Chapter 12 #3
Because it was glorious. Every piece of it.
Matteo’s hand at full power. The waves alone were worth the journey from Florence; the gull was worth a wall in the Uffizi.
And it was little. A panel four feet high.
A font. Two angels, a niche saint, a bird on a sill.
Devotions for a parish of fishermen, made with lapis and genius and love, by a man who had lived in secret for seventeen years to execute a commission he swore to keep beyond death.
If this room was the whole of the keeping, then the commission had come to a font and three figures and a gull, and the years had gone nowhere, and the trail he had followed across Europe ran to its end in a sheep-cropped chapel where he stood.
He did not believe it. He examined his disbelief, standing there in the failing light, and found it was not stubbornness and was not grief.
It was the eye. The same eye that had stopped him dead at a taproom mantel.
A man did not grind lapis for fishermen and stop.
A man did not build waves like those to four feet and never once to forty.
The hand in this room was not a hand concluding.
It was a hand keeping true. Practicing, tending itself, the way a rider walks a horse the morning before a race.
For what, then? Where?
“Lorenzo.” Lucy had come to him across the nave.
The last of the sun was in her hair. Her eyes were shining wet and enormous.
Whatever was in his face made her take his hand in both of hers and hold it hard.
Her palms were warm. The press of her fingers closed around his, and the contact went straight up his arm and into his chest. He felt the small bones of her hands against his, the living heat of her skin, the way she held on as if she meant to keep him from slipping under.
“It is beautiful,” she said. “It is all so beautiful.”
“It is.” His voice came out low and not quite level.
Over her head, his gaze went to Jim, and found Jim already watching him.
The two men stared at each other down the length of the little gold room.
The one asking the question with his whole face, because his mouth could not be trusted with it politely.
The other hearing it, plainly hearing it, and not answering.
Lucy’s hands stayed closed around his. He could feel her pulse against his knuckles.
The nearness of her body, the faint scent of her hair and the sea and the day’s sun on her skin, filled the minute space between them.
But Lorenzo, for the first time since meeting her, had not the patience for any of it.
His frustration was moving in, his vibration beginning, the bee in the bottle.
“Supper,” announced Jim at last, to the room, to the children, to the evening. His hand dropped to Emily’s head. His eyes never left Lorenzo. “You will hear the rest, but not tonight.”
He held the door. The family went out ahead into the long evening light, Emily towing Lucy, Thomas riding Edward’s shoulders, Patricia’s low laugh carrying back up the path. Everything warm, everything golden, everything within reach.
Lorenzo went out last. On the sill, the little gull sat with its head in its wing, keeping whatever it kept. The cold thread pulled thin and taut beneath the whole shining day, and could not quell the turmoil in his soul.
* * *
The evening tide brought Bessy, four band-boxes, and a reckoning.
Lucy was on the landing stage when the boat came through the cleft, Matthew White at the oars and Bessy bolt upright in the stern with the luggage disposed around her like a fortification, and the look on her face announcing to the island in general that she had Views about hidden lagoons and intended to air them.
Then she came up the stage steps, and Uncle Henry stepped forward to hand her ashore, and Bessy looked full into the bearded face of Jim Carver.
Lucy watched forty years of service go to war with itself in the space of one breath.
Bessy did not gasp. Bessy did not stagger. Bessy stood on the wooden stage with her band-box in her arms and went very slowly the color of cold ash, and her mouth worked once, and what came out of it, at last, in a voice scraped down to the wood, was:
“Master Henry.”
“Hello, Bessy.”
“I ironed your shrouds.” It came out flat and terrible.
“Black crepe. A year of it. The mistress cried into the pressing till I couldn’t get the marks from the linen.
” The band-box was trembling now, very slightly, in her grip.
“And here you stand in a heathen beard, brown as a kipper, handing me out of boats.”
“Yes,” said Uncle Henry.
“Well,” said Bessy. And her chin went sideways, once, as it did over spoiled milk and broken engagements and every other outrage the world had yet offered her, and then, with tremendous dignity, she set down the band-box on the stage, took a single step forward, and boxed his ear.
The sound cracked across the lagoon.
“That,” said Bessy, “is for the black crepe.”
She boxed the other ear.
“And that is for the year.”
Then she burst into tears, threw her arms around him, and sobbed into the heathen beard while the children stared and Lucy pressed both hands over her mouth and Matthew White averted his gaze carefully out to sea.