Page 70 of The Beloved Escapade

It surprised a laugh out of Lucy, one broken note, with water behind it.

“You have thought about this?” she asked.

“I think about everything,” said Bessy. “It’s why my hems are straight.” She gave Lucy’s hands one hard squeeze and let go, then picked up the pillowcase. “Now. Four more sheets, and the lavender to lay in, and then they want you for the flowers. The gardener’s set his heart on lilies, and lilies at a wedding breakfast make me think of, well … Never you mind what they make me think of. We’ll have roses.”

They folded the rest in silence. Walk together. Corners met. Part and snap. The pile of white grew at the end of the trestle, sweet with lavender. When the last sheet was squared, Lucy carried the stack to the press herself and laid it away.

Through the floor, up through the boards of the house, the pacing went on below her. Eleven steps. And turn.

* * *

The letter to his father would not be written.

Lorenzo had been trying for three nights. On the third night the proof lay on the desk of the hidden room, in the wreckage of his own hand. Three beginnings. Three sentences ending in miniature deaths.

The first had died at the second line.

Padre. The trail I wrote to you of has ended at the quarry that began it.

He had looked at the words a long time, and the words had looked back. There was no third line in the world that could follow them into a house in Florence, where an old man was, this very month, reading the fat packet in which his son had written that the family had found its Grand Master.

The second had died trying to be gentle.

The evidence now suggests that our ancestor’s great work may not have been.

May not have been. He had sat with the quill dry in his hand, listening to that sentence, and heard what it would sound like read aloud in the workshop, under the racks of chisels. He had drawn a line through it hard enough to cross into the page beneath.

The third had not died. He had burned it, because it had begun I have failed, and a man might write many things to his father, but he did not send him a tombstone with the family name on it and his own signature at the foot.

Centuries of searching for nothing. That was what sat on his chest at two in the morning in the windowless room. Not the eleven years of his own hunting. Not the money spent. Not the friends who had grown careful around him.

Three hundred years of di Bianchis keeping the faith in an attic trunk. Copying the letters before the ink faded. Teaching the legend to each generation. Waiting, certain that somewhere under England the family’s work stood in the dark, ready. Seventeen generations of hope, handed down, until the hope came to Lorenzo. He had carried it to the threshold.

And found nothing behind the door.

There was no way to bring that home. He had turned it every way. A man could not stand in his father’s workshop and say the waiting had been in vain. His father would smile and find something fine to say about faith, and then something in him would go quiet forever. Lorenzo would have failed.

So the letter would not be written. He could not go home. He could not stay. He walked the eleven paces of the secret room. Overhead, through the boards, the woman he was to marry on Sunday was thinking about him. He could feel it. She lay quiet and asked nothing of him.

Which was, he told himself, exactly what she had bargained for.

She had stood in a doorway of this house and set the terms clearly. Passage, not sentiment. A companion for the venture. She had never asked for his heart. She had put it outside the bargain. If the venture was dead, then what he owed her was the rest of the contract. His name, his conduct, his courtesy. His heart had never been part of it, and it was not his to give. It was crushed.

He told himself this while he paced. It held until that evening.

She kissed him in the library after dinner. It began the way the good things between them always began … out of nothing, out of her sweetness. He had said something dry. She had laughed the real laugh, the one that caught him by surprise. Then she crossed the room, took his lapels in both hands, gazed up at him with the laugh still in her face, and kissed him.

Everything in him answered.

His arms went around her. His hand found the warm nape of her neck under her hair. For three heartbeats, the world was the taste of her and the wine on her breath and the pleasured sound she made against his mouth. The noise in his head went quiet.

Then it started again.

He felt it happen. He was there for all of it. The machinery began to turn. He felt himself leave the kiss while his mouth was still on hers. His hands stopped on her. His body went quiet. Not peaceful. Absent. She felt it at once. Of course she did. She was Lucy.

She drew back and looked at him.

“Forgive me,” he heard himself say. The voice came out polite. “Lucia. Forgive me. My mind is⁠—”