Chapter 2
At home we dig up the old gods and the emperors, but here they dig up different ghosts. I do not know their names yet, but I shall learn them.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The study was cold. The fire had only just been lit, and the coals still sulked in the grate, giving off more smoke than heat. Lucy sat in the leather chair with her hands folded tight in her lap and watched her father read the paper on his desk.
He had put on his court manner, and she could always tell the second it settled over him. His shoulders straightened a little and his voice dropped lower and the corners of his mouth firmed up. It was the voice he used with clients, not with her.
Today it was with her.
“Your uncle has been officially declared dead.”
The words landed like cold stone in her stomach.
Lucy did not move. She had known it was coming.
Her father had explained the whole process at Michaelmas.
Seven years’ absence. The petition to the court.
The affidavits from the Naval Office. The notice in the papers.
He had said the ruling would come this year.
Said it as if he were telling her the weather.
She had thought she was ready, but she was not.
The paper was written in a court clerk’s copperplate. She could see the flourishes on the capitals from where she sat. She wondered how many of these her father had read out to grieving families over the years. Dozens at least. This was solicitor’s work. Wills. Property. Death.
Today it was hers.
Not really hers. Uncle Henry’s. But it felt like hers too.
Seven years.
She could not make the number sit right in her head. Seven years since the messenger with the leather satchel and the smell of onions. Seven years since her father had wept into his hands. Seven years since she had said the words that had not left her since.
He might not be dead.
She had never stopped thinking them. Only stopped saying them aloud. There was a difference.
“Lucy.”
She glanced up. Her father had set the court paper down and taken up another.
His face had slipped from the courtroom mask into something softer and more tired.
Fifty-three this year, and until recently she had not thought of him as old.
The last years had changed that. More gray at his temples now.
Lines at the corners of his mouth she had not seen before.
“You understand what this means?”
“Yes.”
“It is not a formality. In the eyes of the Crown, from today onwards, your uncle Henry is deceased. His estate passes under the terms of his will. Which is why I have asked you here this morning.”
“I know.”
He waited. She said nothing more. After a moment, he cleared his throat.
The second paper was older. Yellowed edges. Faded ink. Uncle Henry’s own hand. She knew it before she knew what it was.
Her chest went tight.
Her father fitted his spectacles and lifted the paper.
He read the will. The substance was simple enough. Everything to her.
Lucy nodded. She had known. Or she had assumed.
Uncle Henry had told her once, standing at this very hearth with a glass of her father’s brandy in his hand, that when he was gone, she would have his little bits and pieces to remember him by.
Little bits and pieces. That was how he had put it.
She was not sure what the whole came to.
His books. His instruments. The trunks in the attic. Whatever coin was left in his accounts.
Her father looked at her a long moment. “This is of some import, dear.”
Something in his voice made her sit up straighter.
He drew a third paper from the drawer. Neat. Formal. A solicitor’s fair copy. She could see the seal even from where she sat.
“Captain Belafonte prepared this in 1812. He drew it up in Bristol, with witnesses, and lodged it with his man of business. It came to light after the sinking. There has been considerable dispute over it in the seven years since.”
He turned the paper toward her but did not release it.
“He made your uncle his heir.”
Lucy stared. “His heir?”
“To Grey House. And to a considerable annuity from investments in the Funds. And to the household contents. And to certain moneys held at Coutts. The captain had no living children. His two sons had both fallen in the wars. He had come, in the years he and your uncle worked together, to regard Henry almost as a third son, and had already welcomed him as a permanent houseguest, so he made him his heir.”
She could not speak.
Her father went on carefully. “There was difficulty because your uncle and the captain died in the same shipwreck, most likely in the same hour, perhaps in the same moment. The law does not always know what to do with cases like that. Distant cousins of the captain came forward to contest the will. There were arguments in Chancery about which of them had died first.” He slowly shook his head, sorrow evident on his face.
“More arguments about whether Henry could inherit anything at all when he himself was presumed dead. It has taken seven years to settle. In the end, the court ruled that Captain Belafonte’s death came first, however narrowly they could determine it from the accounts of the sinking.
