The Marriage Escapade

Prologue

My hand shook reading it while the sea beat the rocks outside as if it mocked me. I will not lay down my brushes until I have seen the proof with my own eyes. Some truths refuse to stay buried.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

Lucy Carroway pressed her fingertip to the frost on the windowpane. A clear spot spread under her touch. Outside, the lawn lay white and quiet under snow, and the elms stood black against the slate gray sky.

Fourteen today.

The thought sat bright in her chest. She was not a child anymore. Miss Denbigh had told Mama last summer that Lucy was old enough to put away her pinafores and learn to be a proper young lady. Mama had blushed and looked pleased. Papa had said nothing, which usually meant he agreed.

But fourteen was not the thing that mattered most.

Nay, that was just the motive.

Uncle Henry was coming.

Her stomach flipped hard with excitement.

She flattened both palms against the cold glass to feel it bite, wanting to be sure she was awake and this was really her birthday.

He always came on her birthday, every year for as long as she could remember.

By evening, she would hear the wheels on the drive, then his boots on the stone flags, then his big voice calling up the stairs for his birthday girl.

She turned from the window with a shiver and wrapped her arms around herself. The floorboards were cold under her bare feet. She hopped in place to warm them. The fire had burned low behind the fender, and Bessy would come soon with fresh coals, but Lucy could not sit still and wait.

She went to the dressing table and stood before the little shelf where she kept her treasures. The room was still dim, the sun not high enough to reach it yet, but she knew every piece by feel. She started at the left end and worked her way along, touching each one.

The little brass compass came first. It was no bigger than a plum, the glass crazed with age.

Uncle Henry had brought it when she was seven.

He had come in from the yard, with his hair still dripping from the horse trough, and knelt right on the drawing room carpet.

Mama had not been pleased about the wet prints his boots left behind.

“Do you know where this has been, poppet?” He had held it up so the brass caught the firelight. “It has been around the Cape of Good Hope and up to Zanzibar and down to Constantinople and home again. Now it belongs to you.”

She had asked where Zanzibar was, and he had told her.

He had not merely told her; he had poured the story out until she could see the green-glass harbor and the dhows with sails like cat ears and could smell the cloves and cardamom on the wharves.

She had gone to sleep smelling it for a week afterward and had walked the garden paths with the compass in her hand, pretending she was moving through a Persian market.

She set the compass down and picked up the jade horse. It was cool and heavy in her palm, the color of milk turned green. Uncle Henry had brought it from Canton. Or so he claimed. Papa had pressed him on the details, and Uncle Henry had only winked at Lucy.

“The Chinese carvers read the stone, poppet. They see the horse or the fish or the flower already sleeping inside, and they cut away everything that is not the horse.”

She had asked how anyone could see something that was not there yet.

Uncle Henry had said most people could not, which was why few ever carved horses from jade.

Did she think she might be one who could see?

She had said she thought she might, though she had never tried.

He had laughed and pinched her nose and told her that seemed a sound way to approach most difficulties.

If she ever did carve a horse, he would come and have a look at it.

She put the horse back and reached for the fan.

The sticks were sandalwood, and the silk was creased from all the times she had opened and closed it.

She opened it now. The scent rose up, warm and spiced.

A red bridge curved over a river, cherry trees heavy with pink blossoms, and a lady in sweeping robes pausing on the bridge to look back.

Uncle Henry had said it came from Nagasaki, the one door left open to that closed kingdom.

He had been ashore there, though not far.

The Japanese did not care for Englishmen and liked to send them home quickly.

She closed the fan and set it down.

The red lacquer box was next. Bright red, with gold dragons chasing pearls around the lid.

She had loved it most when it first arrived, for he had said she could keep any secret inside it and no one, not even Mama, would open it without her permission.

It still held her pencil stubs, a pressed violet from when she was nine, and the folded paper where she had written in her worst scrawl that she would go abroad one day and see the great cities and the deserts and the sea.

