Chapter 3
I stood in the hall today and watched the dust move in the bars of sun. This place has not yet decided what it will become.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
Four days in the saddle had taught Lorenzo di Bianchi that he was a scholar and not a horseman, and every bone in his body was still reciting the lesson when he smelled the river.
Mud and salt and something green beneath rose off the flats where the tide had drawn back and left half a mile of land glistening brown in the morning sun.
Then the road bent around a stand of elms, and there it was.
He brought the horse to a halt. The animal shifted under him. The sudden stillness settled into his thighs, and the pull of the reins burned across his palms.
The Severn stretched vast and sliding, the color of wet clay, so wide at this reach that the far bank was only a blue suggestion under the haze.
Matteo had written of this river. Wider than the Arno at flood.
Lorenzo had read the line a dozen times and thought he understood it, yet he had understood nothing.
The Arno was a river. This was a moving country.
This was water with the patience of stone.
Matteo had seen this. He had ridden this road, or one very near it, and seen this same water, and put it into symbols so that no one would ever know he had been here.
Lorenzo’s eyes stung. He let them.
His thighs and back ached, and the insides of his knees had passed beyond aching into a numb, honest misery.
None of it mattered. The satchel hung at his hip, with the fair copy wrapped in oilcloth inside it, and beneath the fair copy, the second journal itself.
And in the second journal, written many times in Matteo’s own hand, was the name.
Severnwick.
He had sat over the maps until his candle drowned in its own wax and found no Severnwick anywhere in England, and he had felt the old despair rising in his throat, the familiar one, three centuries deep, of di Bianchi suffering.
Nicholas had glanced across the table and said the wick would have dropped away, that half the wicks in England had fallen off their villages since the Tudors, the way plaster falls from a fresco.
To look for a Severn with something in front of it.
Little Severn. A fly-speck on the estuary shore.
And now Nicholas was three days gone in the wrong direction, north to York with his bride, so that the watchers who had followed their servants and trunks would see that they, too, had finally arrived.
Lorenzo had argued against it. He had argued at length, with his whole chest, in two languages.
It was his quest and his ancestor and his danger to carry, and he would not hide behind his friends.
Nicholas had waited for him to finish, in that maddening way of his, and had said only, “You are the one holding the thread, Lorenzo. We are the flag. Go quietly and go alone.”
Lorenzo had embraced him. Nicholas had endured it, rigid as a saint in a niche, and Millicent had watched from over her eyeglasses and remarked, rather bluntly, that Italians were very much as described.
He hoped the York road was kind to them.
He hoped the watchers following the trunks found nothing at the end of the journey but a newly-wed couple admiring the Yorkshire countryside.
And he hoped, with everything in him, that this village on this brown river was the right place.
Three hundred years of di Bianchi men had reached into the dark after Matteo and closed their hands on nothing.
Let this be the place.
He clicked his tongue, and the horse carried him down the last slope into Little Severn.
It was a humble place, and it was beautiful.
He could not help seeing it as a painter’s ground, laid out for underdrawing.
Stone cottages the color of raw umber crowded along a single street that ran down to a stub of harbor, where fishing boats leaned on the mud with their masts at odds, waiting for the tide to make them whole again.
Nets hung drying on frames. Gulls sat on the chimney pots.
The church on its rise at the village edge was Norman.
He saw it in one glance, the squat tower, the round-headed windows, older than Matteo, older than Florence’s pride, standing there in the weeds with no one to look at it.
In Italy, they would have written books about that church.
Here, it kept the graves of fishermen and did not ask for any glory.
Heads turned as he rode in. Not many heads. All of them.
He was used to it by now. Months in England had taught him what his face and his coat and his voice did to a village street. He removed his hat to the first person he reached, a woman standing in her doorway with a basket of little silver fish against her hip, and bowed to her from the saddle.
“Good morning, signora. Forgive me. I am looking for Greywick Manor.”
The woman stared at him with suspicion for a long moment. “For what, now?”
“Greywick Manor. A great house. It stands near this village, perhaps very near. Greywick.”
