Chapter 17 #3
“Thank you for coming,” said Lucy. “Please sit, if you wish. I shall stand. This will not take long, and I have rehearsed it, so I would be obliged if you would let me get through it.”
“Lucia—”
“Lorenzo. Please.”
He did not sit. He stood by the cold hearth, in the house where she had once put her back to the shelves and bid on his madness. She folded her hands at her waist, lifted her chin, and gave judgment.
“When we made our agreement in this room, its purpose was plainly stated by both parties. You were embarked upon a quest. I wished to be embarked upon it with you. You warned me, fairly and at the outset, that the quest came first. I accepted the term. The betrothal was contracted upon it.”
Her voice was level, frighteningly so.
“The quest is ended. Through no fault of yours. I will not hear it of any fault. A man cannot be blamed for the truth of history. But the agreement has failed, and a contract whose agreement has failed is discharged. I am therefore releasing you from your promise. The betrothal is dissolved.”
The room tilted. Lorenzo stood on the hearthstone and could not speak in either language.
“I shall deal with the vicar today,” she went on, evenly, ticking the points.
“And with the arrangements and with my parents. You need do nothing and see no one. I shall tell everyone the truth, that I ended it. I am aware of what that means. By tonight, every soul in Little Severn will have the tale with their dinner, and my parents will arrive like artillery, and the county will have a name for me by Michaelmas. I have considered it.”
A short pause.
“It is a season’s talk. I have broad shoulders and, as you may have heard, a scandalous new fortune. Between them, I will manage. That is my concern, and none of yours, and I mention it only so you cannot mistake this for a decision made without forethought.”
“Lucia.” It came out cracked. “Why—”
“Because I find, upon honest examination,” said Lucy, and her voice grew kinder, which was worse, “that you were right, and I was right, at the beginning, and we should have believed ourselves. I wanted the adventure, Lorenzo. I told you so in this room, in words I remember exactly. A husband who takes me with him when he goes. Well. There is nowhere now that you are going. I bargained for a companion on a quest. You warned me fairly which came first with you. Consider the warning honored.” Her chin came up the last degree. “And the contract discharged.”
Everything true in him stood up to fight.
It rose whole, three heartbeats of it.
Ask her. Ask her, on your knees on this hearth, if there is any version of you without the quest that she could still—
The old defenses came down across it, smooth from long use.
Three heartbeats. He would count them for the rest of his life.
“I understand,” said Lorenzo.
He heard his own voice deliver it, polite and finished. He watched something flicker at the back of her eyes, too fast to read, and gone.
“You are,” he said, “as you have always been, more honest than the whole of my acquaintance assembled. I will not insult that honesty with a scene.”
The words came out in good order, one after another, dead.
“I will make my arrangements at once. I would not for the world add any complications. And Lucia … Miss Carroway. The correction cost him more than the rest of the speech. “Whatever is said in Little Severn, or in your mother’s letters, if any voice anywhere lays one grain of fault on you, they will answer to me first. You have behaved, from the first morning to this one, with more honor than any man I have ever done business with. I wish …” The sentence went out onto thin ice.
He stepped back. “I wish you every happiness. All the miles of it.”
“And I, you,” said Lucy, “on whatever trail is left to you. There will be one. Men like you are not finished by one disappointment.”
She put out her hand.
He took it. Her hand lay in his, fine-boned and firm.
And cold. Cold as stone. For one instant, the fact of it went through him. Her voice is summer, and her hand is winter.
He bowed over the cold hand. A correct bow. He knew what it was even as he paid it. He released her fingers and walked out of the library and shut the door with almost no sound at all.
He wrote the letter when he reached his inn, before he packed his things and rode out.
It came easily now. He sat at the desk with the lamp lit and a clean sheet in front of him. The words arrived short and obedient.
Padre. The trail is ended. There is no more to be found. I am coming home. — L.
Four lines. Three hundred years. He read it over once.
There was no fault in it, and no pulse either.
He sealed it with candle-wax and set it on the corner of the desk for the morning post. He sat back in the chair, a free man, discharged, released, and could not remember what freedom had ever been for.
Against his heart, through the breast of his coat, he could feel little Thomas’s stone.
He did not take it out. He sat with his hand flat over it. Then he rose and packed his things.