Chapter 4 #2
“I shall do no such thing,” said Lucy, meaning it with her whole being. The warmth in her belly spread a little further at the way his passion lit his face.
He had been everywhere. It came out sideways, in pieces.
Rome came up because of a ceiling. Vienna came up because of a dealer who had cheated his father.
Genoa came up and brought a sea voyage with it, and a storm, and a crate of panels lashed to the deck that he had sat beside for two days in the wet because they could not sit alone.
Lucy drank her cooling tea and watched him talk with his hands. The feeling that had been circling all morning came and landed.
He is like Uncle Henry.
Not in feature. Not in voice. Uncle Henry had been all bark and bigness, sunburnt, loud in doorways.
This man was cut finer and wound tighter.
But the weather was the same. Some people carried weather with them.
One could stand in an ordinary room and feel the horizon in it, feel that the person before you had come from somewhere and was going somewhere, that the world was wide and they were personally acquainted with the width of it.
Uncle Henry had brought that essence into her father’s careful house twice a year, and everything, everyone, had been more alive while it was in the room, and everything had been smaller when it left.
She had been fourteen when the weather stopped coming.
And now it sat in her drawing room asking for a second cup. This force, this coiled and traveled and impatient creature, a few years older than herself and a whole world older than that.
Lucy understood, watching him fail to sit all the way back in his chair, that whatever else this man was, he was going somewhere.
He was mid-flight even now, only pausing.
And she wanted, fiercely, disgracefully, to know where.
The wanting settled low and insistent, making her shift in her seat without meaning to.
That was the intrigue of him. Not the dark eyes, though the dark eyes did no harm. The going.
The way he looked at her sometimes made her heart beat faster. A surprising warmth ignited between her thighs when his gaze held hers too long. She felt it and told herself it was nothing, but her body knew better.
“And your friends,” she prompted. “The ones with the signal.”
“Ah.” His whole face gave in to warmth. “Three of them traveled with me from Italy. A year ago. Marco, who was a tutor, and his brother Angelo, who is a pharmacist. He treats illness, injuries, old wounds. He is a magician. And Sebastian, my partner, who is English by birth and Florentine by nature. Half a year, signorina. We arrive four bachelors.” He held up four fingers, then folded three of them down with the air of a man reporting casualties.
“Marco. Married. Sebastian. Married. Angelo. Married. Also, two English friends we made here. Married, married. It is like a fever in this country. I am the last one standing, and I confess I no longer feel safe.”
“I shall try to restrain myself,” said Lucy gravely, and had the satisfaction of seeing him fumble his teacup. The small victory sent a spark of satisfaction through her, quick and bright.
But it was around then that she began to notice the glances.
They were quick, and they went to Bessy.
Not admiring glances. Nothing so simple.
But a flick, a weighing flick, arriving always at the turn of a sentence, at the moment a sentence might have gone one way and went, instead, another.
He would gather himself toward something, and glance at Bessy sitting stolid over her mending, and the something would fold its wings and the sentence would land safely elsewhere, in Vienna or on a ceiling.
He did it three times in a quarter hour. He was not a man built for concealment. The machinery of it sat on him like a borrowed coat. And it was almost tender, watching him work the latch of his one locked room and decide, each time, not yet, not before witnesses.
Because there was a locked room. For all the spilling, the pigments and the storms and the married friends, he had not said one word more about Grey House.
Not what he thought his ancestor had done there.
Not what he hoped to find. The trail ended at this house, so he had said, and then he had built a wall of Florence around the subject and talked along the top of it for an hour.
Mama would have called it suspicious. Papa would have called it grounds for caution.
Lucy found she called it a door. And she had never once in her life left a door alone.
So when he set down his cup at last and said, with a carelessness so labored that she nearly laughed aloud, “Signorina, you mentioned a library, I think? The heart of such a house is always its library. I should be honored to see it, if the dust permits,” Lucy was already rising.
