Chapter 3 #3
“Come up yesterday evening, in a chaise, boxes and trunks all over ’un.
Sam Priddle’s boy helped carry in and got sixpence.
” A murmur ran the settles, as if the sixpence had been examined by the parish and declared genuine.
“Taken up residence, proper residence, servants to be hired and all. First soul to live in that great house in seven year.” Puddy shook his head at the wonder of a world that could produce such events on a Thursday.
“Seven year empty, and now this. Nobody knows a thing more. Tom Wickers do say it’ll be some London gentleman.
Widow Priddle do say it’ll be kin of the old captain, come home from the sea. I say we’ll know when we know.”
Lorenzo gripped the edge of the counter.
Yesterday evening. Yesterday evening, a chaise had rolled past this very window and up that avenue, and the shut door, the respectful, final, immovable door, had opened.
There was no stewardship this morning. There were no thorough gentlemen.
There was an owner. An owner of flesh and blood, awakening this very moment under the roof, and an owner had a drawing room, and a drawing room could be called upon.
Today. This morning. Within the hour, if God was merciful and the razor was sharp.
“Grazie Dio,” he said, aloud, with his whole heart, and the settles went quiet and looked at him.
He did not care. He seized Puddy’s hand across the counter and shook it as though the man had personally arranged the entire matter, which from Puddy’s expression he was now half convinced he had.
“Signor Puddy. My friend. I am not riding to London. I shall need hot water to bathe, and breakfast, whatever the kitchen has, everything the kitchen has. I have waited too long for this morning to arrive at it hungry.”
By ten o’clock, he stood once more on the steps of Grey House, scraped raw by his razor, brushed, pressed, and holding his card as if it were a relic of the True Cross.
The door opened before his knuckles reached the knocker.
The same gray-whiskered man, but transformed.
There was a smudge of dust on his dark sleeve.
Behind him, the hall rang with life. Trunks on the marble.
A maid hurrying past with an armful of linen.
From somewhere deep in the house, the shriek of shutters that had not moved in seven years being made to move.
The whole great building sounded like a sleeper being shaken awake, and complaining, and waking all the same.
The whiskered man read the card this time.
“I have come,” Lorenzo said, before regret could gather again on that face, “to pay my respects to the new owner, and to offer my welcome to the neighborhood.”
He had been in the neighborhood one day. He said it anyway, and he said it with conviction, because it was, beneath the impudence of it, entirely true. No one in Gloucestershire could offer that welcome more sincerely than he did.
The man hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at the chaos of the hall, and appeared to conclude that the morning had already escaped all governance and one Italian more or less could hardly worsen it. “If you will follow me, sir. I shall inquire.”
And Lorenzo stepped over the threshold of Greywick Manor at last.
The hall nearly finished him.
Display cases lined the walls between the windows.
He saw carved masks, dark wood, a sheaf of arrows, and a stone head with heavy-lidded eyes and a serenity that said Java as plainly as a signature.
A jade piece, a model of a ship rigged to the last thread, a curved dagger with a hilt of black horn.
A collector had lived here. A true one, not a buyer of fashionable things but an eye, a hunger, case after case of it.
Lorenzo’s feet slowed of themselves, and his neck craned, and the whiskered man was obliged to say “Sir?” twice before Lorenzo returned to his body and followed him down the corridor.
He prepared his address as he walked. Some London gentleman, then, or the old captain’s kin come home from the sea, a man of property either way, and men of property required careful handling.
He would be brief. He would speak of the history of the house in general terms, a scholar’s interest, nothing that could not be said before servants.
He would ask permission to examine the older wing.
He would not mention Matteo. Not today. Not until he knew what manner of man he was dealing with.
A door was opened. A voice announced, “Signor Lorenzo di Bianchi,” wounding the name only slightly.
And every word of the careful address fell out of his head.
Tea. That was the first thing, absurdly, the smell of fresh tea and beeswax and opened windows, May light standing in the tall glass, dust sheets folded in a heap in one corner like shed skins.
