Chapter 3 #4
And there was the lady herself, pouring his tea with the unceremonious goodwill of a cousin, saying, “This is my companion, Miss Smith, who has known me all my life and came with me anyway,” to which the older woman replied, without looking up from her thread, “Someone had to, Miss Lucy,” and bit it off. “I mean, Miss Carroway.”
Miss Lucy Carroway. Lucy. He turned the name over once, the way he would turn a coin to the light.
“You take sugar,” Miss Carroway informed him, dropping in two lumps.
It was not a question, and it happened to be correct.
“Now.” She set her own cup before her, planted both elbows on the table in open defiance of every governess who had ever drawn breath, and put her chin in her hands.
“You said you crossed a continent for this house. I want every word of that, signore, and I warn you, I shall know if you leave out the good parts. Why does an Italian gentleman cross a continent for a draughty old pile on the Severn that even the villagers have half forgotten?”
And Lorenzo, who had walked into a hundred English rooms braced for the chill, for the wariness, for the slow fencing-match of a conversation in which he must advance toward his purpose an inch a week under cover of the weather, Lorenzo found there was nothing to be braced against. There was no lacquer on this woman at all.
He felt it happen in his body before he understood it.
His shoulders came down from about his ears, where they had apparently been living for a year.
The hum under his skin, the tarantella, the bee in the bottle, the ceaseless vibration that his friends mocked and endured and that he could no more govern than his own heartbeat, slowed, and gentled, and settled, like water going quiet enough at last to hold a reflection.
He could hear the birds through the open window and the little clink of Miss Smith’s thimble.
He could hear the house itself creaking and stretching around them as it woke from its seven years’ sleep.
And under all of it, he could feel the pull of her attention, the open frankness of her gaze, the way her laugh had gone through him and left something warm and restless in its wake.
His resolution of the corridor, to say nothing of Matteo, not today, not until he knew what manner of person he was dealing with, was already coming apart in his mind. He knew what manner of person he was dealing with. He had known it from the laugh.
“My ancestor,” he said, “was an artist.”
He had said these words a hundred times, in a hundred rooms, to faces politely arranging themselves for boredom. He heard himself say them now as if for the first time.
“An artist of the Renaissance. His name was Matteo di Bianchi. He was of Florence, as I am of Florence, the same streets, signorina, the same parish. I was baptized where he was baptized.”
Miss Carroway leaned forward, her expression riveted, and he was, in turn, fascinated himself.
“Three hundred years ago, he left home to come to England, to undertake a great commission. His masterwork. And he never came home. At first, letters arrived, but then they stopped. No grave was ever found. He walked into this country, and within months, this country closed over him like water.”
He turned his cup a little on its saucer.
“My family has asked what became of him for three centuries. My grandfather asked it, and his grandfather, and every generation of us back to Matteo’s own brothers and sisters.
It has ruined some of us. It has been called our madness, and perhaps it is our madness, but I have spent my life following the little he left behind, through paintings, and libraries, and one cliff-top house in Cornwall, and the trail of him, signorina, the whole long trail of him, leads here.
At a manor near a village that was called Severnwick when he knew it.
” He looked up from the cup. “At this house.”
Miss Carroway’s lips had parted. The color stood high in her cheeks.
Her eyes had gone wide and brilliant, and they were shining, actually shining, wet-bright in the May light, and she looked like nothing so much as a woman being handed, without warning, the one gift she had wanted all her life and been told a hundred times she could not have.
“In this house,” she breathed. “A lost Florentine. A masterwork. In my house.” She pressed both hands flat to the table as if to keep it from floating. “Bessy. Bessy. We have been here one day.”
“I heard, Miss Lucy.”
“One day!”
“You had best drink your tea while it is hot,” said Miss Smith, unmoved, “if you mean to turn the house over for lost Italians directly after.”
Miss Carroway laughed again, that same low, throaty, unruly laugh, quicker now, and already Lorenzo was listening for it, already some attentive part of him had begun cataloging it, the way his eye cataloged a brushstroke it meant to know again, and he laughed with her, easily, without weighing it, and could not remember the last time he had laughed so.
The sound of it settled deeper this time, warm and insistent, and he was aware of the line of her throat when she tipped her head back, the way her curls had escaped further, the dust still smudged along the edge of her hand where she had been turning over her own house.
The house had waited three hundred years.
It would keep another hour. Matteo, who had crossed a continent for love of a great work, would surely not begrudge his descendant one pot of over-sugared tea in a sunlit room, in the company of this woman, who owned every stone Lorenzo had come to touch and who wanted, Dio, to hear about it.
It could not hurt, surely, to enjoy himself for a moment.
“So.” Miss Lucy Carroway leaned in, eyes alight, chin in her hands. “Begin at the beginning. And leave nothing out.”