Which means his estate passed to your uncle before your uncle himself was lost. Which means—”
He stopped and looked at her.
“Grey House is yours, Lucy. The captain’s fortune is yours. Together with what your uncle himself left. It is a very considerable estate. Two thousand a year in rents alone. More from the investments. The house and its contents. All of it.”
The fire popped.
She did not move.
Grey House rose in her mind so clearly she could almost smell the salt on the wind.
Dark stone on the rise above the estuary.
Long windows catching the light. The stone terrace where the captain took his morning coffee.
The boathouse and the tower she had climbed to watch the ships come up on the tide.
And there had been Captain Belafonte, retired from the Navy.
She had been a little afraid of him at first. A great mountain of a man with white brows that stuck out sideways above pale blue eyes and a voice like a foghorn.
He had lost half his left hand to a French cutlass at the Nile.
He had frightened her in the entrance hall the first afternoon by seizing her chin and turning her face to the light.
“Same eye,” he had said. “Look at that. Same eye as your uncle. There is a devil in it.”
She had been terribly pleased.
Mama had not been pleased at all.
The captain had taken her round his study after that.
Shown her the ships in bottles and the astrolabe from an Arab dealer in Alexandria and the great globe on its brass stand that he let her turn slowly with her fingertips.
A room full of charts. A case of pistols.
A Malay dagger with a curved blade and a hilt of black horn.
She had wandered his corridors for hours.
Opened doors she was not supposed to open.
Peered into rooms that smelled of old leather and pipe tobacco.
Climbed to the top of the tower with her braid coming loose and looked out at the estuary and the sea beyond and thought, in her ten-year-old way, that this was what a life ought to look like.
Grey House. It is mine.
Lucy set her hands flat on the arms of the chair to hold herself in place.
Her mind was going in three directions at once.
There was the part that was still numb with the declaration and the seven years and Uncle Henry gone.
There was the part that could see the terrace at Grey House and the light on the estuary.
And there was a third part now, a new part, that was doing sums.
Two thousand a year.
Plus investments.
Plus a house full of a lifetime’s collecting.
Plus every trunk and journal Uncle Henry had ever brought back.
Her father had walked into the study this morning with the court ruling in his hand, and now she was wealthy.
The word felt strange even inside her own head.
She was one-and-twenty and unmarried and wealthy and no longer under her father’s control.
I am free.
The thought hit her hard enough that a rough sound escaped her throat before she could stop it.
“Lucy?”
Her father was watching her. She saw suddenly that he had been dreading this moment. He had known what she would think. He had known before he walked into the study. He had probably known for weeks.
“Papa?”
“Yes, my dear.”
“I want to go there.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he looked older than he had a moment before. “I thought you might.”
“Not to visit. To live.”
“Lucy—”
“You cannot stop me … Can you?”
He did not answer at once. He set the will down on the desk and folded his hands over it. When he spoke, his voice was low.
“No, my dear. I cannot. As of this morning, you are the sole mistress of your fortune and your movements. You are of age. The law is unmistakable on the point. I have no instrument that would prevent you from taking up residence at Grey House this very afternoon if it pleased you.”
“But you would rather I did not?”
“I would rather,” he said, “that you were safely married to a sensible young gentleman with an income and a name and a house of his own. That you were mistress of a comfortable establishment with a husband to guide you. I would rather,” his voice cracked, “you were the sort of daughter I had prepared myself to have.”
She sat still. “I am not that sort of daughter, Papa.”
“No.”
“I never was.”
“No, Lucy.”
The fire had caught properly now. Little flames danced behind the fender. She could feel the warmth of it against her ankles for the first time since she had sat down.
“I shall take Bessy with me.”
“That is … good to hear. But it will be considered irregular regardless of what arrangements you make.”
“Then it will be considered irregular. I am not living my life to satisfy rumor, Papa.”
He nodded slowly. “Your mother will not accept it quietly.”
“No.”
Her father was quiet a long time.