Page 38 of The Beloved Escapade

“Whitcombe,” he said, dragging both hands through his hair, visibly reassembling himself into a rational creature. “We must go. As soon as it can be arranged. The banns run whether we are here or not. Mr. Sandys has his book. But Lucy, the travel.” And here the rational creature completed itself, and turned to her with a new and rather touching gravity. “I must ask it. Your father’s carriage⁠—”

“Went home earlier, with my letters.” She grimaced. “Papa’s coachman was clearly composing his report the entire drive to the vicarage. I thought it kinder to let him deliver it in person and get it over.”

“Then we have no⁠—”

“There is the captain’s coach,” said Bessy, from the doorway.

They both turned. She stood there with her candle and her workbag, having followed the lamps at her own pace, and having heard, her face announced, as much as she intended to admit to.

“The late Captain Belafonte’s traveling coach,” she said. “In the far coach house, under sheets. I found it when I was looking for the mangle to do the laundry. Great old thing, built like a ship of the line, but Mr. Tredwell says the wheels are sound, and there’s harness, and the smith in the village can look it over in a day. It wants only horses, and horses can be hired.”

“Bessy,” said Lucy, “you are a pearl beyond price.”

“I am a woman who finds things because she looks,” said Bessy. “Somebody in this house has to do it sober.”

But Lorenzo had come forward, and his gravity had not lifted.

“Lucy. Hear me. I did not think of it, and I am ashamed. Today at the church, I understood. Your name is now tied to mine in every mouth in this county, and if you travel across two counties in a coach with a foreign man you are not yet married to, betrothed or no.” His hand cut the air. “I know what this country does to women. I will not be the ruin of you before I am even the husband of you. Tell me how it can be done properly, or we wait out the month and go as man and wife, and Matteo can keep another thirty days. He has kept three hundred years. I can …” A pause, a visible suffering written on his face. “I can possibly endure it.”

Lucy looked at him, at this vibrating, honorable, three-centuries-haunted man offering to sit still for a month, for her, when sitting still was the one thing God had built him without, and felt something in her chest that was absolutely not in the terms of the bargain, and elected not to examine it in company.

“You are very dear,” she said, “and it will not be necessary. We are betrothed, publicly, legally, entered in the book, called from the chancel steps on Sunday. A betrothed couple may travel together perfectly respectably, provided the lady is properly accompanied.” She turned. “Bessy. How do you feel about Devon?”

Bessy looked at the pair of them, and at the chart on the table with the little island standing in its engraved sea, and gathered her workbag with the air of a woman who had packed for worse on shorter notice.

“I’ll want the forward-facing seat,” she said, “and no singing before ten. I’ll start on the trunks in the morning.”

CHAPTER 8

In Florence our legends stay in the workshop or the library. Here they walk the lanes with you

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

After she had arranged word for her parents that she would not be home, they went out through the gates of Grey House at first light with their newly hired coachman from the village, and Lucy watched the manor dwindle between the trees.

Seven years of gates. Every one of them stood open behind her now.

The morning was still cold, and the grass lay silver. Mist stretched along the river in a long white rope, while her breath fogged the glass. Under the traveling rug, her feet were warm and her hands were cold and her blood fizzed like a kettle coming to the boil.

She could not have said whether she wanted to laugh or be sick. She had been awake since four and dressed since five and had eaten nothing, and none of it mattered in the least.

Bessy sat opposite with her hands folded on the hamper like a general reviewing a field already won. Every strap in the boot had been buckled twice. Every band-box had been argued into its place. The newly hired coachman would have had them slung under the seats out of the way, being a flat man who saw no virtue in a light-lidded thing full of bonnets. Bessy had prevailed by the ancient method of standing beside the box in question with her arms folded until it went where she meant it to go, which was on top, where nothing could crush the caps.

“You’ll crick your neck,” Bessy said.

“I am saying goodbye to my house.”

“You’ll see it again in a month, God willing, with a ring on you.”

Lucy settled back in her seat. On her lap lay the Malory she had taken from the library. It was a fat calf-bound tome with its corners going soft, Le Morte d’Arthur stamped along the spine in gilt gone brown. Lorenzo sat at her side with his hat on his knees and his gaze out the window. The wheels found the Bristol road, and they went west.

She had braced herself, in the planning of this journey, for a silent companion. She had seen how he was with the papers and the marbles. A man gone down a well, sending up no bucket for hours on end. So she had packed the Malory and a workbag and three letters she had not replied to against long, mute miles of him thinking.

She need not have packed a thing.

He talked. How he talked. Not at her, that was the wonder of it, but to her, turning to be sure she had seen, touching her sleeve, rapping his knuckle on the glass. A church tower off among elms, which he dated by its windows alone and mourned that they could not stop. A broken arch standing alone in a sheep field, and they did stop; he begged the favor with such tragedy in his face that she rapped for the coachman herself, laughing, and Lorenzo handed her down and walked her through wet grass to lay her glove against stone twenty generations cold.