“There ain’t no Greywick round here.” She shifted the basket. “You’ll be wanting Berkeley, maybe. That be a castle, mind. ’Tis a fair way up the water.”
“Not a castle. A manor. Grey-wick.” He said it slowly, carefully, the way he would say it to a student, giving each syllable its full weight, as if the trouble were only in the hearing of it.
“Never heard of ’er.” And the door closed, softly, and took the fish with it.
He sat looking at the shut door, and the first cold finger of doubt touched the back of his neck.
No. No. The name was in the journal.
What if it has been torn down? It has been three hundred years since Matteo inked it in his journals.
Lorenzo pushed the thought aside, refusing to admit any doubts. Instead, he rode on.
He asked a carter loading barrels outside the chandler’s, a broad man who set his barrel down to think and then called into the shop for someone named Dan, and Dan came out wiping his hands, and the two of them turned the word Greywick over between them like a coin of unknown country, and offered him, in the end, a pig farm belonging to a man named Grey up Awre way.
“It is not a pig farm,” Lorenzo said. His voice came out louder than he had intended. “I thank you. It is not a pig farm.”
He asked the blacksmith, who said nothing at all and watched him with folded arms until Lorenzo backed his horse out of the yard.
He asked two boys fishing off the quay wall with string and bent pins, and his accent undid them entirely.
They laughed until they wept, hanging on each other, and one of them gasped out that he should ask the vicar, on account of the vicar knew Latin.
Lorenzo thanked them with a gravity that set them off again, and rode back up the street with his ears burning.
The sun climbed. The doubt climbed with it.
He stopped in the middle of the only street in Little Severn and made himself breathe.
He was a scholar. He knew what an attribution was worth when only one source supported it.
Several instances in a single hand. A cipher, a dead language of one man, and one man’s spelling of a place he had perhaps only heard spoken aloud in an accent like Dan’s.
Dio mio. Lorenzo had ridden four days on the strength of it, and stood now in a village where the name Greywick meant nothing to a single living soul.
Three centuries. The whole weight of them came and sat on his shoulders, familiar as his own coat.
His family had followed wrong threads before.
His grandfather had gone to Bruges on the strength of a letter and come home two years older and no wiser.
Perhaps this was Bruges. Perhaps he would ride home and take his place in the long line of di Bianchi men who had reached into the dark and found it empty.
“Been a-watchin’ thee.”
Lorenzo turned.
An old man sat on a bench against the harbor wall, in the full sun, with a net across his knees and a wooden needle going through it without haste.
He was ancient, brown and creased as a walnut, white stubble, a pipe in the corner of his mouth that had gone out.
He had clearly been enjoying Lorenzo’s progress up and down the street for some time.
“Thee’s been up street and down ’un,” the old man observed. “Askin’ after summat.”
Lorenzo swung down from the saddle. The hard ground hit the soles of his boots, and the ache in his legs flared. He crossed to the bench and bowed as he would have bowed to a cardinal.
“Good day to you, sir. I am looking for a house called Greywick Manor. No one in this village has heard of it. And yet I have reason, I have very good reason, sir, to believe that it stands near this place.”
The needle stopped.
The old man took the dead pipe from his mouth and pointed with the stem, past Lorenzo’s shoulder, up the rise beyond the church, where a line of great trees marked the edge of parkland, and above the trees, pale against the sky, the suggestion of chimneys.
“Grey House, that be.”
Lorenzo’s heart began to pound.
“But my grandfer, now.” The pipe went back in the mouth.
Came out again. “My grandfer allus called ’er the Manor.
Greywick Manor, he’d say. That were the old say of it, see, when his grandfer were a boy.
Nobody don’t call ’er that no more. ’Tis just Grey House now.
” He squinted up at Lorenzo, curiosity kindling in the creases.
“How do a furriner come to know the old name of ’er, then? ”
Lorenzo could not answer at once. There was something in his throat. He was afraid he might weep openly if he dared to open his mouth too quickly.
“Greywick Manor, he’d say. That were the old say of it.”