Page 68 of The Beloved Escapade

“Signore.” Lorenzo had come to stand beside her, and he spoke formally, with his hand flat over the smooth stone in his breast pocket. “What this island holds, I hold. To the grave. And if we come again, we come as strangers do, rarely, and carefully, and by Matthew’s word first. You have both our honors on it.”

“Aye,” said her uncle, thickly. “I know I do. It is why you’re getting the boat and not a musket ball.” Which was as near as he could come, in front of everyone, and everyone mercifully laughed, and the laugh got them all through the shoving-off, which nothing else would have.

He rowed them across himself.

And midway over, Lucy watched him do the thing she had been dreading without knowing she dreaded it. She watched him watch the quay of Whitcombe come up over his shoulder, and gauge the distance, and then, between one stroke and the next, put the dead man back on. The set of the jaw changed first. Then the eyes, the light in them banking down to shoreman’s civility. And when a boy on the quay sang out something about the tide, the voice that answered was burred and slowed and dressed in the coast, Jim Carver’s voice, a stranger’s voice, and her uncle was gone again, six feet away from her, rowing. Lucy glanced away out to sea and let the wind dry her eyes.

The quay greeted them. Lawrence’s handclasp. Matthew’s, longer, with a look that carried all the freight it needed to. Mrs. Hannaford arrived at the last possible moment, at a fishwife’s pace, with a covered basket that she thrust at Lorenzo like an indictment, and it proved to hold enough pasties for a regiment, and she looked him over once, coat to boots, and said, “You’ll do,” which was Whitcombe for a benediction, and stumped off before anyone could commit sentiment.

Then their carriage stood loaded by the inn, and Bessy stood by the carriage, in her traveling cloak, with the trunks and band-boxes counted twice.

“Bessy,” Lucy said, low, while Lorenzo saw to the last strapping. “Before we start. What you have seen. I must ask you to be⁠—”

“Seen, Miss Lucy?” Bessy’s needles could not have looked more innocent if she had been born yesterday. “I’m sure I don’t follow. Lovely fortnight at the seaside, we’ve had. Devon air. I said to myself the first morning, I said, Bessy, that’s proper air, that is, you can feel it doing you good. I’ve slept like the dead and eaten like a bishop, and there’s a receipt for pilchards I mean to torment Cook with till one of us dies.”

She settled her workbag on her arm and looked at Lucy with eyes as mild as a summer sea, in which, very far down, something old and iron lay keeping watch.

“Seaside, Miss Lucy. That’s the whole of my holiday, and a lovelier one I never had. Now get in before the horses take root.”

Lucy got in. Love, she thought, watching Bessy arrange herself and her knitting opposite like a garrison taking up a position, wore more disguises than the Dominus ever dreamed of.

The road took them up out of the combe, and the sea fell away behind, and the journey home began, and it was the same journey.

That was what Lucy had not been prepared for, though she could not have said what she had expected instead. The same roads. The same climbing lanes between the same high hedges, the same gulls thinning out mile by mile until the sky forgot them. The same red soil, running backward now. The same inns, even, the same landlady at Glastonbury Tor who remembered them and gave them the same rooms, and it was all exactly, faithfully the same, the whole mirror of it, except for the silence riding inside the carriage where the delight used to spill over.

They were not silent, of course. They were worse than silent; they were pleasant. Lorenzo pointed out a hawk, and she admired it. She remarked on the harvest coming forward, and he agreed that it came forward. He handed her down at every stage with his warm sure hand and asked if she was tired, and she was not tired, thank you, and the miles went by stuffed with civility like a drawing room with too many chairs.

Bessy shook her head, and did her knitting.

Through it all, his other hand kept straying, once an hour, to his breast pocket, to a child’s stone, and hers kept closing, in the folds of her skirt where nobody could see, around a little marble bird with its head turned back over its shoulder.

In the parlor of the inn on the second evening, the fire well up and supper cleared, Lucy sat with a book she was not reading, and Lorenzo sat across from her with a journal he was not reading, and Bessy sat between and a little apart with her knitting, and the needles, which had gone all day like a mill, went slower. And slower.

Lucy glanced up and caught her at it, the gray eyes moving from one bent, pretending head to the other, one, and then the other, and back, with the mildness worn clean off them, and worry standing in their place as plain as a lit window.

Bessy caught her catching, and did not trouble to disguise it, which frightened Lucy more than anything else in the whole long days of travel.

Then the needles picked up their pace again, click and click, keeping the little fire of ordinariness alight in the middle of the room, and the three of them sat on in the lamplight, being carried home together, with silence as the fourth passenger, a tangible form made of things unsaid.

CHAPTER 17

I finished the bird and held it in my hand. The stone was cold and perfect. Every feather was there, the head turned back over the wing exactly as I had seen it. And still, for a long moment, I wanted only to open the cage of my own making and let it fly. A man can trap a living thing in marble and still feel the wrongness of the trap.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

Grey House had learned to listen for him.

Lucy had not meant to learn it too, but a house taught its mistress whether she consented or not, and within three days of their return, she could tell from anywhere under its roof exactly where Lorenzo was and what he was doing there.

The library door, which had a voice of its own, opened and did not quite close. And then, for hours, the pacing filtered up through the old floors, faint as a pulse. Eleven steps and turn. Eleven steps and turn. The hidden room was eleven steps long. She had never counted the length. Her feet knew it now the way she knew her own heartbeat, secondhand, through boards.

He was vibrating. There was no better word for it, and she had stopped hunting for one. A man strung like a rigged mast in rising weather, humming with a strain that had nowhere to go. He ate what was put before him. He disappeared to sleep at The Rusty Anchor. He stood when she entered rooms. He was courteous, and dutiful, and present, and a hundred miles away, and the hundred miles ran straight through the library wall into a windowless room where a dead man’s papers were being dealt and re-dealt like a game of patience that never once concluded to his satisfaction.

She had gone down to him there on the second evening, and stood in the opening of the shelf-door to look at what he had made of her uncle’s sanctum. The charts out again. The ledgers open at pages she knew by heart because he knew them by heart. The journals ranked and re-ranked, the cipher key lying at an exhausted angle, and chalked across the slate she had given him for the purpose, columns of figures, tonnages, years, distances, worked and worked again, as though numbers might confess under repetition what they had withheld under logic.

“Anything?” she had asked, keeping it light. He had looked up at her from the middle of the wreckage, the lamp hollowing his face, and said, gently, “No, Lucia. Nothing. Forgive me, I lost the hour.” He had come up to dinner and been charming to her, and the charm had been the loneliest thing she had ever sat across a table from.