Chapter 5 #2
“Name it,” he said again, but softer, because he was watching her face now, and whatever was written there had made him forget the wall entirely.
“Wherever this trail leads,” said Lucy, “I go with you.”
A pause.
“Signorina,” he said slowly, “if you wish to be present at the work, naturally, it is your house, you may stand at my shoulder every hour of every—”
“You misunderstand me.” Her heart was a fist against her ribs.
“I have listened to you all morning, signore. Ships, and cities, and storms, and crates of paintings that could not sit alone. Your trail did not begin in this house, and I would stake this house on the belief that it does not end here either. It will lead somewhere. Trails do. And when it leads out that door, down the river, over the sea, to Florence or Rome or the ends of the earth, I am going with it. All the way. Not as a patroness reading your letters in Gloucestershire. As …” The word she wanted was partner, and it was big enough, so she said it plainly.
“… as your equal in the whole adventure. Every mile of it.”
He had gone quite motionless, watching her.
“And you will know as well as I do,” Lucy went on, and here her courage tried to leave her, and she caught it by the collar and held on, “that there is no arrangement under English heaven by which a young unmarried woman travels the world at a gentleman’s side as his equal.
Not one. I have had years to search for such an arrangement, signore, and I am here to tell you it does not exist. Except …
” Her breath had gone somewhere. She retrieved it. “Except the one.”
She watched him not understand.
She watched him begin to understand.
“So that is my condition,” said Lucy Carroway, twenty-one years old, recently the mistress of Grey House, to the man she had known since a quarter past ten that morning. “If you wish to pursue your ancestor through my house and beyond it, you must marry me.”
The library was so quiet she could hear the dust.
She could hear other things too. Her own blood, roaring in her ears like the tide over the flats.
A gull, somewhere above the chimneys, laughing at something, at her, quite possibly.
The tick of the great clock in the gallery, which had been wound that morning for the first time in seven years, measuring out the longest seconds of her life.
He did not laugh. That was the first mercy.
She had braced for laughter, braced to have to stand there with her back against her uncle’s secrets while an amused foreigner explained to her gently what a child she was, and it did not come.
He did not laugh, and he did not splutter, and he did not look for the exit.
He thought.
She could see him do it. It was extraordinary to watch, the impulsive creature of the morning, all spilled words and escaping hands, gone suddenly and completely motionless.
His dark eyes were fixed on her with the total attention she had seen him give the carved wall not a quarter hour since, as though she were a surface under which something had been hidden, and he were reading her from left to right.
The silence stretched. Lucy’s nerve began, traitorously, to fray at the edges.
Every governess she had ever had rose up in a body at the back of her mind, shrieking.
Mama’s voice arrived over the top of them, not shrieking, which was worse.
“You proposed. To an Italian. In a library. On your second day. Lucy, we cannot even tell people you are dead, because then they will ask how.”
She thought, I could laugh now. I could turn it, make it a jest, a test, save us both, and he would let me. He is kind enough to let me.
She held fast, with her cold hands folded and her chin up and her dreams declared out loud and standing in the open air between them, and she watched the stranger think about it honestly, the way no one had ever thought about anything she had said in her entire life.
When he finally spoke, there was no smile in it at all.
“Signorina Carroway. Before I answer you, I will tell you what you are asking for. Because you have been honest with me this morning, more honest than anyone in this country has ever been, and I will not repay it by letting you buy blind.”
He came a step nearer, and his voice was low and level and entirely without its music.
“You have made your condition. Now hear mine, because I have one also, and mine is not a condition I choose. It is a condition I am. The quest comes first.”
“Signor—”
“No. Hear it all.” His hand came up, not commanding, almost pleading.
“You compared me this morning, in your head, to someone. I watched you do it. Someone you loved who went to sea and filled your childhood with the world. And you have decided I am that man, and that marrying me is a ship’s passage, and perhaps you are right.
But understand what you would be boarding.
This—” His hand turned, taking in the wall behind her, the hidden dark, everything.
“—this is not my occupation, signorina. It is my inheritance and my illness, both. It has ruined di Bianchi men for three hundred years. It ruined my grandfather. It is quietly ruining my father this very hour, in Florence, in a chair by a window. I have watched what it does, and I have it worse than any of them, and I will not lie to a woman in her own library. If the trail calls, I go. If it calls on our wedding morning, I go from the church door. If it calls when you are tired, when you are ill, when you are frightened, when any reasonable husband would stop … I will not want to stop. I will have to be made to stop, and I do not know if I can be made. My ancestor has had my whole heart since before I knew I had one. I cannot promise you the first place in it. I can only promise you I will never pretend the truth is otherwise.”
He drew a breath.
“That is what I am. Marry that, or shut no more doors on me, and we will find you some better arrangement … a courier, a companion, I will think of something. But do not chain yourself to a man’s madness believing it is a pleasure cruise.”
The library was quiet again.
And Lucy, whose heart should have sunk, felt it do the opposite.
Felt it rise and rise like a gull on the wind off the flats, because she could have laughed out loud at him, at the dear, earnest enormity of his miscalculation.
He thought he was warning her off. He thought he was describing the rocks, and he was describing the destination.
“Signore,” she said, “you have misunderstood me from the beginning, so let me be as honest as you. I am not asking for the first place in your heart. I am not even asking for your heart, not this morning; I have known you mere hours, and I am reckless, not simple. I am asking for the seat beside you when you go from the church door.”
She pushed off from the carved vines and closed the distance he had left, and had to tip her head back to hold his eyes.
“You say the quest comes first. Good. Then we want the same thing first, and I have never heard a better beginning for a marriage in my life. My mother put my father first for thirty years, and it made her frightened of weather. I do not want a husband who stays. I want a husband who takes me with him when he goes. You cannot frighten me with the very thing I am purchasing, signore. Chain myself to your madness? I am bidding on it.”
He stared at her.
“But know this also,” Lucy went on, and her chin did its work, “since we are laying terms. If I am to be chained to the madness, I will be chained as crew and not as cargo. When you go from the church door, my hand is in yours or you do not go through my house to get there. That is the whole of the agreement. Your quest first, our quest first, and me beside it. Every mile.”
And then the smile began.
It started in his eyes. That was the ruin of her, that it started in the eyes, some slow, dark kindling, like a lamp carried up from the back of a house, and then it reached his mouth and spread, unhurried, entirely without mockery.
A smile that seemed to have traveled a very long way to arrive and meant to stay now it had come; and his teeth were white against the warm brown of his skin, and the last of the morning’s guardedness went out of his face the way weather clears, all at once, leaving distance and light.
This close, she could smell the miles on him, salt and leather and horse and clean linen and something warm beneath that was only himself, the smell of roads and harbors, the smell of away.
And Lucy, who did not swoon, who had made rather a point throughout her life of not swooning, felt the room tilt gently on its axis and had to put one hand flat against her uncle’s carved vines.