She had never shown him the paper, but she thought he probably guessed.

Beyond it lay the piece of coral, pale and forked like a hand, from a beach in the Antilles.

And the shell with the milky lip and the pink spiral inside like the underside of a mouse ear.

He had told her to hold it to her ear and listen.

She still did sometimes when the house was quiet, and she could hear the sea in it and imagine standing on the creaking deck of the ship.

At the end of the shelf sat the elephant.

Six inches tall, carved from dark wood polished until it shone.

Its trunk was raised and its tusks curved, and there was a seat on its back, with tiny latticed windows, that he had said was called a howdah.

Uncle Henry had carried it home wrapped in silk and set it on the drawing room table.

She had walked around it for what felt like an hour before she dared touch it.

He had picked it up and put it into her hands.

“India, poppet. She is from India. I have been three times and I have never seen half of it, and I shall never live long enough to see the whole.”

That was Uncle Henry. There was always more world than he could reach, more than he could carry back to her in his pockets and trunks.

She set the elephant down and looked around her bedchamber.

It was the same as it had always been. Green paper with trellis and roses on the walls, the chintz cover on the bed, the washstand under the window, the rag rug Mama had pieced years ago, the shelf of books with spines gone soft from reading, and the wardrobe that held the same six gowns she rotated through.

Fourteen years old and still standing in the same room where she had spent her first day.

She could have wept from the sameness of it all.

Not today, though. Not when Uncle Henry was coming. He was the fresh wind that blew through the closed-up rooms of her life. He brought the outside in.

She turned back to the window.

The light had lifted a little. The frost was thinning at the edges.

She could hear the housemaids moving about, the soft swish of skirts and the thump of a coal scuttle.

Cook would be at the range with her sleeves rolled up.

Papa would be in his study with his morning letters.

Mama would still be at her dressing table, telling Bessy which cap to bring out.

Uncle Henry would arrive when he arrived. Papa always said a civil man would send word ahead. Uncle Henry never did and always looked puzzled when Papa brought it up, as if the post had been invented just to vex him.

Lucy smiled at the thought.

Then she saw the rider.

He came around the bend at a fast trot. A dark figure on a dark horse, both of them breathing white into the cold air.

He came up the drive like a man with somewhere important to be.

Her heart gave a hard, glad kick inside her chest. An outrider.

He had never sent one before, but maybe this time he had.

Uncle Henry must be close behind. Any minute now, the carriage would come into view.

She watched the man reach the sweep in front of the door and swing down, a groom running from the yard to take the reins. The rider kept his leather satchel and went up the steps with quick purpose.

Please let Uncle Henry be right behind him. Please, please, please.

She stepped back from the window and clapped her hands once and turned in a circle. She could not go down like this. Nightgown and braid from last night. She needed to be dressed. Now.

She ran to the bellpull and yanked it hard three times.

Bessy came in less than a minute, the way she did when she smelled trouble. She stopped in the doorway with her hands on her hips and scowled at Lucy.

“An outrider,” Lucy said, breathless. “There is an outrider. Uncle Henry must be right behind him. Bessy, I need to dress. The moss green. It suits me best. And my hair up. With the green ribbon.”

Bessy did not exactly smile, but her mouth twitched at the corner.

“An outrider, is it?”

“Bessy, please.”

“On your birthday morning, with the ground still white? Miss Lucy, your uncle is not the sort to send a man ahead. He is the sort to arrive with a stray dog he found on the road and expect Cook to feed it.”

“He did that once.”

“Twice, if I remember right. And Cook still has not forgiven him for what it did to her larder.”

But Bessy was already moving, taking the moss-green gown from the wardrobe and shaking it out over the bed.

She helped Lucy out of her nightgown and washed her face and hands and neck with the hot water from the ewer.

Lucy stood as still as she could while Bessy buttoned and tied the gown and fastened the little brooch that had been Grandmama’s.

Then Bessy sat her down and brushed out the braid with long, slow strokes.