Chapter 17 #2
Lorenzo had been trying for three nights. On the third night the proof lay on the desk of the hidden room, in the wreckage of his own hand. Three beginnings. Three sentences ending in miniature deaths.
The first had died at the second line.
Padre. The trail I wrote to you of has ended at the quarry that began it.
He had looked at the words a long time, and the words had looked back. There was no third line in the world that could follow them into a house in Florence, where an old man was, this very month, reading the fat packet in which his son had written that the family had found its Grand Master.
The second had died trying to be gentle.
The evidence now suggests that our ancestor’s great work may not have been.
May not have been. He had sat with the quill dry in his hand, listening to that sentence, and heard what it would sound like read aloud in the workshop, under the racks of chisels. He had drawn a line through it hard enough to cross into the page beneath.
The third had not died. He had burned it, because it had begun I have failed, and a man might write many things to his father, but he did not send him a tombstone with the family name on it and his own signature at the foot.
Centuries of searching for nothing. That was what sat on his chest at two in the morning in the windowless room. Not the eleven years of his own hunting. Not the money spent. Not the friends who had grown careful around him.
Three hundred years of di Bianchis keeping the faith in an attic trunk.
Copying the letters before the ink faded.
Teaching the legend to each generation. Waiting, certain that somewhere under England the family’s work stood in the dark, ready.
Seventeen generations of hope, handed down, until the hope came to Lorenzo. He had carried it to the threshold.
And found nothing behind the door.
There was no way to bring that home. He had turned it every way. A man could not stand in his father’s workshop and say the waiting had been in vain. His father would smile and find something fine to say about faith, and then something in him would go quiet forever. Lorenzo would have failed.
So the letter would not be written. He could not go home. He could not stay. He walked the eleven paces of the secret room. Overhead, through the boards, the woman he was to marry on Sunday was thinking about him. He could feel it. She lay quiet and asked nothing of him.
Which was, he told himself, exactly what she had bargained for.
She had stood in a doorway of this house and set the terms clearly.
Passage, not sentiment. A companion for the venture.
She had never asked for his heart. She had put it outside the bargain.
If the venture was dead, then what he owed her was the rest of the contract.
His name, his conduct, his courtesy. His heart had never been part of it, and it was not his to give. It was crushed.
He told himself this while he paced. It held until that evening.
She kissed him in the library after dinner.
It began the way the good things between them always began …
out of nothing, out of her sweetness. He had said something dry.
She had laughed the real laugh, the one that caught him by surprise.
Then she crossed the room, took his lapels in both hands, gazed up at him with the laugh still in her face, and kissed him.
Everything in him answered.
His arms went around her. His hand found the warm nape of her neck under her hair. For three heartbeats, the world was the taste of her and the wine on her breath and the pleasured sound she made against his mouth. The noise in his head went quiet.
Then it started again.
He felt it happen. He was there for all of it. The machinery began to turn. He felt himself leave the kiss while his mouth was still on hers. His hands stopped on her. His body went quiet. Not peaceful. Absent. She felt it at once. Of course she did. She was Lucy.
She drew back and looked at him.
“Forgive me,” he heard himself say. The voice came out polite. “Lucia. Forgive me. My mind is—”
The sentence had nowhere honest to go. The truth was that his mind was still in a chapel, tapping a wall that had already given him its answer. He could not say that to her face. The sentence died between them. He watched her hear it.
“Of course,” said Lucy. Level. Bright. She smoothed his lapels where her hands had been, a small wifely motion that cut him.
She stepped back and wished him good night.
She took her candle up the stairs with her back straight.
Lorenzo stood in the library and listened to the fourth stair creak under her and hated himself with a new thoroughness.
He had watched himself do it. That was the worst part. He was failing her.
The next evening, he noticed the Malory.
He came into the library before dinner, and something was wrong with the room.
It took him a minute to find it. The round table by her chair.
For weeks, it had held the big calf-bound Le Morte d’Arthur, open or shut but always there, thick with her paper markers, one for every passage about the sword.
She had read bits of it to him on the good days, feet tucked under her.
She had done the voices in the carriage when they had still believed they would find something.
That book had become part of the furniture, part of their travels, part of the evening, part of her.
The table was bare. Polished. A bowl of roses stood on it.
He looked to the shelves and found the book almost at once, high in its old place between the sermons and the sea atlases, squared away, spine even with its neighbors. Every marker gone. He crossed the room and stood in front of it. He put one finger on the leather of the spine, lightly.
She had stopped speaking of the sword. He counted back through the dinners and could not find Excalibur in any of them since Hwitmarbel. Not once. The word had simply left.
Standing there with his finger on the cold leather, the first thing he felt was relief.
God rot him for it. Then the cold came. A book put away was a decision.
Sometime in this house, in an hour he had not seen, Lucy had put the sword back on the shelf and taken out every marker. She had not told him.
What did a defeated heart do with that? It filed it. She is done with the venture. She was only ever here for it. She is coming to her senses. He let the thought stand because it hurt less than the other reading.
She sent for him the next morning. Two days before the wedding.
The footman brought the message to The Rusty Anchor at breakfast. Miss Carroway’s compliments, and would Signor di Bianchi be so good as to attend her in the library at eleven.
The formality should have told him. Everything about that morning should have told him.
He walked into it obstinately blind anyway.
She was at the window when he came in, with the light behind her, in the dove-colored morning dress, her hair dressed properly, not escaping its pins as it had before.
She did not come to him. She did not smile. When she turned, she was wearing a manner he had never seen on her before. He knew at once whose it was. Her father’s. Court manner. The King’s Bench standing invisible in the room with them.