Chapter 10
The stone does not yield all at once. It argues. It must be persuaded, tool by tool, until the form that was always inside it begins to show itself.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The woman on the mantel had been watching him for three days, and on the third morning, Lorenzo finally saw her.
He was at breakfast in the taproom, alone with his coffee and his sketching-book, being harmless.
Lucy was already gone, down the quay to her nets and the fishwife.
The light came in low off the harbor and crossed the room and climbed the chimney-breast. It caught the little figure standing among the pewter tankards and the brass candlesticks.
Lorenzo glanced up, set down his cup, and did not pick it up again.
A woman looking out to sea. White stone, the height of his hand.
She stood with her weight settled on one hip and her skirts pushed against her legs by a wind the sculptor had somehow left in the stone.
One hand up to shade her eyes, the other holding her shawl at her throat.
Her whole body was one line of waiting, the long fall of it from her lifted elbow down through hip and knee to her bare heel, a curve Lorenzo knew as he knew his own signature, because he had stood in front of it in Florence with his father’s hand on his shoulder.
Contrapposto? The weight shifted to one leg so that the body sings. Men had died without learning what this carver knew about the contrapposto technique.
He crossed the room. He picked her up. She was heavier than she looked, and honest marble through and through. He turned her to the window light, and the light went into the stone the way it goes into skin, and the breath left him entirely.
The marble itself was wrong. Wrong for England.
Wrong for any quarry he could name. White, warm-toned, and figured, faintly veined all through with a close soft grain, like wood sawn and polished, nothing like Carrara, and nothing he had handled in his life until he entered a secret room in Grey House.
There was no English statuary marble worth the name.
Every sculptor in Europe knew it. England bought her white stone from Italy like everyone else.
And here stood a woman carved from a white stone he could not put a country to, on a taproom mantel, at the end of a Devon lane, and the undercutting of her wind-pressed skirts was so deep and so fearless that he tilted her and could see daylight behind the folds.
He had not seen it because he was not expecting to, not in a remote Devon village.
His hands had begun, quietly, to shake.
“Whose work is this?”
The innkeeper glanced over from his barrels.
“The Whites’,” he said. “Up Cliff Lane.” And went back to his barrels as though he had said nothing at all.
Lorenzo set the woman back among the tankards with the care he would have given a saint’s fingerbone, and went out into the morning with his coffee abandoned and his heart going like a carriage downhill.
He meant to go straight up Cliff Lane. He got as far as the churchyard.
The church stood above the harbor behind a low wall, gray and squat, with a tower built to shoulder gales. He was passing the gate at a pace unbecoming to a harmless lamb when the white tablet in the porch wall caught him and hauled him in by the eye.
A memorial. To the men of a boat called the Speedwell, taken by the sea, the names below, and above the names, cut in relief in that same, impossible wood-grained white, the sea itself. Waves.
A man could carve waves his whole life and make cabbage.
These rose and toppled with their bellies scooped hollow and their crests drilled to lace, undercut till they stood free of the ground like the real water’s own contempt for stillness, and in the trough of them, a boat heeled with its sail blown out of its bolt-ropes, and on the shore.
The shore was the masterstroke, six inches of stone.
A woman stood with her back to the beholder, watching it happen.
Nothing of her face. The whole of her grief in the set of her shoulders, in her fists gathered into her apron.
Bernini would have crossed himself in reverence. His father would have wept without shame.
Lorenzo stood in the porch of a fishermen’s church with the gulls going over and read the tablet with his fingertips, tool-stroke by tool-stroke, and the strokes talked to him the way handwriting talks.
The claw work laid at that angle. The drill used and then denied, its holes carved back until they vanished.
The last skin of the stone taken off with a rasp fine as breath and then, he could feel it, with sharkskin, the old way, the way his father did it, the way his father’s father had, the way Florence had done it when Michelangelo was alive to watch.
And the tablet was dated twelve years ago!
He went along the wall then, hunting, and the churchyard gave and gave and gave.
