Chapter 10 #4
“A man keeps an oath for seventeen years and then for forty more,” she said.
“He goes to his grave with his mouth shut, in a village where he told everyone everything, his weather, his wife, his gulls. Lorenzo, silence like that is not absence. It’s masonry.
Men do not build a wall that strong around an empty room.
People guard nothing so carefully as the thing that matters most. Matteo kept that silence the way your family kept its grief, three hundred years, handed down, tended.
That is not how a man behaves when his great work has come to nothing.
That is how a man behaves when his great work was finished, and had to be protected, and was worth protecting until death and past it. ”
Her chin came up. Her hands had closed in his coat-front. The press of her fingers against his chest made his pulse jump and his loins thrum.
“The years are not lost. They are kept. Somewhere between his oath and this shore, there is a locked room with seventeen years in it, and finding locked rooms, signore, is a thing our partnership has already shown some talent for. He would not speak because it mattered. It is the best news we have had since the receipts. I would stake Grey House on it.”
Lorenzo looked down at this woman gripping his lapels on a dark quay at the end of England, one-and-twenty years old, fish-scale still glinting at one pinned cuff, arguing evidence like a barrister, burning like a signal-fire, as hungry for the trail as he had ever been in the worst fevers of his life and twice as clear-headed in the hunger, and the amazement went through him again, the amazement that never wore out, that a bargain struck against a library shelf had put her into his hands.
As ardent as he. More. And she steered where he only burned.
The soft weight of her body so close, the scent of her rising to him, the way her lips parted on the last words, all of it settled low and hot in his belly.
“Madonna santa,” he said, unevenly. “I meant to comfort you tonight, somewhere in my plans. You were fond of him too, by supper’s end. I watched it happen, ah, no, and now you are laughing at me—”
“I am not laughing at you.” She was laughing at him.
“I am admiring you. There’s a distinction.
You looked at Matthew White’s face today as though the sun had come up in the lane, and never once, never once, Lorenzo, I was watching, did you ask them for the thing you wanted most in the world.
Just days ago, you offered Tucker double for a sail.
The tea is working on you, signore. Mrs. Hannaford will make an Englishman of you yet. ”
“God forbid,” said Lorenzo, with his whole chest, and kissed her.
He had meant it for punctuation. It declined the designation. The wind was cold and she was warm, and her hands came up from his lapels around his neck, and the dark and the tide-sound closed around them both.
Her mouth was soft and certain under his, tasting faintly of the cider from supper. He felt the press of her body against the hard length of his, the way her breasts flattened against his chest, the heat of her skin through the thin fabric of her gown.
His blood thickened and raced. A length of time passed that was made of breath and the deliberate slide of his tongue against hers.
The hard edge of her jaw under his thumb.
The soft give of her when he pulled her tighter.
The small helpless sound she made against his mouth that went straight down his spine and settled hot and low between his legs.
It was some time, the harbor clock alone knew how much and struck it, tactlessly, before he gathered the wrists of this ardent creature and drew them down and held them folded between the two of them like something confiscated, both of them breathing as though the quay were steep.
“Up,” he said, against her hair, not trusting the rest of his voice. The scent of her hair, salt and ruined pins and the clean warm smell of her skin, filled his head. “To your room, Lucia. Alone, before I forget that I am the most restrained man in England.”
He turned her by the shoulders, aimed her at the inn door lantern, and did not let go until she was three steps launched, and she went up the quay laughing, backward half the way, holding her blown hair off her face to keep him in view, and the lantern took her in.
Lorenzo stood a while in the dark, putting himself out like a man treading a grass fire. His body still ached with the want of her. The taste of her mouth lingered. The heat she had left in his blood refused to cool.
Behind him lay the island, black on black, holding its seventeen locked years or their key or nothing at all.
Ahead and above, up the sleeping hill, the warm square of the Whites’ window still burned, where his own eyes had looked at him across a supper table out of four living faces, Lawrence and his sons, and where a journal lay open tonight beside a worn-out rasp.
All his life, he had stood on metaphorical shores like this one and stared at the dark shape on the water.
He looked at the lit window, and then he went in, and asked the innkeeper’s sleepy girl for paper and a fresh candle, and sat down at the little parlor table to a letter he had been three hundred years owed the writing of.
Babbo. Non è morto come credevamo. He lived, Babbo. He lived.