Epilogue
“He is a beautiful boy. I see in him the promise of great distinction.”
From the private journal of Lady Isla Scott, written the night her son Nicholas was born.
* * *
Grimsfell Hall with Millie in it was a different place.
Nicholas was not sure he could have expressed it adequately.
But he felt it the moment the private coach turned through the gate and the hall rose up against the gray April sky.
All Tudor stone and Cornish granite and the brooding nature of a building that had been standing on this clifftop for hundreds of years and had developed a certain arrogance about it.
He had left Grimsfell last month as a man with a glibness of attitude and a bad leg and no fixed point in his life.
He was returning as a married man with a very old journal, the manuscript, a second notebook, and Millie beside him on the coach seat with her spectacles at the end of her nose and her notebook open and the scarlet ribbon catching the morning light.
The estate appeared different because he was different. He knew it.
Millie peered up at the hall with the direct, assessing expression she brought to new environments. Examining it quickly and efficiently.
“It is dramatic,” she said.
“It is,” he agreed.
“I like it,” she said, and returned to her notebook.
He watched her for a moment. She had been writing since Bath.
She had been writing in the coach and at the inn, and she was writing now.
Moving her pencil across the page with her customary concentration.
He did not ask what she was writing. He had learned that asking Millie what she was writing when she was in the middle of writing it was not a productive use of either of their time.
The coachman had barely brought them to a stop in the courtyard when the door of the hall opened and Lorenzo di Bianchi appeared.
The Italian crossed the courtyard with an attitude that suggested he had been waiting years for a shipment and had just received word it might be arriving today.
He ignored the coach. He moved past Millie entirely.
Which was a significant social failure that Nicholas filed away for later commentary.
And he came directly to Nicholas with his dark eyes already asking the question before his mouth did.
“Did you find anything?” he said.
Nicholas reached into the folio portfolio and produced the alphabet, the journal, and the second notebook with the clean copied decipherment.
Lorenzo took them as if he were being handed sacred relics.
He held the journal for a moment without opening it.
His hands protective around the worn vellum covers.
His dark eyes moving over the surface. His great-great-great-something-or-other had begun this.
His subsequent family had continued it. Until finally the quest had fallen on Lorenzo’s shoulders, and he had chased it with the fervor that did his family proud, being a man who did not know how to accept disappointment.
Many generations of waiting pressed down on this moment in a Cornish courtyard on a gray April morning with the sea wind singing off the cliff and the gulls calling above the granite bluff.
Lorenzo read in silence. He moved between the journal and the deciphered pages Nicholas had prepared in the second notebook, his eyes moving quickly, his lips pressed together, his entire attention consumed by what was in front of him.
It was awkward work, standing out in the sunlight.
It would have made sense to move indoors to do it, but his impatient friend showed no sign of moving.
The April wind ruffled the pages, and he did not notice. A gull called from directly above their heads, and he did not startle. The coachman led the horses away, and Lorenzo registered none of it.
Nicholas waited with his hands in his coat pockets and his cane in the crook of his arm.
He had become considerably better at waiting in the past weeks.
It was one of several elements Millie had improved in him.
Not by instruction, but by example. Because she waited for nothing and moved directly toward everything, and somehow this made him calmer rather than more impatient.
Which was not the effect he would have predicted, but the effect that it had.
Beside him, Millie was watching Lorenzo with big blue eyes and skew eyeglasses perched on her nose. The relevant parties had been given the information and would catch up when they caught up.
Lorenzo was silent for a long time.
Then he looked up.
“What does it mean?” he said.
Nicholas considered him. “Well,” he said.
“The Renaissance was a period of considerable intellectual ferment, during which men of education and means frequently developed enthusiasms of an elaborate variety. The kind of enthusiasm that required, for instance, the construction of concealed architectural structures for the housing of objects of deeply questionable historical provenance, motivated by beliefs that were, one might say, optimistic in their relationship to verifiable fact and the general consensus of rational —”
“Nicholas,” Lorenzo said.
“I am providing context.”
“Maledizione, you are being obstructive.”
“Context is important,” Nicholas argued. “A man who lacks context may draw conclusions that are premature or insufficiently considered, which in a matter of this complexity could lead to significant disappoi—”
“Nicholas,” Lorenzo implored, having reached the absolute boundary of his patience. Which was not a very distant boundary on the best of days. “What does it mean?”
Nicholas ran a hand through his hair and tried to think how to explain. Lorenzo peered back with the jaw set and the dark eyes entirely serious. The man had devoted the better part of his adult life to this, and he was not going to be deflected by a sardonic habit at the final moment of it.
Nicholas relented.
“Matteo di Bianchi,” he said, “was commissioned by Regis Aeterni in 1513. The Order of the Eternal King. They believed that a rightful claimant to the throne would come, and that a certain relic must be preserved until that claimant appeared. Matteo’s commission was to build a concealed structure.
A temple, which he calls a path that would relinquish to the rightful hand.
Something that would preserve the relevant object until the time of the rightful claimant. ”
Lorenzo frowned deeply. He was processing this … but not well, because he was not British and he did not comprehend the peculiarities of Englishmen and their fondest legends.
“A claimant to the throne,” he said slowly. “Matteo was building a temple for a descendant of Henry—”
“No,” Nicholas said. “It has nothing to do with Henry the Eighth. Or any living monarch. Or any monarch who has been alive in the past several centuries, as far as I can determine. The claim in question is considerably older than Henry the Eighth and considerably more, shall we say, mythological in its orientation. The Regis Aeterni held beliefs that most rational men of the sixteenth century were already treating as allegory, but Matteo, to his considerable credit as a craftsman if not as a man of reason, took the commission seriously and built accordingly.”
Lorenzo stared at him. “What claim,” he said. “Nicholas, what are you saying?”
“I am saying,” Nicholas said, “that the beliefs of the Eternal King were ancient and entirely sincere, and that Matteo di Bianchi was commissioned to construct a cathedral in their service, and that cathedral was intended to house and preserve an object of considerable legendary significance until a certain claimant arrived to claim it, and that both the object and the claimant are, to a rational mind, the subjects of legend rather than history, and that the construction Matteo built is somewhere in England waiting to be found, and that we now have the alphabet and the deciphered journal and the path that leads to it, and I think the least you could do is allow me to deliver it in the order that seems most—”
“Matteo di Bianchi,” said Millie, from directly beside his left elbow, in the blunt voice she used when the most efficient approach was to simply state the fact and move on, “was building a cathedral to house the sword, Excalibur.”
Lorenzo stared at her, his expression blank. Uncomprehending. Nicholas was not entirely clear if Lorenzo would have any reason to know what an Excalibur was, not being British.
“For the day,” Millie continued, with the same severe bluntness, “that King Arthur returns.”
Silence fell across the courtyard, and even the gulls had nothing to say.
* * *
Will Lorenzo finally learn what happened to Matteo in The Beloved Escapade, or will the delectable Miss Lucy Carroway get in his way?