Chapter 12 #2
Soon little Thomas simply toppled, mid-cove, in the sudden way of small children, and was handed to Lorenzo as the nearest suitable furniture.
The child slept on him damply while they walked.
The solid weight pressed warm against Lorenzo’s chest and shoulder.
The boy’s breath came in rhythmic puffs against the side of his neck.
Ahead on the path, Lucy’s laugh kept ringing back down the wind to find him, low and delighted, and every time, it landed somewhere under his ribs and stayed.
She looked around for him at the turn above the white cove. Wind in her hair, her uncle on her arm, the sea a mile of light behind her. She looked for him, found him, and her whole face opened with joy.
The sight of it went through him like an arrow. Everything, thought Lorenzo, with the child’s breath warm on his neck. Everything a man wants. It is all here on one rock, within reach of my hand. Except for—
He cut the thought off, determined to enjoy this moment out of time.
They came to the quarry in the middle of the afternoon, and Lorenzo forgot his manners for the first time.
It sat in a fold of the island’s southern side, hidden from the sea, no bigger than a good church’s floor.
A white bowl cut down into the living stone, terraced, with a windlass and a stout sledge-road running down toward a loading cove.
Weather had softened the older cuts. The newer faces were clean, and where the light struck them, the grain showed through the white like brushwork under varnish.
He went down into it without waiting to be invited. He heard himself apologize, somewhere behind his own shoulder, and kept going.
The stone. He put both hands to the fresh face.
The stone was cool and faintly damp and alive as marble is alive.
It was the stone. The woman on the mantel, the toppling waves in the church porch, the queen with her breaking heart behind the workshop glass.
All of them had come out of this bowl, down that sledge-road, across that water, for three hundred years.
He laid his cheek against it. The cool of the rock sank into his skin. He was aware this was not English behavior. He heard Emily ask, with interest, whether Lorenzo was ill, and Lucy answer gravely that no, this was how he said how-do-you-do to stone.
The sound of her voice, mild and sure, settled in him so deep that he had to keep his face against the quarry wall an extra breath. Lucy understood him to his bones, much like his partner, Sebastian, who waited for him, in London with his bride, to finish his quest so they could return to Florence.
“He worked here.” He said it into the rock. Then he made himself stand back and say it properly, to Jim, who had come down the terraces after him. “Matteo. He stood in this bowl.”
“So the island’s always had it.” Jim’s voice had gone gentler since morning, and quieter, and something moved at the back of it now that Lorenzo could not read.
“The oldest cuts are from his time, they say. There, the low terrace, where the weather’s had two hundred years and more at the tool-marks.
He came across for his stone, worked a season here and a season ashore.
” A pause, with weight in it. “The chapel kept what he left. You will see.”
“There is more?” It came out of Lorenzo too fast, too bright. He heard it and could not suppress it. “Here? On the island? There is work here, his work?”
“There is a chapel,” said Jim. “Come evening, when the light is in its west window. It is best in the light.” And he turned to call the children off the windlass in a father’s voice that brooked no appeal, and would say no more on it.
Lorenzo spent the rest of the golden afternoon being pleasant company with a bell going in him like an alarm warning of fire.
The chapel stood in a green fold above the lagoon, turned side-on to the weather, so old it had half become geology.
One room, one door, one deep-set window facing west. Sheep had cropped its yard to velvet.
Jim lifted the latch and stood back. The evening entered ahead of them.
Lorenzo stepped out of the wind into gold.
The low sun came through the western glass in one solid bar and lay along the little nave. Everything the light touched, Matteo had made.
The altarpiece first. A panel not four feet high.
The Virgin standing on a shore, her cloak the deep sea-blue that only money bought, one hand lifted, and behind her, the sea itself rising in those fearless toppling waves.
His waves, the Speedwell waves, painted this time, green-black and terrible.
Riding the terror of them, tiny, unswamped, a fishing boat with its men looking to her.
Stella Maris. Star of the sea. The fishermen’s Virgin, made for men who drowned.
The blue alone had held three hundred years without as much as a hairline crack that Lorenzo could find at arm’s length.
He was at arm’s length in two strides, and then closer than that.
He was aware of the others only distantly.
Lucy somewhere behind him with her breath caught audibly in her throat.
The children hushed for once by the place itself.
Jim and Patricia inside the door. The chapel revealed its inventory piece by piece, and he ate it up like a starving man, both hands, out of order, greedy.
A font no higher than his hip, its bowl ringed with a relief of the flight into Egypt. The donkey’s patient head, the Child asleep, Joseph looking back down the road with a workman’s wariness.
A pair of marble angels under the roof-beam, and the angels had the faces of real children, one gap-toothed, individual as portraits, because of course they were portraits. Some Whitcombe children centuries dead were holding this roof up.
A stone St. Nicholas in a wall niche, with his crook and three gold balls, the gilding worn where generations of departing sailors had touched them.
And on the sill of the west window, catching the last of the bar of sun, a white gull the length of his hand.
Just a gull, folded, head turned back into its wing, done from life with such tenderness that it looked like it might take flight any second now.
Lorenzo went around the little room twice with his heart beating hard in his chest. Then the sketching-book came out and his manners went entirely.
He spanned the altarpiece with his open hand, muttering, and wrote figures. He drew the angels from below, fast, both of them, and the font relief in running detail around a strip of the page.
He climbed, with a word of apology to the house of God in general, onto the single bench to get his eye level with the St. Nicholas, and interrogated its underside, and got down, and stood in the middle of the nave turning slowly with the book against his chest, hunting the walls, the roof, the floor slabs, the door, for more.
“The panel’s dated?” This to Jim, too quick, a question fired rather than asked. “There will be a year. He dated the Lady panel. It will be low on the frame, left.” He found it himself before Jim could cross the room, dropped to his knee in the sun-bar, read it. Fifteen thirty-four.
“Thirty-four. Four years ashore at Whitcombe, and the blue is lapis, do you understand what I am telling you, on this rock, for fishermen, he ground lapis lazuli. Where did a Devon parish get … No. No, never mind the lapis.”
He was up again. The book shook faintly in his hands. He heard, distantly, that his voice had shed its company manners a mile back and was running now in its shirtsleeves.
“Jim. What else? The house. The cellars. The older workings at the quarry. Is there painting anywhere under lime? Have the walls ever been scraped? Is there carving in the sea caves? Is anything walled?”
“Lorenzo.” Lucy’s voice, soft, from somewhere near the font. Not a rebuke. A hand laid on a running man’s arm.
He stopped. The chapel came back around him. The hush, the gold, the family grouped inside the door, watching him with varying degrees of wonder, Emily open-mouthed with pure admiration for the spectacle, and Henry Carroway, or rather Jim Carver, with a sympathetic expression.
“This is what there is,” Jim said. Gently. “The chapel, and what’s in it. It’s the whole of it, son. There’s no more on the island.”
The bar of sun had climbed the east wall while they stood there, going up the stone as it does when the day is nearly spent.
Lorenzo stood in the middle of the loveliest little room in England with his book against his chest and felt the first cold thread go through the warm water of that whole golden day.