Page 5 of The Beloved Escapade

She stared at the drawing room door.

The door stayed shut.

The clock finished striking and the room held its breath, and Papa lowered himself at last into the wing chair across from her and put his elbows on his knees and his face into his hands.

Her father was weeping. Her father who had never wept in front of her, not even when his own mother died, was weeping into his hands like a boy and his shoulders were shaking, and Mama was holding Lucy so hard it hurt.

It cannot be true. If it were true, my father would not be weeping like this. My father does not weep. Therefore, it is not true.

But her father was weeping.

She wished with a sudden sharp fierceness that she had never come downstairs.

She wished she were still upstairs at her dressing table with her shelf of treasures, before the messenger, before the bell had rung. She wished she could go back to eight o’clock when the frost was still on the glass and Uncle Henry was still coming and the whole day was still ahead.

But time did not turn back. Uncle Henry had said so once, standing on the drawing room rug with a glass of Papa’s brandy in his hand and the firelight on his face. He had said it lightly, but she had noticed because he never said light things that were not serious underneath.

“Time is a river, poppet. You may sit on the bank and watch, or you may get in and swim. But you shall not turn it back. Better to swim.”

Lucy swallowed.

Her voice when she found it was small and came from a long way away, as if she were listening to a stranger speak.

“He might not be dead.”

Mama made a broken sound in her throat.

“He might not,” Lucy said again. “The sea is a large place. He might have⁠—”

“Lucy.” Papa had lifted his face from his hands. His eyes were wet but he was Papa again, and Papa knew things and Papa did not say what he did not know. “Lucy, my dear one. He is gone. It has been more than a week. If he had come ashore, we would have heard of it before now. He is gone.”

Her gaze drifted from her father to her mother, then past them both to the firmly closed drawing room door. His carriage would never draw up outside again, nor would a laughing gentleman in a mud-spattered greatcoat burst through it with that beloved, irrepressible joy.

Then Lucy Carroway buried her face in her mother’s neck and wept.

But somewhere down under the weeping, down where the hot coal of stubborn hope still burned and would not go out, a thought had lodged itself and would not be moved by tears or by any pronouncement from the Naval Office or by any words her father might say.

They had not found him.

They had found fragments of the ship.

They had found no body.

The sea was a large place.

And she would not believe that Uncle Henry was dead.

CHAPTER 1

I think of my father’s workshop and the smell of the pigments and the sound of my brothers arguing over the price of a panel. I have not written to them in weeks. What would I tell them? If I do not return, at least the stone will know I was here.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

April 1822 (seven years later)

The library at Grimsfell was cold. Lorenzo di Bianchi had learned in his weeks here that no fire the Cornish maids could build would prevail against the wind off the cliffs, and they had given up trying. He worked in his coat.