Chapter 17
I finished the bird and held it in my hand.
The stone was cold and perfect. Every feather was there, the head turned back over the wing exactly as I had seen it.
And still, for a long moment, I wanted only to open the cage of my own making and let it fly.
A man can trap a living thing in marble and still feel the wrongness of the trap.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
Grey House had learned to listen for him.
Lucy had not meant to learn it too, but a house taught its mistress whether she consented or not, and within three days of their return, she could tell from anywhere under its roof exactly where Lorenzo was and what he was doing there.
The library door, which had a voice of its own, opened and did not quite close.
And then, for hours, the pacing filtered up through the old floors, faint as a pulse.
Eleven steps and turn. Eleven steps and turn.
The hidden room was eleven steps long. She had never counted the length.
Her feet knew it now the way she knew her own heartbeat, secondhand, through boards.
He was vibrating. There was no better word for it, and she had stopped hunting for one.
A man strung like a rigged mast in rising weather, humming with a strain that had nowhere to go.
He ate what was put before him. He disappeared to sleep at The Rusty Anchor.
He stood when she entered rooms. He was courteous, and dutiful, and present, and a hundred miles away, and the hundred miles ran straight through the library wall into a windowless room where a dead man’s papers were being dealt and re-dealt like a game of patience that never once concluded to his satisfaction.
She had gone down to him there on the second evening, and stood in the opening of the shelf-door to look at what he had made of her uncle’s sanctum.
The charts out again. The ledgers open at pages she knew by heart because he knew them by heart.
The journals ranked and re-ranked, the cipher key lying at an exhausted angle, and chalked across the slate she had given him for the purpose, columns of figures, tonnages, years, distances, worked and worked again, as though numbers might confess under repetition what they had withheld under logic.
“Anything?” she had asked, keeping it light.
He had looked up at her from the middle of the wreckage, the lamp hollowing his face, and said, gently, “No, Lucia. Nothing. Forgive me, I lost the hour.” He had come up to dinner and been charming to her, and the charm had been the loneliest thing she had ever sat across a table from.
He was here because he had promised. She made herself say it honestly, in the privacy of her own skull, on the fourth morning, standing at her window watching him walk the terrace below with his hands behind his back, up and down, up and down, eleven steps and turn, as though the terrace too had become that secret room.
He had given his word in this very house, to her face, with her back against a shelf, and Lorenzo di Bianchi kept his word the way his family kept stone.
He would stand up in the church. He would say the vows beautifully, in that accented voice.
Nothing on earth would make him break the betrothal, and she knew it, and there was a time, nearly a month ago, a lifetime ago, when knowing it had felt like standing on rock.
Now it felt like watching a man walk to the scaffold punctually for his public hanging.
The banns had run while they traveled. Three Sundays, one after another, the vicar’s voice raised over a spring congregation, if any of you know cause or just impediment, and nobody in Gloucestershire knew any cause, and the third asking was done and gone this past Sunday.
The thirty days her betrothal had been given to be validated were completed.
The nuptials were on Sunday. There was a date now, and a celebratory breakfast arranged, and her best gown hanging in the pressing-room with tissue in its sleeves, and her mother’s letters arriving with admonishments and a promise to attend now that Lucy was back from no one knew where.
The vicar called to settle the details of the service, and the whole machinery of it went forward, smooth and kindly and inexorable, every cog turned by people who loved her, exactly like a funeral no one had the heart to cancel.
She finally said what she was thinking to Bessy while they folded linen.
The new sheets had arrived from Bristol. They needed airing and folding and laying up in lavender. It was work her hands could do while her mind went in circles. They stood at either end of the long trestle with the first sheet stretched between them. The linen was fine and cool under her fingers.
They folded the way they had folded since she was a child. Walk together. Corners met. Part. Snap the fold straight. Walk together again. Bunches of lavender lay at the end of the trestle. The afternoon sun came in low and turned the room the color of cream.
On the third sheet, when their hands met in the middle, Lucy heard herself speak.
“He warned me, Bessy. At the very beginning. He stood in the library and warned me to my face that the quest came first.”
