Chapter 4
Ahead of me is a country I have never seen and a commission I do not yet understand. I should be afraid. Instead I feel as if a door has opened that I did not know was there.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
Lucy had been mistress of Grey House for fourteen hours now. In that time, she had been lost twice, found a crocodile, and cried only once. She counted that a triumph.
The crying had ambushed her at half past seven that morning in the linen closet. The air there smelled sharp and musty, of lavender and seven years of shut doors.
The tears had risen hot and sudden behind her eyes, pressing until she had to let them out. They had lasted maybe ten breaths, shaking her shoulders, and then they had stopped. She had wiped her face on her sleeve and told herself it was done.
It had not been proper crying. It had been about nothing and everything all at once.
About Mama weeping on the front steps as the carriage was loaded, those great gulping sobs that felt like evidence in a trial.
As if Lucy were being sent to her ruin instead of driving to Gloucestershire in her father’s second-best carriage with Bessy and a hamper of cold chicken.
It was about Papa’s face at the window when they pulled away. He had not wept. He had only lifted his hand, and that had been worse. The memory of it still sat heavy in her chest, making her breath catch sometimes when she thought of it.
Three days of roads had jolted her bones until they ached.
Three days of inns that smelled of smoke and strangers and damp linen.
Bessy’s knitting needles had ticked beside her like a clock she could not escape.
Mama’s tears had left a damp spot on her collar, and Lucy still felt the ghost of it when she turned her head too fast.
And then yesterday evening, the trees had opened and the manor had been there.
She had forgotten how big it was. That was the truth. In her memory, it had been towers and treasure, sized for a ten-year-old’s summer. The house that rose out of the dusk was vast and dark and shuttered, not one window lit. Sad. Deserted.
For one long moment, her heart had hammered like a rabbit’s and her hands had gone cold on the squabs. What have I done, she had thought. She had not allowed it a second moment.
Then Bessy had said, “Well. It wants airing,” and the moment had passed. Lucy had climbed down, the ground firm under her boots after the jolting, and walked up the steps of her house.
Her house.
Fourteen hours later, she sat in the one room she had properly conquered.
She drank tea she had poured from her own pot.
The words still would not lie flat in her mind.
Her drawing room. Her dust sheets heaped in the corner like snowdrifts.
Her shutters shrieking open one by one through the distant rooms as Mr. Tredwell and the two village girls worked their way along.
Her crocodile somewhere in a room she did not know how to find again, grinning its stuffed grin at nobody.
She had given one instruction last night that had made Mr. Tredwell’s whiskers stand at attention. She was At Home to callers. From this morning. To anyone.
He had clearly thought her mad. Perhaps she was.
The house was still chaos. Half of the servants did not exist yet.
There was not a soul in the county who knew her name.
But she had spent seven years in her parents’ drawing room being Not At Home to everything, to conversation, to strangers, to the whole wide breathing world.
She had promised herself in the carriage somewhere past Cirencester that Grey House would keep an open door if it killed her. She wanted to meet people.
She had expected the vicar, eventually. Perhaps a squire’s wife with opinions about the garden.
She had not expected the card Mr. Tredwell carried in at a quarter past ten. He held it slightly away from his body, as though it might go off.
“A caller, miss.” His whiskers wrestled with something and lost. “A foreign gentleman.” He read the name aloud with only a minor stumble before offering the card to her on a silver salver.
Lucy took the card. Signor Lorenzo di Bianchi. The letters swooped and curled. She read it twice and felt curiosity sit up inside her like a dog hearing the word fetch.
“Show him in, Mr. Tredwell.”
“Miss.” Another pause. “Shall I remain—”
“Miss Smith is with me. Show him in.”
The door had opened, and the morning had stopped being ordinary.
Her first thought, absurdly, was that he had too much life in him for the room.
He was tall and lean and dark, in a coat that had been good and traveled hard. Black curls cropped close. Eyes so dark she could not find the bottom of them. All of that was agreeable enough.
But it was not what caught her. What caught her was the life that would not settle in him.
