Chapter 13
Men follow the work the way hounds follow a scent. Every ledger, every shipment, every cipher is a footprint. The silence I swore is no longer sufficient. It must become absolute.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The island gave them a rinsed blue morning, and Uncle Henry took them up into it.
The path left the valley by the quarry track and then abandoned the track altogether, climbing through gorse that smelled of warm honey wherever the sun had got into it.
The turf under Lucy’s half-boots was cropped close and sprung like a mattress, starred all over with thrift flowers going from pink to paper. Gulls hung off the cliff edge on the wind, hardly working, riding the sea breezes.
Below and behind, the white gash of the quarry caught the light and threw it back so hard she had to squint, and beyond the quarry, the sea lay wrinkled and glittering all the way to Wales.
Her uncle walked ahead, reading the ground the way other men read a newspaper. Lorenzo walked behind.
That was the wrong order of march, and she felt the wrongness of it between her shoulder blades at every step.
Her betrothed’s hands were clasped behind his back. Those hands, which talked even when his mouth rested, which built cathedrals in the air over breakfast, were folded away like furled sails, and they had stayed that way since they left the chapel.
He answered when spoken to. He was as courteous as a prayer book.
And he had not reached for her once this morning, not her hand, not her elbow, not the light touch at her waist that he did in doorways without seeming to know he did it, and the absence of it sat on her skin like a draft from a window she could not find.
Where the path bent around a shoulder of rock, her uncle stopped.
The bend made a hollow out of the worst of the wind, floored with turf and furnished, by the quarrymen of some other century, with a bench of waste stone gone gray-gold with lichen.
From it the whole world stood open, sea and sky and the mainland no more than a blue suggestion, and nothing anywhere with ears but sheep and gulls.
“Sit,” her uncle said. “The pair of you. I promised you the truth, and it warrants sitting down.”
He did not sit himself. He took up a stand at the lip of the hollow, where a man could talk and keep an eye on the weather at the same time, and Lucy understood, watching him do it as if without knowing he did it, so habitual was the watching.
“You have the Italian half of the tale from your own side,” he said to Lorenzo. “The order. The commission. The sword, and the king coming back for it. What you do not know is the English end.”
The wind moved the gorse. Lucy folded her hands in her lap and made them stay there.
“Three hundred years back,” her uncle said, “your Regis Aeterni was a company of believers with a legend and no money, which is the natural condition of believers. Belief is cheap, Lucy-bird, but cathedrals are not. So they went where money goes, to the old families, and among the families that opened their purses was a family called de Grey.”
He said the name with a roughness in his voice.
“Quiet people. Old lands, older blood. They had married well for ten generations, or badly, depending how you look at it, because the marrying had laced their blood up into the blood of kings, both the Plantagenets and the Tudors. They never wanted a throne. There is no scrap of paper anywhere that says they so much as looked at one sideways. They wanted to farm, and pray, and pay for beautiful things, and when a brotherhood came to them talking of Arthur and a resting place fit for his sword, they paid for that too. Their silver is in the stone your Matteo cut, signore. Some of it. A good deal of it.”
Beside her, Lorenzo had gone from listening to listening with his whole body, the way he did, but his hands remained behind him and his face stayed shut, and that combination was so unlike him that Lucy’s chest ached watching it.
“And then,” her uncle said, “the order bred its wolf.”
A gull went over, screaming its cold laugh, and was gone down the wind.
“There were men inside the brotherhood, and around it, for whom a returned king was not a hope. It was ruin. They had built themselves up over lifetimes, offices, lands, seats at the right tables, and every stone of it was mortared with the Crown staying exactly the Crown it was. A claimant, any claimant, even the ghost of a legend of a claimant, was a crack in the fortress of their whole world. They call themselves the Dominus. And somewhere in old King Harry’s time, they stopped guarding the legend and started weeding the garden. ”
“Weeding?” Lucy repeated. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to, and it sounded ominous even to her.
“Their own word for it, or near enough, in such papers of theirs as have ever come to light. Pruning.” Her uncle’s jaw was set.
“A gardener’s word, bird. You prune a rose so that it flowers the way you want and nowhere else.
