Chapter 12
Ordinary marble will not do for the work.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The cleft was barely wider than the oars.
White stone rose on either side of the boat, close enough that Lorenzo could have put out a hand and touched it. The rock was cool as a cellar against the springtime air, and the sea ran green and quiet beneath them where a moment ago it had been running silver and loud.
He laid his hand flat against the passing rock as another man might touch a church door. The stone took the heat from his palm. The swell lifted them, set them down, lifted them again. Somewhere overhead, a gull called once and gave it up.
Then the walls opened, and the island let them in.
A lagoon lay inside the cliffs like a coin in a cupped hand. Still water, blue-green over pale sand, ringed all around with the white stone. A wooden landing stage stood out from a shingle beach. A path climbed away from it through turf cropped short as a lawn.
Above the path, tucked into the green shoulder of the island with its back to the weather, stood a house. Old, long, and low, built of gray stone with vines spreading across the edifice and smoke standing up from two of its chimneys.
Lorenzo had seen the palaces of Florence.
He had seen Venice emerge out of its own reflection.
Now he sat in the stern of a rowing boat with Lucy’s hand in his.
Her fingers were warm against his palm, the leather of her gloves soft, the pressure light and even.
He could feel the small pulse in her wrist where it rested against his own.
And he could not remember any arrival, anywhere, that had ever mattered this much.
Figures were already coming down the path.
A woman first, walking fast, a shawl caught around her shoulders, tall and brown-haired.
Behind her, a young man, fair, slighter.
And weaving between and around and ahead of both of them like a dog off its lead came a very little girl at a dead run, bonnetless, shrieking something joyful and continuous in which the only clear word was Papa.
Henry, or rather Jim, shipped his oars. His whole face had changed. The last of Jim Carver came off him like weather clearing, and the man who stood up in the boat and caught the flung rope was somebody Lorenzo had not yet met at all. Easy, open, ten years younger.
“That’s my Emily,” he said, needlessly, gladly, as the child arrived on the stage above them, dancing on her toes.
“Mind she doesn’t unbalance you into the water.
Trish.” This called up to the woman, who had stopped at the head of the stage with her hand pressed over her mouth, her eyes going from the boat to Lucy and back again, already understanding something, already pale.
“Trish, love. Come down. Come down and meet my brother’s girl. ”
Her name was Patricia Carver, and she held Lucy a long time.
Nobody explained anything, there on the stage, and nothing needed explaining.
The woman had taken one look and known. She held Lucy the way a wife holds a husband thought lost and returned from the sea, one hand cradling the back of her head, her eyes shut, saying a few words too low for anyone else’s hearing.
Lucy’s arms were tight around a stranger’s waist. Jim stood beside the two of them with his hat gone and his hazel eyes moist.
Lorenzo stood back and let the moment belong to them. He could still feel the place where Lucy’s hand had been in his, the warm print of her fingers against his skin. The air between them felt thinner for the loss of it.
The fair young man came down last and offered his hand with a polite reserve. Edward Granger. Patricia’s brother, Jim said. He left it there.
Edward shook Lorenzo’s hand and weighed him quietly, as reserved men do, and said he was welcome. The little girl, meanwhile, had planted herself directly in front of Lucy, fists on her hips, head tipped back, and was staring up with the frank ferocity of the very young.
“You have my papa’s nose,” Emily announced.
“I have your papa’s brother’s nose,” said Lucy, crouching to her level in one rustle of skirts. “Which is the same nose, one over. I am your cousin Lucy.”
Emily received this with narrowed eyes, weighed it, and found it acceptable. “There was a dead crab on the beach,” she confided, taking Lucy’s hand with the air of a queen conferring honors. “It is only a little bit horrible. Come and see.”
And that, as far as Lorenzo could ever afterward establish, was the whole of Lucy’s formal adoption into the household of Hwitmarbel.
It was concluded before they reached the house.
