Chapter 1 #2
Nicholas said, “Well, the Renaissance was a period of considerable intellectual ferment, during which men of education and means frequently developed enthusiasms of an elaborate variety. The kind of enthusiasm that required, for instance, the construction of concealed architectural structures for the housing of objects of deeply questionable historical provenance, motivated by beliefs that were, one might say, optimistic in their relationship to verifiable fact and the general consensus of rational—”
“Nicholas.”
“I am providing context.”
“Maledizione, you are being obstructive!”
“Context is important,” Nicholas said. “A man who lacks context may draw conclusions that are premature or insufficiently considered, which in a matter of this complexity could lead to significant disappoi—”
“Nicholas,” Lorenzo said, and he heard his own voice come out of him at a volume he had not intended, and Nicholas heard it too, because the corner of his mouth went still. “What does it mean?”
Nicholas ran a hand through his hair. “Matteo di Bianchi was commissioned by Regis Aeterni in 1513. The Order of the Eternal King. They believed that a rightful claimant to the throne would come, and that a certain relic must be preserved until that claimant appeared. Matteo’s commission was to build a concealed structure.
A temple, which he calls a path that would relinquish to the rightful hand.
Something that would preserve the relevant object until the time of the rightful claimant. ”
Lorenzo frowned.
He was following Nicholas’s English carefully. His own English was good. It was not native and it never would be, but he had lived enough years among Englishmen now to catch the meaning of most things at a first hearing. He was catching the meaning of most of this but missing the whole.
A rightful claimant to the throne.
He was not a specialist in English kings.
He had learned the Continental view of the Tudor schism and had read Machiavelli on the death of Edward IV.
He had heard Italian gossip about Elizabeth’s reign, but he had never studied the English monarchy from the beginning and certainly never memorized which Henry preceded which.
There had been a great many of them. Matteo’s commission was 1513, which meant it was …
Henry VIII. The one who broke with Rome.
If Matteo was building a temple against the coming of a claimant, and the commission came in a year when a Henry was on the throne, perhaps the claimant was another Henry. A rival. A—
“A claimant to the throne,” Lorenzo said slowly. “Matteo was building a temple for a descendant of Henry—”
“No,” Nicholas said. He was doing that tense thing with his mouth again.
“It has nothing to do with Henry the Eighth. Or any living monarch. Or any monarch who has been alive in the past several centuries, as far as I can determine. The claim in question is considerably older than Henry the Eighth and considerably more, shall we say, mythological in its orientation. The Regis Aeterni held beliefs that most rational men of the sixteenth century were already treating as allegory, but Matteo, to his considerable credit as a craftsman if not as a man of reason, took the commission seriously and built accordingly.”
Lorenzo stared.
Mythological.
He knew the word. He was uncertain why Nicholas was using it about a commission from an Order that had been paying good Florentine gold for actual, weighable, carved marble and painted panels.
“What claim,” he said. “Nicholas, what are you saying?”
“I am saying that the beliefs of the Eternal King were ancient and entirely sincere, and that Matteo di Bianchi was commissioned to construct a cathedral in their service, and that cathedral was intended to house and preserve an object of considerable legendary significance until a certain claimant arrived to claim it, and that both the object and the claimant are, to a rational mind, the subjects of legend rather than history, and that the construction Matteo built is somewhere in England waiting to be found, and that we now have the alphabet and the deciphered journal and the path that leads to it, and I think the least you could do is allow me to deliver it in the order that seems most—”
“Matteo di Bianchi,” said the woman, from directly beside Nicholas’s left elbow, in a blunt voice that suggested she was not going to allow this conversation to continue in its present shape a moment longer, “was building a cathedral to house the sword, Excalibur.”
Lorenzo turned his head to look at her.
She met his eyes. “For the day,” she went on, in the same blunt voice, “that King Arthur returns.”
Silence fell across the courtyard. Even the gulls had nothing to say.
Lorenzo stood shoeless with the notebook in one hand and the alphabet in the other and Matteo’s journal pressed under his arm. He stared at the woman. Then he stared at Nicholas, who said nothing. So he turned his stare back at the woman.
He said, quite politely, “I am sorry. I do not think I know what an Excalibur is?”
“Ah,” Nicholas said. “Yes. That would be worth explaining.”
The woman put her hand up, adjusted her eyeglasses with a decisive motion, and looked at Lorenzo the way a schoolmistress looks at a pupil who has been out of the room during the essential lesson.
“Sir,” she said. “Do you know King Arthur?”
“Sì, Matteo painted an allegory of the legend,” Lorenzo said.