Chapter 8 #2
The broken tower stood over her. The levels lay below, green and silver to the edge of sight, ditches flashing where the low sun found them, and she could see how it must have been, water everywhere, and this hill an island. A real island in a real sea, with a name out of the stories.
He arrived beside her, breathing like a man who had climbed a hill. His hat was in his hand because the wind had knocked it off. The bronze of his skin was flushed from the climb. The hard profile of his forehead, Roman nose, and jaw showed clean against the sky.
He stared at the view with an expression of wonder, and she knew him well enough to know he was imagining it painted on canvas.
Then he looked at her, with her ribbons cracking like pennants and her face scoured cold and her hem six inches deep in Somerset, and she watched him revise something.
Whatever he had thought, in a Gloucestershire library, that he was contracting for …
she watched him take it out, and examine it, and put a different version back in its place. He appeared pleased with the exchange.
“You will out-march me the length of Italy,” he said.
“You may follow at your leisure, signore. I will send word back about the views.”
“Crew,” he said, to the wind, “and not cargo,” and there was something underneath the laughing of it that spoke of growing admiration, and it made her heart ache in a delicious way.
A week ago she had been a bored and proper young lady.
Now she was an adventuress betrothed, standing on Glastonbury Tor.
It was the innkeeper’s wife who told Lucy about Avalon, over supper, with the candles lit and the mutton going round again. A broad, soft-spoken woman with flour to her elbows, who had the whole story ready to tell the way that vicars had psalms.
All this was water, she said. The Tor was an isle.
The Isle of Avalon, the isle of apples, and it was here they brought King Arthur in a black barge with three queens weeping, after the last battle.
And in the old king’s time … Henry, second of the name …
the monks dug in the abbey yard, between the two stone pyramids, sixteen feet down, and found a coffin cut from a whole oak. A man’s bones inside, and such bones!
The shin set against a tall monk’s leg and reaching past his knee.
And beside him lesser bones, a woman’s, with a coil of yellow hair that shone like the day it was plaited, and a young monk reached in to touch it and it went to dust in front of them all.
And under the coffin lid, a cross of lead, and letters in it: Here lies Arthur, king that was, king that shall be.
“King that shall be,” Lucy repeated. The words went down her spine like a cold finger, and she pressed the feeling to her breast and kept her face politely entertained, and inside her fascination grew.
They were digging up his grave here, she thought, and swearing he would come again. And in that same age, in Italy, an Order that took its name from the Eternal King had set a Florentine artist his life’s commission.
It was not a story. Stories did not leave receipts.
Somewhere it lay waiting in the dark, and every trail Uncle Henry had ever unwound for her on a drawing room carpet had ended the same way.
With the treasure coming up into the light while somebody wept with joy.
She saw no reason under heaven that hers should end differently.
Beside her, Lorenzo was asking the innkeeper’s wife what the abbey’s great church had been, before the fire, before the stripping. Had the ceilings been painted, did any record survive of the colors, was there gilt?
The woman blinked at him. She said no one had ever asked her that, sir, and she was sure she could not say, and offered him more mutton, which he took, with a defeated expression.
Lucy hid her smile in her wine. As taken with it all as she was, every hour of the day, she had chosen her husband-to-be well beyond her deserving.
Sunday overtook them on the road below a green ridge, in country where the ostlers said Camelot as easily as they said Tuesday.
The hill above Sparkford was hollow, one of them told her while the traces were buckled.
Arthur and all his knights were asleep inside it in their armor, and on Midsummer Eve, they rode out down the old causeway to water their horses at the spring, and a man who put his ear to the ground at the right hour would hear the silver bridles going.
His own granddad had heard them. Lucy gave him sixpence on the spot, to Bessy’s visible disbelief.
And somewhere in the middle of that morning, church bells came over the fields from a village off the road, thin and sweet with distance, and Lucy sat with the Malory closed under her folded hands and reckoned the hour.
At Little Severn, about now, the vicar was standing up in the cold light of the north aisle and reading her name to the pews. Hers, and a Florentine name he had needed three attempts to spell.
Half a county away, in a church she had visited once, she was being married by inches to the man riding with her in the carriage, who was at this moment frowning out the window at a hay barn as though it had said something to him about vaulting.
She was not in her pew to hear it done. She was flying south with legends in her ears, and the banns went on without her like a tide that had her name in it.
It ought to have felt scandalous. It felt like being read aloud into a story.
“Papist gallivanting on a Sabbath,” said Bessy, to the hamper, “and sixpence gone to a liar with straw in his hair.”
“The liar’s granddad heard silver bridles, Bessy.”
“His granddad heard an excess of cider, more like.”
Monday the world began to sink. That was the only way to describe it. Devon did not rise around them so much as the roads went down, the lanes cutting deeper and deeper between banks until the hedges stood higher than the carriage roof and the sky narrowed to a ribbon of white overhead.
Ferns crowded the banks, thick as fur. The earth showed red where the wheels had cut it.
Red as rust, red as no earth she had ever seen, as though the whole county had been left out in the rain since the Flood.
And the light came down green through the leaves, and for an hour at a time, they traveled in a tunnel with the birdsong very loud.
At a widening where the horses stood to breathe, she got down to walk the stiffness out, and went over a stile into a sloping field before Lorenzo’s hand had finished arriving to help her.
From the top of the field, between two shoulders of land …
nothing. More land. But a gull went over, high up, sculling on the wind, and she stood in the red field with her heart going oddly, because she could smell it now.
Salt. Salt, under the green. The sea coming to meet them before it would let itself be seen.
“Not far now, then,” she said, to nobody, and her voice was not as level as she expected. She had never been to Devon before. But, then, she had never been to Gloucester or Somerset either.
“Thank you, Uncle Henry,” she whispered. For without the estate he had willed her, she would not now be standing on this red soil, in a county that, until now, had been no more than a rumor to a young Lucy Carroway.
The lane tipped down for the last time in the late afternoon, turned twice around a shoulder of rock, and let them out of the green tunnel all at once, and there it was below them.