By the time they had climbed the path, Emily was wearing Lucy’s bonnet down her back and instructing her in the private names of individual gulls.
At the door of the long gray house, a boy of perhaps three stood holding the doorframe, thumb anchored in his mouth, regarding the invasion with enormous eyes.
“Thomas,” said Jim softly, and went down on his heels. “Come and meet your cousin.”
Thomas considered the matter from the safety of the doorframe. Then he removed his thumb, walked directly past his father, past Lucy, past his shrieking sister, and stopped in front of Lorenzo. He held up, in silent and absolute tribute, one wet fistful of dead crab.
“For me,” said Lorenzo, his voice suddenly thick. He got down on his heels and received it into his open hands with the care he had once given a Donatello bronze. The crab was cold and soft and faintly sticky against his palms.
“Grazie, signorino. It is the finest crab I have been given in England.” He turned it gravely to the light. “In my whole life, I think.”
Thomas beamed around his reinstated thumb, laid one starfish hand briefly on Lorenzo’s knee by way of a seal on the friendship, and toddled off after the bonnet.
Lorenzo stayed down a moment longer than the transaction required, holding a dead crab in the doorway of a hidden house, because his eyes had filled without notice and he needed a moment to arrange that sort of thing before standing up in company.
The damp weight of the crab sat cool in his hands.
Somewhere behind him, he could hear Lucy’s voice, low, answering Emily, and the sound of it settled under his ribs the way her laugh always did.
It was, plainly and completely, one of the best days of his life, and he knew it while it was happening, which was the rarest way to have one. There would be answers, and Lucy was here to share them.
They ate in the walled garden behind the house because Emily lobbied for it and Patricia was easy to persuade.
Bread still warm, a crock of butter, ham, the first radishes, a gooseberry fool of which Lucy took a second helping, then a third.
The talk stayed carefully in the shallows, and they were happy there.
Jim sat at the head of the rough table with his daughter on his knee stealing off his plate.
Every few minutes, his gaze crossed to Lucy and caught and held, as if to make sure of her again.
Lorenzo watched a man reassembling something inside himself piece by piece over cold ham.
Lucy sat across from him. Once, when she reached for the bread, her sleeve brushed the back of his hand.
The light contact went through him like a struck string.
He kept his eyes on his plate and felt the place where her sleeve had touched for a long time after, thinking what it would be like to have her in Florence at a family table of their own.
Afterward, Jim showed them their island.
It did not take long, and Lorenzo would not have shortened a minute of it.
The green crown first, up a sheep path to the highest turf, where the wind came clean over the top and the mainland lay along the north like a low cloud and the sea went out forever on every other side.
Then the coves, working sunward around the island’s skirt.
A black-pebbled one where seals hauled out in autumn, Edward said, finding his voice at last on the subject of seals.
A white-sanded one, absurd, Mediterranean, where the children bathed on the hottest days and where Emily required everyone to stop while she looked for a certain stone she had left in April.
The stone was recovered. The expedition went on.
Lucy walked ahead with her uncle most of the way, her arm through his, her head sometimes on his shoulder, the two of them talking and talking. Seven years going back and forth between them in pieces, out of anyone’s hearing, as they should.
Lorenzo dropped back and let them have their reunion. He found himself flanked instead. Patricia on one side with Thomas riding her hip, Edward on the other, Emily orbiting them like a comet. And they folded him in. There was no other word for it.
Patricia asked after Florence, and then after his father, and listened to the answers with her whole attention.
Edward, discovering that Lorenzo could name the seabirds’ Italian cousins, unbent by degrees into a naturalist. Emily demanded to know if he could draw a horse, was shown that he could, and amended the commission on the spot to a horse with a fish’s tail, which was duly executed against a rock while the whole party waited and Thomas breathed reverently on the paper.
Lorenzo had spent his grown years in libraries and other men’s cellars, excellent company for the dead. It had been a long time since he had made time for an afternoon with family.