“The dust permits,” she said. “The dust has no say in this house any longer. Bessy,” and she heard herself do it, heard herself step over the line as neatly as stepping over a puddle, “would you find Mr. Tredwell and ask whether the girls have reached my uncle’s rooms yet?
I particularly wish them left exactly as they are until I have seen them. Exactly. Every paper.”
Bessy looked at her.
It was not a long look, and no muscle in her face moved that a stranger could have named, but it contained the entire text of the sermon Mama would have preached.
Alone, with a foreign gentleman, in a library, on your second day?
“I’ll see to it, Miss Lucy,” Bessy replied, folding her mending. “The passage door sticks, I’ve noticed. I shall likely have to come back this way more than once.”
Which meant, “I will be within call, and he had better know it.”
“Thank you, Bessy,” said Lucy, and did not meet her eye, because the corner of Bessy’s mouth had done the thing it did, and if Lucy met her eye, they would both be lost. Her heart beat a little faster at the small defiance, a tingle of nervousness running along her skin.
She found the library on the second try, and was proud of it.
Her feet remembered more than her head did.
Down the long gallery, past the cases where the signor slowed like a cart in sand and had to be spoken to twice.
Left where a bad sea-picture hung that she remembered from being ten and thinking it was a bad sea-picture.
Through the double doors at the end, into the smell.
That was what stopped her on the threshold.
Not the sight. The sight was grand enough, two stories of books rising into the gloom, the ladders on their rails, the gallery rail running round above, the shrouded furniture, the great desk humped under its sheet like a sleeping animal.
But the smell. Leather and old paper and pipe tobacco gone faint and sweet with the years, and under it something she had no word for that was simply the captain’s house where Uncle Henry had resided for many years.
For a moment, she was ten years old on this exact square of floor with her braid coming loose, being told that a library was not a room, Lucy-bird, it was a fleet, and every book in it would sail her somewhere if she gave it the chance.
The memory touched her like a hand on the back of her neck, familiar and sharp at once.
She let the moment wash over her. Then she folded it away, because the signor had gone strange beside her.
Strange was the only word. The talking man was gone.
He had stopped two steps into the room, and he was reading it.
She could think of no other way to describe what his eyes were doing.
Reading the room from left to right like a page, the windows, the shelving, the run of the cornice, the gallery above, and his lips were moving very slightly, and one hand had risen halfway into the air and hung there, forgotten by its owner.
Her own breath came quicker as she watched him, a warm pull in her chest at the way his body moved through the space.
Then he began to prowl.
There was no other word for that either.
He went down the length of the room slowly, with his head tipped back, trailing his fingers along the shelf-edges the way one trails a hand in water from a boat.
He stopped at the windows and stared at them for a long moment, not through them, at them, and paced the distance from the last window to the corner, heel to toe, counting under his breath in Italian.
He crossed to the fireplace end and did the same.
He came back up the room on the inner wall, the wall the library shared with the rest of the house, and here he slowed further still, and his fingers left the shelf-edge and spread flat against the carved backing between two shelves, and pressed, gently, as though the wall might have a pulse.
Lucy watched all of this with her arms folded and her curiosity now fully off its leash and running. Her skin prickled with it, a warm tingle along her arms, her heart beating a little faster as she tried to guess what he was feeling in his fingers.
“Signore?”
“Mmm.”
“What are you doing?”
“Mmm.” A pause. “One moment, signorina. Forgive me. One moment.”
He was at the carving now. The shelves along the inner wall were old, far older than the rest, even Lucy could see that now that she looked, the wood nearly black, the backing behind the books worked all over with vines and leaves in the stiff old style, and he was tracing the vines with one pigment-stained finger, following a stem through its loops the way one follows a line of music, frowning, muttering.
“Signor di Bianchi. I must tell you that in England it is customary, when a gentleman begins stroking a lady’s walls, to offer the lady some explanation.”
That reached him. He surfaced, and had the grace to look abashed, and gestured at the wall, at the windows, at the whole room, with both hands at once.
“Your library is older than your house, signorina.”
“I beg your pardon?”