Bessy took the corners from her and stepped back and snapped the fold. “He did, Miss Lucy.”
“The quest came first. Those were the terms. I heard them, and I bid on them, and I have never once been able to say I was deceived, because I was not deceived. I was told.”
Walk together. Corners met. She kept her hands quiet on the linen. The quiet felt wrong.
“Well, the quest is dead. It died and we buried it with honors and brought the mourning home in the carriage with us. And a man whose quest is dead, Bessy, what is left for him in this house?” Their fingers touched at the middle of the fold.
“A promise. A church on Sunday. What is left for him here is a cage. And I am the lock on it.”
“Miss Lucy—”
“No, let me say it all, or I never will.” The sheet came to its last fold, a neat square of white. Lucy laid it on the pile and put her hands flat on it.
“You will say he is fond of me. He is fond of me. I have proof of his fondness that would make Mama faint into her wine. But I have the other proof too, and I have been refusing to admit it since Devon, and I am done refusing.”
The sun lay along the linen. Somewhere below, faint through two floors, the pacing turned and came back. Eleven steps.
“Every night, Bessy. Every night since the island, he comes to me, or lets me come to him, and he is generous, he is everything ardent, he gives and gives until I cannot see straight, and then every night, at the last, he stops. He takes my hands away. He kisses my knuckles politely and says when we are wed, and he holds himself back, every time, without one single exception.”
The linen-room went quiet. Bessy had stopped folding. She stood with a pillowcase forgotten in her hands and let her finish, withholding her thoughts about proper behavior under these solemn circumstances.
“I called it respect.”
Lucy’s voice had dropped almost to nothing and stayed level. That cost more than crying would have.
“For weeks I called it respect, and I glowed over it, like a fool. Such a gallant man, guarding me until his ring was on my finger. That was the kind reading, Bessy, and I clung to it.”
Her hands pressed flat on the sheets.
“But I will not hold him to a promise that was made for a different road. The quest is gone. What is left is a wedding on Sunday and a man who will stand up in it because he gave his word. I will not trap him by a promise made to me in desperation.”
There. It was all out. Every word she had been carrying. Said aloud in a room that smelled of lavender and hot linen. The world did not end. The fear stayed standing right there with them.
Bessy laid down the pillowcase. She came around the trestle, took Lucy’s hands off the folded sheets, and held them, dry and warm.
“Then we’ll manage, Miss Lucy,” she said. “You and I.”
Lucy looked up.
“We’ve managed before, and worse, with less.
” The gray eyes did not look away. “Whatever Sunday is, and whatever comes after Sunday. If it’s a marriage, we’ll manage a marriage.
And if it turns out to be a man forever off with his papers and his ghosts, leaving my lady to her own life, well then.
My lady has a life. My lady has this house, and income.
” A short pause. “And if it comes to the worst, Miss Lucy, if it ever comes to very worst, then it’s you and me and the Continent, and no man’s leave to ask.
Italy, I’ve heard, is lovely. Rome. Venice.
We’d take rooms. I’d learn to shout at foreign laundresses; I’d enjoy that.
And we’d hire a respectable young man to be your private secretary, to make the arrangements, see to the tickets and the brigands, and escort us on the boats.
Good teeth, sensible boots, and no poetry. I’d interview him myself.”
It surprised a laugh out of Lucy, one broken note, with water behind it.
“You have thought about this?” she asked.
“I think about everything,” said Bessy. “It’s why my hems are straight.
” She gave Lucy’s hands one hard squeeze and let go, then picked up the pillowcase.
“Now. Four more sheets, and the lavender to lay in, and then they want you for the flowers. The gardener’s set his heart on lilies, and lilies at a wedding breakfast make me think of, well …
Never you mind what they make me think of. We’ll have roses.”
They folded the rest in silence. Walk together. Corners met. Part and snap. The pile of white grew at the end of the trestle, sweet with lavender. When the last sheet was squared, Lucy carried the stack to the press herself and laid it away.
Through the floor, up through the boards of the house, the pacing went on below her. Eleven steps. And turn.
* * *
The letter to his father would not be written.