Chapter 6
The churches still stand, but the words inside them have begun to change
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
Banns.
Lorenzo turned the word over in his mouth as the carriage swayed under him, the lane jolting up through the floorboards into his legs. It did not improve with handling.
Banns.
It sounded like a thing done to criminals. In the same quarter hour, she had given him parish, resident, license, and reading, each one delivered by Miss Lucy Carroway with crisp assurance. He had nodded through all of it and understood perhaps half.
“Say it again,” he said. “The whole of it.”
“The banns,” said Lucy, beside him, with the patience of a governess who liked her pupil, “are the public notice of a marriage. They are read aloud in church on three Sundays, one after another, so that anyone with an objection may raise it. You must be a resident in the parish. Mr. Sandys will want your name, your condition, and your church, and he will want to look at you for rather a long time without appearing to, and you will bear it beautifully.” A pause.
“You are resident at The Rusty Anchor. That answers the residence. My father will want to see the entry in the banns book with his own eyes, so it must all be done exactly, in order, with nothing for a lawyer to pick at. He is a barrister at the King’s Bench, signore.
When he descends upon us, and he will descend the moment my letter reaches him, I intend to hand him a proceeding so correct that he can find no purchase on it anywhere. It is the only mercy I can offer him.”
“You are fortifying your position,” said Lorenzo.
“I am.”
“Against your own father?”
“Against my own father, who taught me how.” She said it with love, which was the remarkable thing.
Behind them, on the rear seat, Bessy Smith sat with her workbag on her knees like a magistrate attending an execution of which she broadly approved.
She had received the morning’s news, conveyed by Lucy in the drawing room in approximately eleven words, without dropping a stitch.
She had looked at Lucy for a moment. Then she had looked at Lorenzo for a considerably longer moment, a look that had gone through his coat and his waistcoat and his character and out the other side.
Then she had said, “I’ll fetch my bonnet,” and that had been the whole of the opposition.
Lorenzo suspected the companion was not finished with him. He suspected the companion was a long-term undertaking.
The carriage, Lucy’s father’s own traveling carriage, its coachman wearing the expression of a servant composing his letter home, rolled between hedges white with blossoms. Lorenzo sat in a barrister’s carriage beside a woman he had known since that morning, on his way to post public notice that he would marry her, and waited to realize that it was madness.
It did not feel like madness. That was the strangest part of an entirely strange day. It felt like the click of a well-made mechanism seating itself in his chest.
What it also felt like, and this pressed on him harder with every turn of the wheels, was a letter he had not written.
His father was in Florence, in the chair by the tall window in the room that had been the good salon for three hundred years.
The sun still came onto the wall in the late afternoon exactly as it always had.
His father sat in that chair more of every day now, a rug over his knees against the drafts, and waited.
He did not say he was waiting. In the letters taken down by Lorenzo’s cousin because his own hand wandered, he wrote that the weather was fine, that the roof wanted attention, that Lorenzo was to eat properly among the English who boiled everything.
But he was waiting. He had given his strength and his health and a good part of his life to the same silence Lorenzo had served, and he had passed the whole weight of it to Lorenzo without apology, only with the clear expectation that the work would continue.
Now he sat by the window while the light crossed the wall, and waited to learn whether three centuries of di Bianchi men had finally found what they had been hunting.
And Lorenzo had not written. Not from Cornwall, when the journals opened. Not from the road. He had told himself there was nothing yet to say that would not be cruelty. Hope was the sharpest instrument one could use on an old man. One did not raise it without certainty.
But the truth had less dignity than that.
The truth was that he had not known how to put into a letter what it was to stand at the end of three hundred years of pointing.
The whole long compass needle of his family had swung west, and west, and further west, and it had come to rest at last on Grey House above a brown river, and everything in Lorenzo strained toward that house like a hound against a collar.
And first, first, he must stand in a vicarage and spell his name for a country priest.
He almost laughed. He caught the shape of it in time and turned it into a cough, because the laugh held no bitterness, and that was the thing he could not yet explain to himself.
The secret room behind the library had waited three centuries.