They pruned families. Claimants first, the loud ones, the foolish ones.
Then quieter. Then any line at all whose blood ran too near the throne, whether it knew its own pedigree or not.
A fever here. A duel there. A carriage gone off a bridge, a ship lost with all hands, a childless marriage where the physician was very attentive.
Give them a century, and they could make a bloodline look like nothing but misfortune. Mere bad luck, to the unwary observer.”
The morning was warm in the hollow, and Lucy was cold in the middle of it, cold in her stomach.
“The de Greys had the misfortune of blood,” her uncle said.
“That was all. Not a thing they did. A thing they were. They were killed for the marriages of their great-great-grandmothers, so that no de Grey in any age to come could ever stand up in a court and say the word throne. And they were not the only garden the Dominus worked, Lucy. There were other lines, but there are no other lines left now, to my knowledge.”
Nobody said anything. The sea worked at the rocks below, patient, forever.
“The de Greys learned in time. Not all of them, and not soon enough, but some. They scattered. They went to ground the way hunted things go to ground, and one branch of them did the cleverest thing I ever heard of. They shed the name like a wet coat and took another. Granger.” He glanced at Lucy.
“It means gray, Lucy-bird. Gray in plainer cloth. A farmer’s word, a granary word, a name nobody thinks about twice.
Their own dry little joke, and their shield, both in one.
And they hid it on a quarry island off a Devon combe behind the village that had been carrying the island’s stone and the island’s silences for centuries. ”
“Whitcombe,” said Lucy.
“Whitcombe has been protecting this family for centuries. Grandfather to father to son, without ever once writing a word of it down. You will not find a village on any coast of England slower to warm to strangers, and that slowness has kept people breathing. Every cold shoulder on that quay is a rampart, bird. Every incurious face is a locked door. They are not suspicious folk. They are garrison.”
He let that stand a moment.
“My wife is a Granger. De Grey, by the old spelling. She and her brother are the last of this part of the line, saving the little ones asleep down the valley this minute.”
Lucy sat with her hands folded on the cliff top and felt the whole of the past week rearrange itself around one sentence, quietly, hugely, like furniture being moved in the dark.
“And now,” her uncle said, “the part I need you to understand. The Dominus were never hunting the sword.”
Lorenzo’s head came up.
“I doubt there’s a man among them in this age who believes it exists, and if it lay on the table in front of them, they would not cross the room for it. Excalibur is nothing to them. What they want is the trail.”
He tipped his chin at Lorenzo, not unkindly.
“Your grandsire’s trail, signore. The stone, the ledgers, the ciphers, the whole beautiful thread of it.
It is worth exactly one thing to them, and it is that roads end at doors.
Follow the stone far enough, and you come to the place the family sheltered.
Three hundred years, they have kept half an eye on Matteo’s riddle.
Not to solve it. To see who solves it, and to follow him home.
That is what the trail is. Not a treasure map, bird.
A fuse. And they do not follow it only to remove claimants.
That has long passed as a possibility. They follow it to remove knowledge of the Dominus’s very existence.
Lucy did not look at Lorenzo. She could not have borne to, and she did not need to. She could feel him taut beside her.
“You arrived without a shadow,” her uncle went on, gentler.
“This village watches every stranger’s back-trail as a matter of course, and yours was watched from the day you took rooms at the inn.
There was nobody behind you on that road.
And in seven years, Lucy, you are the first soul to come off that shore and find me.
But the trail is a fuse, and you have both been walking along it with a lantern, and you had to hear it from me before anything else was said today. ”
The silence afterward had a texture to it.
Lorenzo broke it. His voice was low, and his accent had thickened the way it did when he was agitated.
“The cathedral?”
Her uncle waited.
“Signore, I must ask you the question I have been afraid of since we landed.” His hands came out from behind his back at last, and they did not describe spirals.
They opened, empty, and stayed open. “Did Matteo finish it? Does it exist at all? The journals say, where the stone was born, there is the door. We are where the stone was born. Is there a door?” A breath.
“Or was the whole of it a lantern? A false light, hung out to draw the wolves away from the fold. Did my family keep faith three hundred years with a decoy?”