Chapter 3 #2
Grandfather to grandfather to grandfather, the name had been handed down a chain of Gloucestershire fishermen while it slept in cipher in a Florentine’s journal, and the two threads had run beside each other for three hundred years without touching, and they touched now, here, on this bench, on this old man’s tongue.
“From a very old book,” Lorenzo managed. “Sir, from a very old book.”
He took the man’s free hand in both of his own and pressed a coin into it, and bowed over it, lower than he had bowed to anyone in England, while the old fellow protested that he hadn’t done nothing to be paid for, that a man couldn’t take money for pointing up a hill.
Lorenzo was already back in the saddle, already turning the horse, calling back his thanks in a voice that cracked in the middle.
Behind him, he heard the old man tell the gulls, with satisfaction, that furriners were queer folk and no mistake.
The house rose out of its trees like something surfacing from deep water.
Every stride of the avenue gave him more of it.
A long, rambling front, wing grafted onto wing across the centuries.
He read the building as he came. He could not help it.
It was his training and his blood. He read it the way another man would read a face.
Sash windows in the outer ranges, Georgian, new, no interest. But the central block …
The central block. Stone mullions. Leaded lights.
Dripstones over the windows, and a squat porch with a four-centered arch, and walls of gray ashlar thick as a fortress.
Late fifteenth century, perhaps the very early sixteenth.
He would stake his name on it, which meant those walls were standing when Matteo landed in England.
Standing when Matteo took his commission.
Standing, perhaps, while Matteo stood where Lorenzo’s horse now stood, a Florentine in the rain with his life’s greatest work before him, examining that porch with his eyes.
Lorenzo’s legs would no longer hold him in the saddle. He swung down and stood at the foot of the steps, with his hand against the horse’s hot neck, and looked up at the house of the journals, and for a moment, he could not have said his own name, so giddy was he with relief.
I have found it.
After three hundred years of silence, a di Bianchi stood before the house, and none of the others, not his father, not his grandfather, not one of the long line of them, had ever stood where he was standing now.
He climbed the steps and instructed himself as he climbed.
He would be calm. He would be brief. He would speak slowly and keep his hands at his sides and be, for five minutes, the kind of man the English opened doors to.
He lifted the knocker and heard it fall, heavy and final, into the quiet of the house.
The door was opened by a spare, gray-whiskered man in dark clothes, who took in Lorenzo’s dusty boots and foreign face in a single downward pass of the eyes, and settled into polite regret before a word had been said.
“Good day. My name is Signor di Bianchi.” He presented his card. “I have traveled a very great distance. I beg only a few minutes of your master’s time.”
The man received the card without reading it. “There is no master here, sir.”
“Your mistress, then—”
“There is no family in residence, sir. There has been no family in residence for some years. The estate is under stewardship.”
Stewardship. Lorenzo did not know the word, and then he knew it, and it dropped into his stomach like a stone into a well. An inheritance issue.
“Then I will speak with the steward. Gladly. Today. Now.”
“The stewardship is administered from London, sir.”
“London.” He heard his voice begin to climb and could no more stop it than stop the tide out there on the flats.
“Sir. I have ridden four days. I have crossed the sea for this house. I ask nothing, nothing, that any Christian could not answer standing in a doorway. The age of the old wing. Whether records survive of its building. Whether there was ever, three hundred years ago, an Italian.” His hands had escaped him, his nature taking command.
They were in the air, shaping the size of it, the enormity of what stood behind this whiskered gatekeeper in this doorway.
He seized them and clasped them behind his back, where they strained against each other.
“Forgive me. Forgive me. I ask it simply. Which office in London? A name. A street. Give me that, and I will trouble your doorstep no more.”
Perhaps it was the crack in his voice. Something in the whiskered face unbent, one degree.
“Messrs. Harding and Pole, sir. Lincoln’s Inn. Any inquiry regarding the estate must be directed to them. In writing.” A pause. “They are thorough gentlemen, sir. I am told they reply within the quarter.”
Within the quarter.
A quarter of a year. The di Bianchis had waited twelve hundred of them, and the English proposed to add one more, in writing, through thorough gentlemen.