A headstone with a scallop shell so deeply thrown that it held real shadow in its throat.
A child’s grave with a sleeping lamb, the oldest trick in the mason’s book, ruined by ten thousand hacks across Christendom, and this lamb slept, truly slept.
And the dates ran back. Seventeen-ninety.
Seventeen-forty. Sixteen-eighty-one, a slate to a shipwright, the lettering alone worth a day’s study.
Different hands. He could tell the hands apart within minutes, an old one bold in the big forms, a later one finer in the faces.
Different hands across a century and a half, and every hand schooled in the same grammar, the same deep-throated undercut, the same horror of the timid surface; one long conversation in stone carried down the generations in a churchyard smelling of nettles and the sea.
A school. An artistic dynasty. Here, in Whitcombe!
He was running by the time he reached the quay, and he did not care who saw the harmless lamb run.
Lucy was at the trestle, sleeves pinned back, six mackerel halfway to her morning’s dozen, and Mrs. Hannaford saw him coming before she did and stopped the lesson with one lifted red hand, the way a coachman stops horses.
“Your man’s had a fright,” she observed.
“Not a fright.” He had no breath to spare and spent it anyway, doubled at the trestle-end.
“A miracle. Two miracles. Lucia, the mantel, the church, you must come, forgive me, signora, I must steal her, it cannot wait, I will—” He cast about and promised the first mad thing that offered itself.
“I will gut fish for you tomorrow in her place. A full day. I am told I am thorough.”
Mrs. Hannaford looked him over the way she looked over a doubtful catch.
“You’ll spoil that coat,” she said, which he had learned by now was Whitcombe for yes, and took back her knife, and Lucy came away with him up the lane with her cuffs pinned and her hands smelling of the sea and fish, laughing at him, demanding sense.
He gave her what sense he had, tumbling, both languages leaning on each other.
The woman on the mantel, the wind carved into her skirts, the Speedwell stone, the centuries of one school sleeping in a churchyard.
And then Cliff Lane turned around a whitewashed shoulder and sense was no longer required, because the window did the telling.
It was a low, broad window in a long cottage, built wide on purpose to catch this very light, and behind the glass ran a shelf, and on the shelf stood the little figures, white on dark wood, close enough to fog with his breath.
A queen. She could be nothing else, though her crown was the plainest circlet.
A woman seated with her hands quiet in her lap and her head turned aside, and everything the carver knew about sorrow was in the turn.
A queen listening to something read aloud that was breaking her heart, and keeping her state while it broke.
A knight kneeling, but not in triumph. He knelt as a man kneels all night, in vigil, his sword point-down before him with his brow against the crossguard arms and his whole young back one line of aching.
And at the shelf’s end, rising from a churn of that fearless undercut water, a woman’s arm, bare to the shoulder, breaking the surface with the drops still standing on the stone, and across the open palm, offered flat to whoever stood outside the glass, a blade.
Beside him, Lucy made a sound he had never heard from her. Both her hands had come up over her mouth.
“Lorenzo.” Her whisper had gone to almost nothing. “Lorenzo, look at them. Guinevere. The vigil. The Lady of the Lake. The sword. It’s all here. It’s been here all along!”
Her fingers closed on his arm, hard, through the sleeve. The pressure of them went straight through the cloth into his skin. “Breadcrumbs. The whole lane is breadcrumbs. It’s close. It’s here, somewhere near. I can feel it. We are close.”
“With my whole heart,” said Lorenzo, “yes.”
And he meant it, Dio, he meant it to the floor of himself, because there behind the glass was the proof past all proving.
Not the subjects, the hand. The line of that queen’s turned neck was the line of the mantel woman’s lifted arm, was the line of a fisherwoman’s shoulders on a memorial, was the line, he would have staked his eyes, of a Lady of the Lake painted on English oak three hundred years ago by Matteo di Bianchi, the first work of his brush on this island, the panel Lorenzo had found and cleaned with his own hands and slept beside like a sick child.