It was in his hands, which moved when he spoke as though the words alone could not carry everything.
It was in the way his eyes went round the room in one sweep, not the visitor’s polite glance but something hungrier, touching the paintings and the cornice and the window glass and weighing them, and then coming back to her.
It was how he stood, even standing still, like a kettle at the simmer, like a horse at a gate, like something bottled that the bottle was only just managing to hold.
Her pulse quickened at the sight of it. She knew that lively look.
She had grown up watching for it out the window on winter mornings.
Yet it was unfamiliar. When the gentleman’s gaze landed on her and stayed, a surprising warmth spread low in her belly.
He made her a speech. It was headlong and hopeless, all of it tumbling out.
He had prepared remarks for a gray-headed gentleman and could not deliver a word of them.
He knew how this appeared. He had tried to wait and failed.
By the end of it, Lucy was laughing before she had decided to.
The laugh, the one Mama despaired of, came up from her comfortable boots and bubbled warm through her chest, easing something tight there.
Over the teacups, he told her why.
An artist ancestor of Florence, three hundred years gone, who had crossed the sea for his life’s greatest work and never come home.
He walked into this country and this country closed over him like water.
The sentence went into her like a splinter.
She knew she would be taking it out and examining it for days.
A family that had never stopped asking. A trail followed through paintings and libraries and one cliff-top house in Cornwall, ending at …
My house.
One day! She had been here one day!
She watched him say it, this stranger with three centuries in his saddlebags, and she thought, with a lurch that was half joy and half terror, It has started. I inherited a house, and an adventure rode up to the door of it before the dust sheets were off.
Her breath came a little quicker at the thought, a flush rising warm under her skin.
The second pot of tea arrived. Lucy set herself to learn him.
It was not difficult. He was the least guarded person she had ever taken tea with.
Or no, that was not right. She corrected herself, watching him over the rim of her cup.
He was guarded in one place only, like a man with one locked room in an open house, and everywhere else he simply spilled.
She felt the pull of it. His openness made her want to lean closer, her body answering before her mind caught up.
“So your father is an art dealer?” she asked.
“Was. Is.” A gesture that took in the ambiguity.
“He is not well, these last years. The business is mine now, in the ways that matter. Though I am a poor dealer, signorina. My friend Sebastian is the dealer. Sebastian could sell a sketch to the man who drew it. I am the one who cannot let go of things. A dealer must let go of things. It is the whole profession. Together, we are brilliant.”
“And what are you, if not a dealer?”
“A restorer. By training and by love.” He turned his hands over, palms up, as if presenting evidence.
She saw the faint stains ground into the creases of his fingers, ochre and something darker, the kind of marks that no washing reached.
The sight of them made her fingers tingle with the sudden want to touch.
“You cannot get it out,” he remarked, following her eyes, unembarrassed.
“The pigment. My grandmother said God marks the trades He approves of. Fishermen with their hands, farmers with their necks, painters with their fingers.” He considered his own.
“Lawyers stay clean, she said. She wished me to notice this.”
Lucy laughed again, choosing not to mention her father’s profession. “And you restore paintings.”
“Paintings, panels, once a ceiling, which I do not recommend. The neck is never the same. You lie on the scaffold with your arm up, and the whole time the saints look down at you, waiting to see if you are worthy.” His eyes had gone bright with the memory of it.
“That is the thing no one tells you of restoration, signorina. You are alone with the work as no one has been alone with it since the man who made it. Under the dirt, under the old varnish gone brown like a fog, there is the day it was painted. The actual day. The light of it. You take away three hundred years an inch at a time, and one morning the fog lifts under your hand and the color comes up at you, the blue he ground that morning, the blue nobody living has seen, and you are standing in his workshop with him. Both of you at the same easel. Three centuries apart.”
He stopped. He looked faintly surprised at himself, as though the speech had run off without permission.
“Forgive me. My friends have a signal they make when I do this. Like so.” He made a little cutting motion at his own throat. “And I am obliged to stop.”