Chapter 14
The sea rose in walls and the ship labored until the seams opened. I clung to the rail and prayed in the language of my childhood, certain the water would take us.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The head of the island ran out west into the wind, and Lorenzo walked it until walking stopped answering.
It had answered for the first hour. His boots on the sprung turf. The gorse tearing at his stockings where the path pinched and bent around the cliff edge. The wind coming up off the water with enough force to wet his sleeve.
A man could pour a great deal into his legs.
His father had taught him that without once putting it into words, all those evenings tramping the Lungarno with some ruinous auction or some cheating dealer burning in his chest, walking and walking with his son trotting at his heel until the fire had gone down into coals a man could bank.
But his father had never had to walk off three centuries.
Does it exist at all?
He had asked it aloud on the cliff that morning, before her and before her uncle, and no one on this island could answer him. The question had been walking beside him ever since like a dog he could not send home.
Seventeen years, and no trace of the hidden work Matteo had done in that time.
His chest had an empty space where his hopes had lived. A lacuna, a restorer would call it, the place where the plaster has come away and taken the saint’s face with it. Lorenzo had filled a hundred lacunae in his time, with a sure hand and a quiet conscience.
This one would not take paint. From the first shipment to the last, in the old papers at Grey House and again in the island’s own tallies, the white stone had gone out on the tide and been delivered …
somewhere. Twelve great blocks and fourteen and nine and eleven, carriage by water to the “workes” in “secrecie.”
Two words in a dead clerk’s hand, and the writing told him nothing.
A clerk’s hand never did. It wrote out miracle and mutton in the same brown ink.
The workes could be a buried cathedral. The workes could be a shed on any shore of the Severn with a roof of thatch and a dirt floor.
He had built his life on digging up the past, and this was the first time he had understood, in his body, that the past owed him nothing.
That was the stone in his boot he could not walk out. Signor Carver. Henry. Jim. The drowned man. The keeper. The one soul in England who held the secret of the dead. Jim had looked at him this morning with honesty on his face and given him nothing, because there was nothing.
The island had cut the stone and shut its mouth.
Whatever Matteo had built or failed to build, the knowing of it had not been passed down.
Lorenzo had crossed a sea, learned a country, buried months of his life in ciphers and cold libraries, and come at last to the very rock where it all began, close enough to breathe the quarry dust. Matteo di Bianchi was as shrouded here, at the beginning of everything, as he had been in Florence with the width of Europe between them.
The path gave out at the head in a tumble of rock and thrift.
There was nowhere farther to walk, which was the trouble with islands.
He stood at the end of England with the wind pushing at his chest like a flat hand and let the worst thought come all the way up at last, because it was coming whether he wished it or not.
Perhaps there is no cathedral.
There. It was out. The gulls did not fall from the sky.
Perhaps there had never been one.
He made himself look at it as he would make a pupil look at a doubtful panel, coldly, the wishing wiped from his eye like grime off old varnish.
Say only what is in the paint, Lorenzo. Nothing that is not in the paint.
The order had commissioned a hidden marvel, yes. The money had been real. The stone was real. The intent was real. The journals planning it were real.
And in those same years the wolves had begun their hunting. The patrons were the de Greys, and the de Greys were being murdered.
The purse that was to raise a cathedral was being emptied grave by grave while Matteo cut his blocks. Commissions die when patrons die. Every man of Lorenzo’s trade knew that before he learned to shave. Half the unfinished glories of Italy were tombstones to a patron’s fever.
He had stood before San Lorenz more times than he could count, that great raw cliff of naked brick, the facade Michelangelo quarried half a mountain for and never raised. The marble was delivered, but the church did not always rise to meet it.
Why not here? Why not the greatest of them all, dead in the cradle, the crates unshipped, the plans burned for safety, and a Florentine master stranded on a gray coast with a quarry, a debt of silence, and the rest of his life to get through.
Matteo, the master from over the sea, took the stone to the mainland and worked it.
Not enshrined it; not enthroned it. Worked it, the way the Whites worked it now, tablets and tombs and chimney-pieces and little queens for cottage windows, and he taught his art to other hands, and the school he left in a churchyard was a retired man’s school.
That might have been the whole of the truth.
Matteo di Bianchi had lived out his days on that green mainland, cutting the loveliest gravestones in England for people who could not say his name, his real name, and the cathedral was a fire that had burned only in the journals, only at night, only in the cipher where a man keeps what he cannot have.
Perhaps the trove Lorenzo had sworn to carry into the light was a taproom mantel and a churchyard.
The nausea of disappointment came up in him suddenly, and he turned out of the wind.
Below the head, the cliff was cut by the cleft.
The path down it was little more than a stitching of ledges.
He went down it fast, faster than sense, needing his hands and his feet busy, or he would shout at a rock in Italian, and the day had no dignity left in it.
The cleft closed over him as he went. The wind stopped as though a door had shut.
At the bottom, the landing opened the way it had to receive the boat: a fan of pale shingle inside walls of white stone eighty feet high, the water lying green as bottle-glass over a floor of the marble itself, and the evening sky hanging far overhead in a long slot.
The whole of it, Dio, the whole of it was a nave.
A cathedral of water and stone and firmament.
He stood on the shingle and hated the resemblance with all his heart.
The white walls going up. The high light.
The hush was not the sea’s but an interior, the one he had crossed a continent chasing.
Even the Carvers’ sailboat and rowboat, hauled up above the tideline and canted on their sides, lay there like pews in an abandoned church.
He put his hand on a gunwale in passing.
The wood was cold and damp with evening.
Then he pulled at his neckcloth, at his coat, at his boots, with no decision made anywhere that he could find, only the body deciding for him that it would not stand in a mockery of a cathedral one breath longer with all its clothes on.
His hands folded the coat and set it on a dry rock, from a lifetime of handling things older and better than himself. He stared at his own hands doing it and could have wept at them, the obedient fools.
The water took him at the thigh like a blow and at the chest like a judgment.
He went under on purpose, all the way. The cold closed over his skull and squeezed.
Every thought in his head went out at once like candles in a draft, which was the entire object.
He came up gasping, swearing in two languages at a volume the walls threw it back as a congregation, struck out hard down the middle of the cove, and swam.
He swam until his shoulders burned. The water was so clear it was nearly cruel. Below him, the white floor fell away in ledges, pale, paler, pale-blue, blue-dark, the island going down into the deep the way everything he desired had sloped down into the dark.
Once, he took a breath and dove for it, down along a sunken buttress of the white stone with his ears aching, and laid his hand flat on the stone in the cold green light.
The grain was there under his fingers, even here, wood-grain in drowned marble.
He hung there a moment with the last of his air, touching it.
At least the stone will know I was here.
Matteo had written that, in the first winter, in the cipher, homesick and stubborn as he worked in secret workshops.
And the stone had known. The stone knew everything.
The stone was under Lorenzo’s hand this minute, keeping three hundred years of it, the workes, the door, the missing seventeen years of a man’s life, holding all of it the way stone keeps, entirely, and forever, and mute.
He came up hard, blowing, and struck the water flat with his open hand, once, a crack that went up the white walls and came back down at him thinned into something like laughter.
Then he rolled onto his back and floated, spent, his ears under, his own blood loud, the slot of sky far above him going from gold to the color of a healing bruise.
I vowed to find it, he told the sky. The sky, being English, said nothing back.
He had vowed it at fourteen, with his father’s hand on his shoulder in the workshop and a cleaning-cloth in his fist. He had vowed it again last year, bent over a panel he had brought back to life with his own hands.
A lady in a lake, pointing at secrets in the painted water: the first singular piece of Matteo’s brush he had touched.