Chapter 7 #4
Lucy’s back met the chart cabinet, and she was glad of it, glad of something solid taking her weight, because her knees had resigned without notice.
The chart crackled somewhere. Her fingers were in his dark hair, which she had no memory of authorizing. He tasted of the orgeat and of triumph, and he was murmuring between one kiss and the next, her name, and Italian, and her name inside the Italian.
The heat that had been banked low in her all evening roared up through her like a chimney catching.
She felt the firm press of his mouth, the slow deliberate stroke of his tongue against hers, the thorough, unhurried claiming of it.
She heard herself make a sound she would deny to her grave, and pressed closer, her body answering without permission, soft and eager against the hard length of his.
He tore himself back.
Bodily. A full step, then another, his hands leaving her and closing into fists at his sides as though they could not otherwise be trusted, and he stood there wrecked in the lamplight, chest heaving, curls unruly, eyes blazing, looking at her the way he had looked at the marble hand.
“No,” he said, to himself, she understood. The word was aimed entirely inward. “No. Not until we are wed.”
And Lucy, sagging against the captain’s chart cabinet with her heart going like the Grand Army and her lips feeling twice their size, watched him stand there fighting himself for her sake, and thought, giddily, gloriously, Honor!
Pure honor, and it looked wonderful on him; it looked better than the shirtsleeves. Somewhere at the back of her inner assembly, the junior member in the dark stood up and began, quietly, to applaud, and the chair called for order, and did not entirely receive it.
“Well,” she managed. Her voice had gone to smoke. She cleared it and tried again. “Well. Then we had better make short work of the month.”
A laugh broke out of him, helpless, boyish, wholly undone, and the last of the tension went out of the room like a tide turning.
“Whitcombe,” he said, dragging both hands through his hair, visibly reassembling himself into a rational creature.
“We must go. As soon as it can be arranged. The banns run whether we are here or not. Mr. Sandys has his book. But Lucy, the travel.” And here the rational creature completed itself, and turned to her with a new and rather touching gravity.
“I must ask it. Your father’s carriage—”
“Went home earlier, with my letters.” She grimaced. “Papa’s coachman was clearly composing his report the entire drive to the vicarage. I thought it kinder to let him deliver it in person and get it over.”
“Then we have no—”
“There is the captain’s coach,” said Bessy, from the doorway.
They both turned. She stood there with her candle and her workbag, having followed the lamps at her own pace, and having heard, her face announced, as much as she intended to admit to.
“The late Captain Belafonte’s traveling coach,” she said.
“In the far coach house, under sheets. I found it when I was looking for the mangle to do the laundry. Great old thing, built like a ship of the line, but Mr. Tredwell says the wheels are sound, and there’s harness, and the smith in the village can look it over in a day.
It wants only horses, and horses can be hired. ”
“Bessy,” said Lucy, “you are a pearl beyond price.”
“I am a woman who finds things because she looks,” said Bessy. “Somebody in this house has to do it sober.”
But Lorenzo had come forward, and his gravity had not lifted.
“Lucy. Hear me. I did not think of it, and I am ashamed. Today at the church, I understood. Your name is now tied to mine in every mouth in this county, and if you travel across two counties in a coach with a foreign man you are not yet married to, betrothed or no.” His hand cut the air.
“I know what this country does to women. I will not be the ruin of you before I am even the husband of you. Tell me how it can be done properly, or we wait out the month and go as man and wife, and Matteo can keep another thirty days. He has kept three hundred years. I can …” A pause, a visible suffering written on his face. “I can possibly endure it.”
Lucy looked at him, at this vibrating, honorable, three-centuries-haunted man offering to sit still for a month, for her, when sitting still was the one thing God had built him without, and felt something in her chest that was absolutely not in the terms of the bargain, and elected not to examine it in company.
“You are very dear,” she said, “and it will not be necessary. We are betrothed, publicly, legally, entered in the book, called from the chancel steps on Sunday. A betrothed couple may travel together perfectly respectably, provided the lady is properly accompanied.” She turned. “Bessy. How do you feel about Devon?”
Bessy looked at the pair of them, and at the chart on the table with the little island standing in its engraved sea, and gathered her workbag with the air of a woman who had packed for worse on shorter notice.
“I’ll want the forward-facing seat,” she said, “and no singing before ten. I’ll start on the trunks in the morning.”