Chapter 14 #3
“The sword is not here, Bessy.” It came out of her low and fast now that it had started, the whole morning’s freight of it.
“The trail is not here. The trail his whole life has run on stops on this island like a road running straight into the sea. Three hundred years of his family keeping faith, the journals, the cipher, where the stone was born, there is the door, and we are where the stone was born, and there is no door. Nobody here ever heard of a door. And nobody can tell him whether Matteo ever finished the work at all. Whether the cathedral was ever built. Whether it is standing somewhere this minute in the dark with the sword lying in it to this day, or whether there was never anything at the end of it all but a story hung out like a false light to lure ships to their doom.”
“Mm,” said Bessy, and turned the hem.
“And what happens to him if we fail?” Lucy was staring at the sundial and not seeing it.
“You have not watched what the quest is to him. It is not a venture, Bessy. It is not a scheme a man shrugs off and takes up another. It is the keel. Take the keel out of a ship and what you have left is driftwood that remembers being a ship.”
“If that sword’s anywhere, miss,” Bessy said, “it’s been wherever it is three hundred years. It’ll keep till Sunday. And roads that run into the sea,” the thread was bitten, re-licked, re-threaded, “is what boats were invented for.”
“Bessy.”
“And a man that’s lost his star will stare at the sky a good while, Miss Lucy. It doesn’t follow he’s forgot who’s standing on the deck next to him.”
“He bowed to me,” Lucy said, and hated how it came out, like a girl of fifteen.
“On the cliff. A bow. And he has not—” Her hand moved and gave up.
“Since we landed, he has barely … He is courteous. He was never courteous to me, Bessy. He was a great many magnificent things, and courteous was never among them, and I find I would rather he shouted.”
The needle paused, only just.
“And there’s the marrow of it coming now,” said Bessy, comfortably, to the hem. “I’ll wait for you to say it.”
Lucy looked at the box knots. The clove smell of the gillyflowers was thick as syrup. Out with it, then.
“I am betrothed to him as part of the adventure,” she said, low.
“That is what it is, Bessy. That is what it was drawn up to be, and I drew it, and I was proud of the drawing. The quest first, and me alongside. The adventure is the marriage articles. And if there is no quest, if the trail is dead and the door was never anywhere, then what I am asking is—” and there it failed her.
“—is will there be any you,” Bessy finished, “without it.”
The bees worked. The sea broke on the rocks.
“It is a fair question of terms,” Lucy said at last, stiffly, to the sundial, in her father’s own courtroom cadence, and heard how it sounded, and did not take it back.
“Terms,” said Bessy. She held the hem up to the light, considered it, and laid it down. “You drew your bargain in good ink, Miss Lucy, I don’t doubt. Trouble with hearts is, they write in something that don’t blot.”
Lucy said nothing at all, which said enough, and she knew it, and could not help it.
“I’ve dressed you every morning of this journey,” Bessy went on, placidly, taking up the work again, “and I’ve watched him every evening of it.
When you come into a room, that man turns like a weathercock in a squall.
And there’s no treasure in it, miss, for he does it when you’re carrying nothing in your two hands but a candle.
” The needle went in. “As for the bargain. If you’ve gone and got to wanting more than you contracted for, that’s no shame and no great wonder either.
It happens to half the world, and the other half are liars.
But I’ll tell you the one thing I know about gentlemen and terms, Miss Lucy.
A man cannot agree to terms he’s never heard.
Deaf as adders, the whole breed of them, about anything unspoken, and the best of them are the deafest.”
“I cannot negotiate terms with a man who is heartbroken,” Lucy said. “Not now. Not for a long while, perhaps.”
“No,” Bessy agreed. “Now, you hold his coat while he recovers. And you let him be silent at you, and you don’t take the silence personal, though I can see you’re taking it personal enough to bite.
And when he’s dug out what can be dug, you’ll see what he builds next.
” A pause, one stitch long. “And whether there’s a door in it for you. ”
Lucy sat upright on the warm bench with her hands folded, and did not trust herself.
“I never said the word love, Bessy,” she said finally.
“No more did I, Miss Lucy,” said Bessy, and bit her thread.
The light was stretching long and gold. The wall’s shadow had crossed the garden, and the bees were thinning out of the lavender, going home.
Lucy stood, and shook out her skirts, and then, because she was alone with Bessy and the garden and God, she stepped up onto the bench, which a lady did not do, and looked west over the wall.
Out on the head, far off, a figure stood dark against the sunlight. Upright. Facing the sea. Watching, she supposed, his hopes wash away on the tides.
Her uncle’s words were still ringing in her ears, low now, below hearing almost, the way a great bell seeps into the bones of its tower long after the rope is still.
Adventure was never the destination. And under the ringing lay the fear, and under the fear, bright and stubborn and entirely against contract, lay the desire.
“Well then,” said Lucy Carroway, to the dew, to the dark coming up out of the sea, to nobody at all.
She got down off the bench, and went in to eat breakfast with her heart floundering in open water.