Chapter 4 #3
“The house, the front of it, the wings, the room we sat in, that is all of the last century. Georgian, you say. Symmetry, sash windows, everything in its pairs, very handsome, very rational.” He said rational the way other men said regrettable.
“But this room, no. This room is the original building. The old manor. Look.”
He took her by the sight-line rather than the arm, one hand sketching the window bay.
“Stone mullions. The wall an arm’s-length thick, you see how deep the bay sits? And this.”
Back to the black shelving, the carved vines.
“This joinery is Tudor. The Belafonte family, the old owners, whoever they were, they were faithful to something, signorina. For three hundred years, while the fashions changed around them, they kept the core of the house and they built the new fronts around it. Like a new frame put around an old painting.”
His voice had dropped.
“Nobody does that for three hundred years by accident. You keep an old thing so carefully for so long for one reason only. Because you value it.”
The back of Lucy’s neck prickled, slow and cold and delicious. The sensation ran down her spine like fingers, making her breath catch.
“And what do they value?” she asked.
He did not answer.
He had stopped moving. His finger had stopped on the carving, on one worked medallion in among the vines, a round boss no bigger than a crown-piece, and Lucy saw his breath change, saw his shoulders lift and fill, and then he was pulling books from the shelf below it, quick and careful, a run of naval almanacs that hit the carpet in soft thumps, “Forgive me, forgive me,” said absently to the books themselves.
His arm went into the gap to the shoulder, and his eyes went far away in the manner of a man working by his fingertips.
Then his whole face changed, and he said something in Italian, low and reverent, that Lucy did not understand and understood completely.
“Signorina,” he said. “You may wish to stand back one step.”
She did not stand back one step. She came forward two.
He pressed on a sigil, a circle intersected by a sword, and something inside the wall went clunk, a deep, oiled, well-kept sound, a sound that had been maintained, and that maintenance itself made the hair rise on her arms. The whole case, books and blackened carving and all, swung slowly out of the wall toward them and let out the dark.
A room. Behind her library, there was a room.
Narrow, windowless, breathing out cold air that smelled of dust and paper and candle-wax and something older beneath, something mineral, like the inside of a church.
The light from the library windows reached in a little way and gave up.
But it reached far enough. A desk. A rug.
Shelves stacked with journals, dozens of them, spines out, and with papers, and with rolled drawings sheaved together like kindling.
Drawings pinned flat to the walls above, pale rectangles crowded edge to edge.
On the desk and along a low shelf, catching what light there was and giving it softly back, were little marble figures, six, seven, eight of them, white as teeth in the dark.
Lucy heard herself gasp. She heard it from a distance, along with the thunder of her own heart beating so hard it shook her ribs. The cold air touched her face and made her skin prickle all over; a drop in her stomach felt like standing at the edge of something she could not see the bottom of.
Beside her, the signor stood in the doorway of the hidden room with his hand still on the shelf-edge, breathing as though he had run a mile, saying nothing at all, and she understood that his silence was the same thing as her gasp, that they had arrived at the same cliff from opposite ends of the earth.
And standing there on the lip of the dark, Lucy Carroway took the measure of what was happening to her.
I am excited.
Truly excited, the real thing, that she had not felt since she was fourteen years old, before word came of a storm off the Cornish coast.
Seven years of waiting rooms and needlework and being told what a young lady could not do, seven years of holding a hope she could not say aloud to anyone but Bessy, and all that time the excitement had been down somewhere in the dark of her, banked like a fire, and she had begun to fear it had gone out.
It had not. It was up and roaring. She was standing at the edge of an abyss, she could feel the drop of it in the soles of her feet, and every particle of her wanted to step forward off the edge, because down there in the dark was the thing Uncle Henry had always promised her the world contained.
The adventure. The real one. Hers.
And there was one thing more, arriving on the heels of the rest, unbidden and unpardonable, and she was honest enough to look straight at it.
She was very much afraid that she had fallen, a little, only a little, a manageable amount, surely, in love with the man beside her.
It was absurd. It was worse than absurd.
It was the sort of thing Mama’s novels did in the second chapter, and Lucy had always despised them for it.
She had known him only hours. But there it was, sitting in her chest, plain as the marble in the dark.
A handsome stranger with three centuries in his pocket and pigment ground into his hands had walked into her drawing room, uncorked, and opened a door in her own wall that she had not known was there.
It was not easy, being a young woman who wanted the world.
Every road she had ever tried to take had a gate across it and a relation standing at the gate.
But the wife of a Florentine art historian, a man whose whole life was ships and cities and workshops and locked rooms, the wife of such a man would not be stopped at gates.
The wife of such a man could go anywhere.
Lucy Carroway, she told herself severely, you are measuring the gentleman for a wedding coat because he found you a cupboard.
It was not a cupboard, though. And she knew it, and he knew it, and neither of them had said a word for a full half minute.
Her chest tightened with a warm ache at the thought, a flush rising to her cheeks and making her skin hot, a pull in her body toward him that made her want to step closer even now.
“Signore,” she said at last, and her voice came out low and not quite level and she did not care. “I believe you now owe me a very great number of explanations.”
“Yes,” he said. Just that. His eyes had not left the dark room.
“I intend to collect every one of them.”
“Yes,” he said again.
“Good.” Lucy picked up her skirts and stepped past him, over the threshold, into the hidden room first.