Page 27 of The Beloved Escapade

“I do not want my name on a page.”

He stared at her. She watched him arrive at the end of everything he knew how to offer, and it was strangely touching, how quickly the end came. Money, and honor, and then nothing, because those were the only things anyone had ever tried to take from him.

“Then what,” he said, quietly now, “do you want?”

And there it was. The river, churning, right at her feet.

Lucy’s hands had gone cold. She could feel her pulse in her throat, in her wrists, in the soles of her feet against her newly inherited floor. Somewhere far off in the house, a shutter shrieked open and the ordinary morning went on without her. Bessy in some passage, the village girls with their brooms, Mama a hundred miles away composing her next tearful letter, and Lucy stood with her back against a hidden door and gathered up her whole life in both hands like skirts before a stream.

Throw it overboard early, Lucy-bird, or it will sink you in the end.

“You may search this house,” she said. “Every room, every wall, every cellar. I will give you the freedom of it from attics to foundations, for as long as the work requires. I will open every door I have the opening of, and you have seen this morning that my doors are worth having.” Her chin came up. It did it on its own; that chin had never once waited for instructions. “On one condition.”

“Name it,” he said again, but softer, because he was watching her face now, and whatever was written there had made him forget the wall entirely.

“Wherever this trail leads,” said Lucy, “I go with you.”

A pause.

“Signorina,” he said slowly, “if you wish to be present at the work, naturally, it is your house, you may stand at my shoulder every hour of every⁠—”

“You misunderstand me.” Her heart was a fist against her ribs. “I have listened to you all morning, signore. Ships, and cities, and storms, and crates of paintings that could not sit alone. Your trail did not begin in this house, and I would stake this house on the belief that it does not end here either. It will lead somewhere. Trails do. And when it leads out that door, down the river, over the sea, to Florence or Rome or the ends of the earth, I am going with it. All the way. Not as a patroness reading your letters in Gloucestershire. As …” The word she wanted was partner, and it was big enough, so she said it plainly. “… as your equal in the whole adventure. Every mile of it.”

He had gone quite motionless, watching her.

“And you will know as well as I do,” Lucy went on, and here her courage tried to leave her, and she caught it by the collar and held on, “that there is no arrangement under English heaven by which a young unmarried woman travels the world at a gentleman’s side as his equal. Not one. I have had years to search for such an arrangement, signore, and I am here to tell you it does not exist. Except …” Her breath had gone somewhere. She retrieved it. “Except the one.”

She watched him not understand.

She watched him begin to understand.

“So that is my condition,” said Lucy Carroway, twenty-one years old, recently the mistress of Grey House, to the man she had known since a quarter past ten that morning. “If you wish to pursue your ancestor through my house and beyond it, you must marry me.”

The library was so quiet she could hear the dust.

She could hear other things too. Her own blood, roaring in her ears like the tide over the flats. A gull, somewhere above the chimneys, laughing at something, at her, quite possibly. The tick of the great clock in the gallery, which had been wound that morning for the first time in seven years, measuring out the longest seconds of her life.

He did not laugh. That was the first mercy. She had braced for laughter, braced to have to stand there with her back against her uncle’s secrets while an amused foreigner explained to her gently what a child she was, and it did not come. He did not laugh, and he did not splutter, and he did not look for the exit.

He thought.

She could see him do it. It was extraordinary to watch, the impulsive creature of the morning, all spilled words and escaping hands, gone suddenly and completely motionless. His dark eyes were fixed on her with the total attention she had seen him give the carved wall not a quarter hour since, as though she were a surface under which something had been hidden, and he were reading her from left to right.

The silence stretched. Lucy’s nerve began, traitorously, to fray at the edges. Every governess she had ever had rose up in a body at the back of her mind, shrieking. Mama’s voice arrived over the top of them, not shrieking, which was worse. “You proposed. To an Italian. In a library. On your second day. Lucy, we cannot even tell people you are dead, because then they will ask how.”

She thought, I could laugh now. I could turn it, make it a jest, a test, save us both, and he would let me. He is kind enough to let me.

She held fast, with her cold hands folded and her chin up and her dreams declared out loud and standing in the open air between them, and she watched the stranger think about it honestly, the way no one had ever thought about anything she had said in her entire life.

When he finally spoke, there was no smile in it at all.

“Signorina Carroway. Before I answer you, I will tell you what you are asking for. Because you have been honest with me this morning, more honest than anyone in this country has ever been, and I will not repay it by letting you buy blind.”

He came a step nearer, and his voice was low and level and entirely without its music.

“You have made your condition. Now hear mine, because I have one also, and mine is not a condition I choose. It is a condition I am. The quest comes first.”

“Signor—”