Chapter 13 #3
“Do you not miss it?”
He turned his head.
“The world,” she said. “The whole world, Uncle. I grew up on your horizons. The Cape. The rivers. Canton and the monkey and the silk. You brought the wide world into Papa’s front hall twice a year, and everything was bigger while you stood in it.
And now, one green mile of rock. Seven years.
For a man made of adventure.” Her voice wobbled and she let it. “Do you not miss it?”
Her uncle did not look at the sea.
He turned his gaze down the valley. Lucy followed his eyes.
Far below, in the green fold of the island, the manor’s chimneys stood up out of their trees with a feather of smoke on one, and the wash hung on a line white as gulls, and the walled garden lay like a green pocket-handkerchief dropped on the land, and thin on the wind, once, came a child’s shout, there and gone.
“I chased the horizon nearly two decades,” he said.
“Shall I tell you what is at the horizon, bird? Another horizon. I never caught the thing I was chasing, because it was never out there to be caught. Adventure was never the destination. I thought it was a place, and I sailed for it my whole life, and the whole time it was that.”
His chin tipped at the valley, at the smoke, at the wash on the line.
“A wife. Children. Work my hands are proud of, and people who would hide me with their lives. The greatest adventure I ever found in this world was a quick sail off a coast I had charted twice and never once truly seen it. Everything before this was practice for the life I live now.”
The words went into Lucy like a bell going into a quiet evening.
And then it began to ring.
And in the ringing, without meaning to, without her own leave, she looked out along the cliff to where a dark upright figure stood against all that shining air with his back to her and his face to the sea, and the whole of her went out to him at once, entire, like iron to a lodestone, and she knew.
I love him.
Not the passage. Not the venture, not the going, not the brightness that arrived into rooms with him.
The man. The man who talked with his hands and pursued his family’s legacy; the man standing out there this minute with his dreams in ruins around his boots, too far off to touch.
One does not fall in love with a mast, she had ruled once, in solemn assembly, and the motion had carried, and the assembly, it now appeared, had been packed to the rafters with liars. The adventure was wherever Lorenzo was.
Her breath went thin. The bell rang on.
Because love had never been in the contract.
She had drawn the terms herself, drawn them proudly, in good ink, with her chin up.
Passage, not love. Crew, not cargo. The quest first, always, and he had told her so bluntly, kindly, at the very outset, the worst truth he had ever told anyone, and she had heard it and bid on it; she had bid on that exact clause.
And now she sat on a cliff, wanting, hugely, disgracefully, the one thing she had sworn she was not buying, and wanting it from the one man in England who had been honest enough to tell her it was not his to give. She wished to be first, not second to a quest.
And this morning of all mornings was when she realized it. This morning, when the quest itself lay bleeding under him.
Her uncle had followed her gaze. He watched the far figure a moment, and then look away, back at the sea, and said nothing at all, nothing whatsoever, which was its own way of saying he had seen everything, and Lucy loved him for the silence and could have pushed him off the cliff for it in the same heartbeat.
They went down before noon, and at the head of the quarry track, where the path was narrow and private and the wind covered voices, her uncle stopped her with a hand on her arm, and the grimness came back into his face.
“One more thing, Lucy-bird, and then I am done frightening you for one day. You carry a new weight home with you, and I would have you know its heft before you lift it. Your name is in the world’s ledgers now.
The captain’s heir. Mistress of Grey House.
Seven years of Chancery arguing over you, in print, where anybody may read.
If any of the Dominus still keeps track, and they seem to keep everything, then your name has been written into them this year in fresh ink.
They may come to you, Lucy. Not with knives.
With soft questions. Lawyers’ clothes and charming manners.
A gentleman at a dinner, curious about the late captain’s voyages, his friends, his papers.
Somebody wanting a look at the library, for scholarship.
They may never come. If they come, they will come smiling. ”
The cold went through her again, and behind it, close behind it, came something with a straighter spine. Her father’s daughter stood up inside her.
“Then they will find nothing,” Lucy said, “but an ignorant heiress enjoying her new wealth.”
Her uncle watched her.
“I can play the goose to a nicety, Uncle, I promise you. A girl with more house than sense, who inherited furniture and damp and an atlas she cannot read. The captain’s secrets died with the captain.
No souls survived that gale, and I was in short frocks, last I saw him.
To me, he was a foghorn with white eyebrows who never told me so much as where the tea was kept.
I know nothing, for I inherited a leaky roof from an old man I was half afraid of, and I find it all a great bother.
” She lifted her chin. “It will be the easiest part I have ever played, because it has the advantage of being very nearly true.”
Something eased in his face, and something else in it hurt to look at, pride and grief run together like paint in the rain.
“And the rest of it,” Lucy said, and made herself say all of it, formally, like an oath, because she could see he needed it.
“The secret will go to my grave. I will tell no one, not even Papa.” Her voice caught on that, and she pushed through the catch.
“He mourns you still, Uncle. And he can never—”
“That bill is mine, Lucy-bird.” His jaw was tight. “Mine, not yours. Do not you carry a farthing of it.”
“I will keep my distance,” she went on, because if she stopped, she would not finish.
“No letters to this coast in my hand. No visits soon, and none that draw eyes, ever. When word must pass, it will go through Matthew White, and rarely, and it will read like an order for paving-slabs.” She got the last of it out level. “You have my word on all of it.”
He took her hands then, both of them, in the old grip, the handshake that was a sentence, and for a moment, he did not manage to speak.
“Seven years, I have buried you every morning with the rest of my old life,” he said at last, roughly, “and you walked up out of the sea at me on a delivery tide. I will not ask Providence for more than that. But hear this. Some winters, when the watch says the coast is quiet, there is always a berth on this island with your name on it.”
Lucy nodded, because her voice had gone, and thought, with a clear cold ache, that she had found him and must now bury him again with her own two hands, and keep the grave tended with her own silence, for years, perhaps for always.
She would do it, for doing it was the price of him breathing, and for that she would pay it every day.
She took her uncle’s arm, and they went down the track into the valley with the smoke and the wash and the noise of children playing rising to meet them.
They talked of sheep, of weather, of nothing that mattered, like people who had all the time in the world.
Inside, Lucy was hollow with worry about Lorenzo.