his boots, and the ache in his legs flared. He crossed to the bench and bowed as he would have bowed to a cardinal.

“Good day to you, sir. I am looking for a house called Greywick Manor. No one in this village has heard of it. And yet I have reason, I have very good reason, sir, to believe that it stands near this place.”

The needle stopped.

The old man took the dead pipe from his mouth and pointed with the stem, past Lorenzo’s shoulder, up the rise beyond the church, where a line of great trees marked the edge of parkland, and above the trees, pale against the sky, the suggestion of chimneys.

“Grey House, that be.”

Lorenzo’s heart began to pound.

“But my grandfer, now.” The pipe went back in the mouth. Came out again. “My grandfer allus called ’er the Manor. Greywick Manor, he’d say. That were the old say of it, see, when his grandfer were a boy. Nobody don’t call ’er that no more. ’Tis just Grey House now.” He squinted up at Lorenzo, curiosity kindling in the creases. “How do a furriner come to know the old name of ’er, then?”