Page 37 of The Beloved Escapade

He was already moving, to the corner shelf, to the tea-colored vellum journals, pulling the second one, and taking from his satchel by the chair a folded card that Lucy glimpsed only briefly: two columns, pictograms and letters. A key. He laid journal and key side by side under the lamp and began to hunt, page after page of the marching symbols, his finger flying down the rows, muttering. Lucy stood at his shoulder and watched a dead alphabet come alive under a stained fingertip, and it was, she thought, the finest thing she had ever been permitted to watch.

“There.” His finger stopped. He worked along a row, symbol by symbol, letter by letter, half-aloud, and then read it through, in English, slowly, in that voice that carried another man inside it.

“The white island gives the stone. The white island keeps the way. When the work is done, let no man seek the work. Let him seek the stone, for where the stone was born, there is the door.”

The lamps burned. The house held its breath. Lucy heard the words go down into her like an anchor finding bottom.

“The cathedral,” Lorenzo whispered. “Lucy, he is telling us where. Where the stone was born, there is the door. The cathedral is at Hwitmarbel, or the way to it is. The door, the beginning.” His hands had escaped and were describing spirals. “It is there; it starts there. Where is there? Where is Hwitmarbel? Have you ever⁠—”

“Never. But I know a man who had charts of every water in the world.” Lucy was already moving. “Bring the lamp.”

The chart drawers were in the long room off the gallery where the pistol case lived, exactly where they had been when she was ten, and Uncle Henry’s charts came out in great, stiff sliding sheets smelling of dust. The Levant, the Indies, half the oceans of the earth, until, near the bottom, England herself.

The whole southwest, the long peninsula, the Bristol Channel yawning between Wales and the West Country. They spread it under both lamps on the great table and bent over it together, heads nearly touching, and hunted the coastline inch by inch, headland by headland, her finger on the north shore of Devon moving west, west.

“There.”

A speck of an island, standing off the Devon coast in the gray, engraved sea. The old chart gave it in letters smaller than ants, and gave, on the mainland shore inside it, a village name in letters barely larger.

Hwitmarbel I. And, on the coast, Whitcombe.

“Whitcombe,” said Lucy. Her voice came out not entirely her own. “The white combe. And the white marble island off it. Hwit is white in Old English.”

“Two days’ travel,” said Lorenzo. “Perhaps three.”

He was measuring with his fingers, walking them across Devon like a divider, and his hands were unsteady, actually unsteady, and his breath was audible. Then he stopped measuring and straightened and looked at her across the chart with his ancestral quest painted across his face.

“Lucy. Lucy, do you understand what you found tonight? Not I. You⁠—”

“My uncle found it first,” said Lucy. “I only⁠—”

He seized her.

It was nothing like the library kiss. That one had been a seal on a bargain, thorough and warm and half-smiling.

This one was a detonation.

His hands came round her, one at her waist, one splayed between her shoulder blades, and he brought her up against him and kissed her the way the tide came up the Severn, all at once and from everywhere.

Lucy’s back met the chart cabinet, and she was glad of it, glad of something solid taking her weight, because her knees had resigned without notice.

The chart crackled somewhere. Her fingers were in his dark hair, which she had no memory of authorizing. He tasted of the orgeat and of triumph, and he was murmuring between one kiss and the next, her name, and Italian, and her name inside the Italian.

The heat that had been banked low in her all evening roared up through her like a chimney catching. She felt the firm press of his mouth, the slow deliberate stroke of his tongue against hers, the thorough, unhurried claiming of it. She heard herself make a sound she would deny to her grave, and pressed closer, her body answering without permission, soft and eager against the hard length of his.

He tore himself back.

Bodily. A full step, then another, his hands leaving her and closing into fists at his sides as though they could not otherwise be trusted, and he stood there wrecked in the lamplight, chest heaving, curls unruly, eyes blazing, looking at her the way he had looked at the marble hand.

“No,” he said, to himself, she understood. The word was aimed entirely inward. “No. Not until we are wed.”

And Lucy, sagging against the captain’s chart cabinet with her heart going like the Grand Army and her lips feeling twice their size, watched him stand there fighting himself for her sake, and thought, giddily, gloriously, Honor!

Pure honor, and it looked wonderful on him; it looked better than the shirtsleeves. Somewhere at the back of her inner assembly, the junior member in the dark stood up and began, quietly, to applaud, and the chair called for order, and did not entirely receive it.

“Well,” she managed. Her voice had gone to smoke. She cleared it and tried again. “Well. Then we had better make short work of the month.”

A laugh broke out of him, helpless, boyish, wholly undone, and the last of the tension went out of the room like a tide turning.