Chapter 6 #3
And Lorenzo understood, in one stride between the porch and the gate, that the news was already out.
He could see it travel. It moved along the wall like wind over barley, a bending of heads, one to the next, and he caught the words in fragments as they passed.
Banns, the Eye-talian, Miss Carroway, up at the great house, this Sunday, Mrs. Sandys had it from the housekeeper.
A stout woman at the gate looked from Lorenzo to Lucy and back to Lorenzo and pressed both hands to her bosom with an expression of such rapturous scandal that Lorenzo very nearly bowed to her out of professional respect.
One did not often see an emotion so purely rendered.
Painters attempted that face for years and got mannerism.
“Give you joy, sir!” burst out of Puddy, who could contain himself no longer. “Give you joy, miss! That is, begging pardon, none of my—” And then, abandoning the retreat halfway through, said with his whole heart, “The Rusty Anchor’ll stand a barrel the day of it, and that’s said before witnesses!”
The wall cheered. It was a modest cheer, gruff and half-embarrassed and instantly regretted by several participants, but it was a cheer, and the two boys from the quay ran off down the street with the news at a speed suggesting outlying farms would have it by milking.
Lucy laughed, the low, ungoverned laugh, out in the open street, and they liked her instantly and forever. Lorenzo watched it happen. She took his arm to walk to the carriage, and said something to the stout woman in passing that made the stout woman bloom like a peony.
And Lorenzo, pacing beside her through the gauntlet of delighted eyes, felt the afternoon quietly change its weight in his hands.
Because this was serious now.
It came to him not as alarm but as a cold clarity, like ice water. Until this hour, the extraordinary bargain in the library had lived in a world of two, three, counting Bessy Smith, whose silence was a vault.
Words spoken behind a shut door could, at terrible need, have been unspoken. A door shut could have stayed shut. The lady could have come to her senses in a day or a week, and no one the wiser, and no harm done that did not fall entirely on him, where harm belonged.
But the banns were in the book. The village had the news at a full gallop. By Sunday, it would be called from the chancel steps before God and the parish, and by Monday, it would be in Gloucester, and within the fortnight, it would be in a letter on a barrister’s desk at the King’s Bench.
Her name, a young woman alone, one day in the county, already the raree-show of the district, was now lashed to his in every mouth from here to the river, and there was no gentle unwinding, no version of events in which Lorenzo di Bianchi could walk away from this and leave anything standing behind him but a ruin with her name on it.
He must marry her. Not as an adventure, not as a bargain, not as terms sealed inside the parish book.
As a plain matter of honor, from this hour, whatever came, whatever lay behind the secret door or did not, whether the trail ran to glory or to nothing, he must see it through to the church door and beyond it, all the way, for the whole length of two lives.
He examined the obligation from every side, standing there handing her into her father’s carriage while the village watched.
And found, Dio, for the second time today the search had failed him, that he could not locate the hardship in this either.
She settled her skirts. The coachman gathered his reins with the face of a man now composing a much longer letter home.
Bessy took the rear seat and directed at the crowd one final look under which the crowd tidied itself.
And Lorenzo swung up beside his betrothed.
His betrothed. The word still fit him like another man’s coat, and yet.
He thought of them all, his casualties, his fallen.
Marco, who had crossed Europe a heartbroken tutor and now debated wallpaper.
Angelo, who had lectured Lorenzo on the banns and the residence with shining eyes not weeks ago, word for word the same machinery, and Lorenzo had listened with sympathy and superiority in equal parts, thinking, Poor Angelo, netted at last.
Sebastian. Gabriel. Nicholas, who had gone to Oxford a sardonic invalid and come back married to a woman who corrected him publicly. Corrected everyone publicly, truth be told.
One after another after another, down the ladder into the sea, and Lorenzo di Bianchi standing safe at the rail the whole while, inoculated, immune, too fanatical about his dead ancestor to catch anything from the living.
One morning. It had taken this village one morning.
And here was the truly disgraceful thing, the thing he would confess to Sebastian someday and to no one sooner … the arrangement pleased him.
Strange as it was, backward, headlong, sealed in a library against a hidden door by a woman he had known mere hours, it pleased him entirely.
She sat beside him, bright as newly applied gilding, already planning the letter that would detonate in her mother’s morning room.
And when he had kissed her, when she had made him kiss her, in effect, having made him do everything else, the memory of it rose warm through him now, unbidden and thoroughly enjoyed.
Her mouth had been soft and sure under his, answering without hesitation. He had felt the seam of her lips part for him, the slow, deliberate stroke of his tongue against hers, the faint taste of honey and tea still lingering from the pot they had shared.
She had fitted against him in a manner that had left heat low in his body ever since, her form soft and decidedly, distractingly womanly for so small and martial a person.
The press of her breasts against his chest, the way her fingers had curled into his coat, the helpless sound she had made against his mouth, all of it returned to him in the sway of the carriage and made his blood thicken with private, unrepentant pleasure.
There was a month of Sundays between now and the chancel steps, and Lorenzo suspected the month would improve his praying considerably.
The carriage turned up the lane. Behind them, the village boiled joyfully. Ahead, above its trees, the chimneys of Grey House stood against the sky, keeping what they kept.
Lucy followed his gaze to them.
“Tomorrow morning,” she said, answering the question he had been too proud to ask since the library.
“At first light, if you like. We open the room, and everything in it, and we read every page together.” Her hand settled on his sleeve, light and sure and entirely without permission, exactly as she did all things.
The warmth of her fingers soaked through the cloth into his skin.
“You have waited three hundred years, signore. You will certainly survive until breakfast.”
Lorenzo sighed in relief.