Chapter 1 #3
He had heard of Arthur in Florence, in a lecture on medieval French romance.
He had heard it from an English tutor in Rome who had recommended he read a book called Le Morte d’Arthur to improve his English.
Lorenzo had bought the book, got through eight pages, and set it aside because the English was more medieval than his English was ready for.
And he had been debating it since reaching England and laying his hands on Matteo’s first known painting on British shores, which was of the Lady of the Lake from Arthurian legend.
But he had not paid it much mind because it was clearly mythology.
An allegory in the manner of the great Masters of the Renaissance who painted ancient Greek and Roman gods.
The name sat in his head as a foreign name from a foreign story, not as the object of a commission Matteo di Bianchi had received in the year of our Lord 1513.
“He was the king of the Britons,” the woman explained.
“Or he was said to be. The stories place him in the fifth or sixth century after Christ. He is said to have united the tribes of Britain against the Saxon invaders. He is said to have carried a mighty sword called Excalibur. He is said to have died at a battle called Camlann, and to have been taken to an island called Avalon to be healed. And it is said, in some of the stories, that he did not truly die, but that he will return when Britain has need of him.”
She paused and gazed intently at Lorenzo to see if he had followed.
“He is not real,” she added. “Or at any rate, no one knows if he was real. He is a story. A rather large one.”
“Ah,” Lorenzo said. “Like Zeus.”
“But there are people,” she continued, “who have always believed the story is true. Or true enough. Or true in the way that matters. Not simple peasants, sir. Educated men. Men of standing. Nobles. Bishops. Men with money to spend on the belief.”
“Men,” Lorenzo said, “who might commission a Florentine artist in 1513 to build a temple for a sword against the day a legendary king returns?”
“Yes.”
Lorenzo stood there, his mind as blank as it had been since he first gained access to Matteo’s journals. The journals still did not make any sense, even with the cipher.
He had come here believing that Matteo’s commission had been a great work of the Renaissance.
A concealed masterpiece. Lost paintings.
A private chapel for a rich patron with peculiar tastes.
Marbles that a man could stand in front of one day in a museum in London or Paris and see the di Bianchi name recognized on a plaque beneath.
He had come here believing his ancestor had been engaged in a serious matter.
He had not come here believing his ancestor had spent his last years building a temple for a fairy tale.
Lorenzo’s eyes fell, finding the alphabet in his hand.
Beyond death. The phrase had been sitting in the hollow place his ancestor occupied in his head. Beyond death. For a fairy tale?
“Nicholas,” he said, “you believe this?”
“I believe,” Nicholas said, “that Matteo believed it. Or that he believed that his patrons believed it. Which is not the same thing. What I believe is that a serious craftsman was engaged by a serious Order to build a serious structure, and that the structure might exist, and that it is somewhere in England, and that we have the means to find it. What the men who commissioned it believed about swords and kings and lakes is their business. What I believe about it is my own. What matters at this moment is that the journals lead somewhere real.”
“Somewhere real?”
“Yes.”
“A cathedral?”
“So it appears.”
“With a sword in it?”
“So it is said.”
“A specific sword?”
“A specific sword. Which is, I should add, neither here nor there. If we find the cathedral, we shall find whatever is in it. It may be a sword. Or a rusted piece of iron. It may be nothing at all. The cathedral will still be a cathedral. Your ancestor will still have built it. Whatever he built, it will be recoverable.”
Lorenzo took this in, then shifted his attention to the woman. “And you, signora?”
“I do not know your ancestor,” she said, “but my father cares a great deal about King Arthur. What I care about is that the journals have been deciphered and that the deciphered text says what it says. It is not our business to determine whether the men who paid Matteo were right or whether they were mad. It is our business to work out what he built and where. Which we can now begin to do properly.”
Lorenzo looked at her a long moment.
She met his gaze without blinking.
“Signora,” he said, “I do not know your name.”
Nicholas said, mildly, “This is my wife, Mrs. Millicent Scott.”
Lorenzo blinked in surprise. But he would have been far more surprised if the three men who had accompanied him to England had not, one after the other, fallen in love and wed over the past few months.
“You went to Oxford,” he said, “to find an alphabet.”
“Yes.”
“And you have returned with an alphabet and a wife?” Lorenzo bowed to Mrs. Scott. “Signora,” he said. “è un onore … It is an honor. Welcome to Grimsfell.”
She inclined her head.
“Please,” Lorenzo said. “Both of you. Come inside. I have coffee—”
He turned and led them toward the door, and it was only when Mrs. Roskelly caught sight of his stockinged feet in the entrance hall and let out a Cornish exclamation about the death of him that Lorenzo remembered he had come out without his boots.