The door closed. Softly. Respectfully. Completely.
Lorenzo stood on the steps and shook. His whole body hummed with it, the fury and the nearness and the helplessness all trying to leave him at once through his skin.
Angelo called it his tarantella, the lively folk dance of their people.
Nicholas had compared him, unkindly and accurately, to a bee sealed in a bottle.
He felt the bottle now. He wanted to hammer on that door until the wood splintered.
He wanted to walk the walls with his palms flat against the cut stone like a blind man reading.
He wanted, God forgive him, to find a window with a weak latch.
He did none of it. He went back down one step, and stopped, and turned, and laid his open hand against the wall of the house, against the cold gray stone beside the porch, the way he would touch a sacred relic. The stone did not warm. Stone never did. It kept to itself.
He would come back. If it took the lawyers, the letters, the whole grinding machinery of England, he would come back.
Then he climbed back into the saddle and rode down the avenue at a walk, spine straight, like a civilized man, while everything inside him howled.
The village inn was called The Rusty Anchor. It was low-beamed and smoke-dark and it smelled of cider and river mud, and the landlord, a round, kind, curious man named Puddy, gave Lorenzo the room over the kitchen, which was warm, and a supper of mutton stew, which was gray.
Lorenzo ate it at a corner table and built his campaign against Messrs. Harding and Pole of Lincoln’s Inn, stone by miserable stone, while he ate the flavorless English food that made him wish he was home eating real food.
He would ride for London at first light. Three days. He would go to their chambers in person, because a letter could sit in a basket for a quarter of a year, but Lorenzo di Bianchi in an outer office could not be filed.
He would be courteous. He would be patient. He winced even as he formed the word. He would try to be patient. He would offer money for their time. He had money. The partnership selling art with Sebastian Markham had seen to that.
For the first time in four generations, a di Bianchi could put gold behind the family madness.
And if courtesy and patience and gold all failed, he would sit in their office every day, in the same chair, until the thorough gentlemen understood that the best way to be rid of him was to allow him entry to Grey House.
It was a plan built entirely of waiting and painful patience, which was not material he had never learned to work in.
He went up early to the warm room and lay on a bed built for a smaller nation, with the satchel beneath his pillow, and listened to the river.
One could hear it even here. Under the settling of the inn, under the last voices in the taproom below, a vast, endless, sliding sound, going down to the sea as it had gone down every night for thousands of years.
Matteo had lain within reach of this sound. Somewhere. Some night. Thinking in a language not his own, holding a secret he had sworn to keep beyond death, listening to this same water.
Had he thought of Florence? Of the light on the workshop wall at evening, of his brothers quarreling over their work? Had he lain in the dark of this country and longed for home, as Lorenzo, who could go home whenever he chose, longed for it now?
He was close. Closer than any di Bianchi had been in three centuries. Tomorrow he would begin the long, dull siege of London, and however many quarters it consumed, he would not go away.
The river went on, and he slept, badly, with his hand on the satchel.
He woke before six and dressed in yesterday’s dust, brushing it as well as he could manage, and carried his saddlebags down the narrow stair, with the opening address to the solicitors already arranging itself in his head: respectful, brief, no gestures, and stopped, three steps from the bottom.
The taproom was full.
Full, at this hour.
A dozen villagers at least, crowded onto the settles with their heads together, and Puddy behind his counter in the middle of them like a hen over a large brood, and the noise of it, the eager, delighted, scandalized hum of a little place to which something has finally happened.
Lorenzo came down the last steps. Faces turned to him and away.
“Signor Puddy.” He set the saddlebags on the counter, and dread walked up his spine with cold feet, because in his experience, news that gathered crowds was never kind. “What has happened? Has someone died?”
“Died!” Puddy looked at him with round eyes. “Bless you, no, sir. T’other thing altogether.” He leaned across the counter, and lowered his voice in the manner of a man sharing a wonder. “There’s an owner come to Grey House.”
The room went strange around the edges, and Lorenzo thought the sheer relief might make him pass out.
“I beg your pardon,” Lorenzo said carefully, wanting to be sure he had understood.