Page 17 of The Beloved Escapade

Lorenzo could not answer at once. There was something in his throat. He was afraid he might weep openly if he dared to open his mouth too quickly.

“Greywick Manor, he’d say. That were the old say of it.”

Grandfather to grandfather to grandfather, the name had been handed down a chain of Gloucestershire fishermen while it slept in cipher in a Florentine’s journal, and the two threads had run beside each other for three hundred years without touching, and they touched now, here, on this bench, on this old man’s tongue.

“From a very old book,” Lorenzo managed. “Sir, from a very old book.”

He took the man’s free hand in both of his own and pressed a coin into it, and bowed over it, lower than he had bowed to anyone in England, while the old fellow protested that he hadn’t done nothing to be paid for, that a man couldn’t take money for pointing up a hill. Lorenzo was already back in the saddle, already turning the horse, calling back his thanks in a voice that cracked in the middle. Behind him, he heard the old man tell the gulls, with satisfaction, that furriners were queer folk and no mistake.

The house rose out of its trees like something surfacing from deep water.

Every stride of the avenue gave him more of it. A long, rambling front, wing grafted onto wing across the centuries. He read the building as he came. He could not help it. It was his training and his blood. He read it the way another man would read a face. Sash windows in the outer ranges, Georgian, new, no interest. But the central block …

The central block. Stone mullions. Leaded lights. Dripstones over the windows, and a squat porch with a four-centered arch, and walls of gray ashlar thick as a fortress. Late fifteenth century, perhaps the very early sixteenth. He would stake his name on it, which meant those walls were standing when Matteo landed in England. Standing when Matteo took his commission. Standing, perhaps, while Matteo stood where Lorenzo’s horse now stood, a Florentine in the rain with his life’s greatest work before him, examining that porch with his eyes.

Lorenzo’s legs would no longer hold him in the saddle. He swung down and stood at the foot of the steps, with his hand against the horse’s hot neck, and looked up at the house of the journals, and for a moment, he could not have said his own name, so giddy was he with relief.

I have found it.

After three hundred years of silence, a di Bianchi stood before the house, and none of the others, not his father, not his grandfather, not one of the long line of them, had ever stood where he was standing now.

He climbed the steps and instructed himself as he climbed. He would be calm. He would be brief. He would speak slowly and keep his hands at his sides and be, for five minutes, the kind of man the English opened doors to. He lifted the knocker and heard it fall, heavy and final, into the quiet of the house.

The door was opened by a spare, gray-whiskered man in dark clothes, who took in Lorenzo’s dusty boots and foreign face in a single downward pass of the eyes, and settled into polite regret before a word had been said.

“Good day. My name is Signor di Bianchi.” He presented his card. “I have traveled a very great distance. I beg only a few minutes of your master’s time.”

The man received the card without reading it. “There is no master here, sir.”

“Your mistress, then⁠—”

“There is no family in residence, sir. There has been no family in residence for some years. The estate is under stewardship.”

Stewardship. Lorenzo did not know the word, and then he knew it, and it dropped into his stomach like a stone into a well. An inheritance issue.

“Then I will speak with the steward. Gladly. Today. Now.”

“The stewardship is administered from London, sir.”

“London.” He heard his voice begin to climb and could no more stop it than stop the tide out there on the flats. “Sir. I have ridden four days. I have crossed the sea for this house. I ask nothing, nothing, that any Christian could not answer standing in a doorway. The age of the old wing. Whether records survive of its building. Whether there was ever, three hundred years ago, an Italian.” His hands had escaped him, his nature taking command. They were in the air, shaping the size of it, the enormity of what stood behind this whiskered gatekeeper in this doorway. He seized them and clasped them behind his back, where they strained against each other. “Forgive me. Forgive me. I ask it simply. Which office in London? A name. A street. Give me that, and I will trouble your doorstep no more.”

Perhaps it was the crack in his voice. Something in the whiskered face unbent, one degree.

“Messrs. Harding and Pole, sir. Lincoln’s Inn. Any inquiry regarding the estate must be directed to them. In writing.” A pause. “They are thorough gentlemen, sir. I am told they reply within the quarter.”

Within the quarter.

A quarter of a year. The di Bianchis had waited twelve hundred of them, and the English proposed to add one more, in writing, through thorough gentlemen.

The door closed. Softly. Respectfully. Completely.

Lorenzo stood on the steps and shook. His whole body hummed with it, the fury and the nearness and the helplessness all trying to leave him at once through his skin.

Angelo called it his tarantella, the lively folk dance of their people. Nicholas had compared him, unkindly and accurately, to a bee sealed in a bottle. He felt the bottle now. He wanted to hammer on that door until the wood splintered. He wanted to walk the walls with his palms flat against the cut stone like a blind man reading. He wanted, God forgive him, to find a window with a weak latch.

He did none of it. He went back down one step, and stopped, and turned, and laid his open hand against the wall of the house, against the cold gray stone beside the porch, the way he would touch a sacred relic. The stone did not warm. Stone never did. It kept to itself.

He would come back. If it took the lawyers, the letters, the whole grinding machinery of England, he would come back.