And at a table drawn close to the window, in the full light, where Lorenzo had prepared himself for a gentleman of property, a young lady sat pouring from a silver pot, with an older woman beside her holding mending she was not attending to.
A young lady. The owner, the keeper of every stone Lorenzo had crossed a continent to touch, was a girl who must be at least one-and-twenty to be in her majority, with a smudge of gray dust along the edge of one hand.
She glanced up.
She was a little brown-haired creature, and her curls were escaping their pins on one side in a manner that said the pins had been asked to work since dawn. Hazel eyes, wide-set, extraordinarily awake.
She did not rise in a flutter. She did not stiffen into the smooth English blankness that Lorenzo had met in a hundred drawing rooms, that lacquered surface the ladies of this country put on before strangers the way one put on gloves.
She sat where she was with the teapot suspended and looked at him, openly, delightedly, from his boots to his eyebrows, the way a child looks at a conjurer.
The way, it occurred to him, he himself had looked at the display cases in the hall.
No one in England had ever looked at Lorenzo as though he were the interesting thing in the room.
Something low in his belly tightened. The dust on her hand, the escaping curls, the way the green of her gown caught the light along the line of her shoulder.
He felt it all at once, sharp and unexpected.
She was living here alone, or near enough, a young lady in a house that had been empty for seven years, and the irregularity of it charged the air between them in a way that made his skin prickle.
“Well,” she said. “You are certainly not the man about the chimneys.”
“I,” said Lorenzo, and discovered he had nothing prepared for her at all. He bowed, to buy his tongue a moment.
“Lorenzo di Bianchi, signorina. Your servant. Forgive me. I confess you have caught me entirely without my speech. I made one, on the ride up, a very good one, respectful, brief, and it was prepared for some gray-headed gentleman of property, and I find I cannot deliver a word of it.”
Honesty overtook him then, as it always did, somewhere ahead of schedule.
“And I must beg your forgiveness twice over, because I know how this appears. You are one day arrived, your house is upside down, and here is a strange Italian in your drawing room before your trunks are even unpacked. It is unpardonable, and I have done it anyway, because I could not wait. I tried to wait. I truly tried. Signorina, I have come to learn about this manor. Its history. Its stones. Everything it will tell me. I have crossed a continent for this house.”
There was a silence of perhaps two heartbeats, in which Lorenzo had time to reflect that Nicholas would have said all of that differently, and in considerably fewer words, and possibly not at all.
Then the young lady laughed.
It came from somewhere low in her throat, that laugh, warm and rolling and wholly ungoverned, not the little silver bell that English ladies rang and put away again, but a true laugh, a laugh that had never once been practiced before a mirror, a laugh the way his aunts laughed across a supper table in Florence with the candles burning down.
It reverberated through the sunlit room and it went through Lorenzo, and something in his chest, some string that had been wound tight since Dover, since Calais, since boyhood if he was honest, eased by a full turn.
The sound of it settled low in his belly and stayed there, warm and unwanted and impossible to ignore.
“Oh, that is famous,” she said, when she could speak. “Bessy, do you hear him? He has crossed a continent to learn about the manor.”
And she turned the whole of that bright hazel attention upon him, and her grin was crooked, and confiding, and he found he was smiling back before he had decided anything about it.
“Then, signore, I must make you a confession, and you will think me the poorest hostess in Gloucestershire. I arrived at this house yesterday at seven in the evening. I have thus far discovered my own bedchamber, this drawing room, and perhaps one-third of the way to the kitchens. This morning, I found a stuffed crocodile in a room I cannot now find again. Whatever you hope to learn about this manor, you have applied to the one person in England who knows less of it than you do.”
She lifted her chin, and the chin, he noted, was a stubborn one, a chin with character.
“I am here to learn about it myself. It seems we are upon the very same errand. Sit down and have some tea.”
Lorenzo sat.
He did it slowly, because several things were happening in him at once and he wished to be present for all of them.
There was the crocodile, which he fully intended to see before he died.
There were her words, ‘the very same errand,’ ringing against everything that lay wrapped in oilcloth in the satchel at his hip.