It had, at present, a door shut upon it by the small, determined young lady at his side, who had made her terms with her back against the shelving.
And Lorenzo, who could not wait for coffee to cool, found that he did not resent the delay so much as marvel at its author.
He would write to his father tonight. Both letters’ worth in one. Babbo, I have found the house. Also, I am to be married. His father would read the second sentence three times and then ring for wine.
“You are talking to yourself in Italian,” Lucy observed. “Under your breath. You do it when you think.”
“I do it always,” Lorenzo admitted. “In company, I merely do it more quietly. What did I say?”
“I have no idea. It sounded like arithmetic.”
“It was a letter,” he said, “that I owe.”
She glanced at him sideways, quick and shrewd, and did not ask.
She was learning the doors of him already, he thought, and choosing which to knock upon.
He was beginning to suspect that she chose better than he did.
It was disconcerting to be the recipient of such interest when it was usually he who dispensed it.
The lane dropped, the hedges gave way, and the village opened before them. The one street, the tide out, the boats on their sides in the mud like sleeping cattle, and the smell of salt and fish and smoke rising to meet the carriage.
And every living soul in Little Severn stopped what it was doing.
It was not subtle. Lorenzo had been stared at in villages the length of England, and he knew the ordinary grades of it. The flick, the lean, the murmur behind the hand. This was none of those. This was the full and honest halt.
The woman with the fish basket stood in her doorway with a fish actually suspended in her grip.
The carter set down his barrel with ceremony, as one clearing the decks.
Two children ran the length of the street ahead of the carriage, crying news to doorways that had already heard it, and the doorways emptied, and by the time the coachman drew up before the church gate, there was a modest crowd assembled with the frank, unhurried attention of people who did not intend to pretend they were doing anything else.
“The new owner,” said Lucy, under her breath, with dawning comprehension. “Oh, heavens. I am the raree-show.”
“What?” asked Lorenzo, perplexed.
“The raree-show,” Lucy answered quietly. “The curiosity everyone has come out to stare at.”
“Ah. Like the peep-shows in the piazzas at home.” Lorenzo understood at once. “Prepare yourself, signorina. You are about to eclipse every one of them.”
He handed her down from the carriage. The crowd sighed, audibly, collectively, a sound like the tide turning. Miss Smith descended behind them and swept the street with a scowl, and the crowd discovered urgent business, all of it, everywhere, at once.
The vicarage stood beside the church in a garden given over to gooseberries and bees, and the Reverend Mr. Sandys received them in a study lined with sermons and smelling of ink and apples.
He was an old, mild, deliberate gentleman with white hair rising from his head like steam and spectacles worn low, and he moved through the world at the pace of the church he kept, which had been standing for seven hundred years and saw no reason for haste in others.
He had already heard of Miss Carroway’s arrival, naturally.
Lorenzo watched him not say so. The whole village had known by midnight the night before that the new owner of Grey House had arrived, and the vicar of a parish this size knew what the village knew before the village had finished knowing it.
Yet Mr. Sandys arranged chairs and sent for his housekeeper and inquired after the state of the roads with the serene manner of a man to whom the afternoon’s business was a complete and delightful surprise.
Then he sat down behind his desk, drew a great flat book toward himself, and peered at them over the spectacles.
“Now,” he said. “I understand I am to have the pleasure of calling banns.”
“You are, Mr. Sandys,” said Lucy.
“For yourself, Miss Carroway, the parish is very glad to see Grey House opened, I may say. My predecessor used to dine there in Captain Belafonte’s day. And for this gentleman …” The mild eyes came around, and settled, and gave him their long look without appearing to do anything of the kind.
“Signor Lorenzo di Bianchi,” said Lorenzo, and bowed.
“Just so,” said Mr. Sandys, and dipped his pen. “We shall proceed gently, sir, and arrive together. Your name in full, if you would be so kind. Slowly, and I will thank you to spell it.”
Lorenzo spelled it. There was a difficulty at once regarding the di, which Mr. Sandys wished to know the nature of. Was it a name, or a courtesy, or, as it were, scaffolding?