Chapter 6 #2
Once explained, he entered with two capital letters, struck out, entered with none, considered, and entered a third time correctly, remarking that the banns book had survived the Commonwealth and would no doubt survive this also.
The Christian name went in without incident.
The surname required the pen to be re-cut.
“Condition,” said Mr. Sandys. “Bachelor?”
“Bachelor.”
“Age of majority?”
“I have thirty years.”
“Parents living?”
“Sì.” The words came out with more inside them than he had intended, and he felt Lucy’s attention touch him, light as a hand on his sleeve. “They live in Florence. I will write to them this evening.”
“They will approve, one trusts?”
“My father will ring for wine,” said Lorenzo, with certainty.
Mr. Sandys’s mouth twitched, and he wrote something, and then he laid down the pen and folded his hands, and Lorenzo understood that they had arrived at the true center of the interview, the matter the pen had merely been circling.
“Signor di Bianchi. You will forgive an old man a question or two beyond the book. It is my duty, you understand, and my inclination, which is worse, for a duty can be discharged briskly, but an inclination lingers.” The spectacles came off, were polished, went back.
“You are, I take it, of the Roman communion?”
Half of Lorenzo’s mind, and he would confess it to no one, but half of his mind at least, and he suspected the larger half, was at that moment a mile up the hill, in the dark behind a carved wall, moving along shelves he had seen for thirty seconds and had been inventorying ever since.
Journals by the dozen … whose? The marble figures, white as teeth in the dark, no bigger than a lapdog, the finish on them soft even in that dead light, and if they were of the hand he thought, if they were even of the school of the hand he thought, then the little room behind the library of Grey House held more of consequence than most palaces he had been ushered through with ceremony.
And drawings. Rolled drawings, sheaved like kindling.
Paper survived so poorly. Three centuries in the damp of this country, and yet the room had breathed dry at him, mineral and kept, and someone had oiled that mechanism within living memory, and the question of who had oiled it was a thread that, pulled, unraveled somewhere he could not yet see.
“Signore?”
“Forgive me.” Lorenzo returned to the vicarage at speed. “Yes. Roman. Baptized in Santa Croce, confirmed at eleven years, and I will not pretend to you that I have been a great ornament to the faith since, but it is mine, as my eyes are mine. I do not know how to be otherwise.”
He said it truthfully, and watched the old man receive it, and could not tell what the reception was. Beside him, Lucy came in smooth as water.
“My father took advice on the point before I ever came into Gloucestershire, Mr. Sandys,” she said, which was, Lorenzo was nearly certain, a magnificent invention, deployed without a flicker, “and I believe the law is entirely settled. The marriage of a Catholic and a Protestant, solemnized in the established church, according to its rites, after banns duly called, is good in law in every respect. Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act makes no exception of the Roman communion.
Indeed, it makes rather a point of including it.
If it would ease your mind, I know Papa would be honored to correspond with you on the question.
He does love a correspondence with a careful man, and he finds so few. ”
Lorenzo watched this pass across the desk and settle over the Reverend Mr. Sandys like a warm rug.
It was masterly. In four sentences, she had answered the law, flattered the questioner, produced her father as both authority and threat, and made the entire matter appear to have been resolved months ago by wiser heads, requiring nothing from anyone present but the formality of agreement.
“That will not be necessary, Miss Carroway, though I take it very kindly.” Mr. Sandys resumed his pen with the air of a man who had discharged both duty and inclination and could now enjoy himself.
“The law asks your conformity to the rite, signore, not the surrender of your conscience, and I am too old to believe the Almighty checks the register against the heart. You will be married by the Book of Common Prayer, in that church,” a nod through the window, at the gray tower standing in its leaning graveyard, “and what you say to God privately in Italian afterward is between the two of you, and I dare say He is equal to the language.”
He wrote.
“Now. Conditions. The banns must be called on three Sundays, successively. The first calling will be this Sunday coming. And it is my practice, my invariable practice, sir, and the bishop’s strong preference, that where the groom is a stranger to the parish, he shall have kept residence here a clear month before the marriage.
Thirty days.” The spectacles came up. “You are lodged at The Rusty Anchor, I understand?”
“I am.”
“Then the residence and the callings will run out their course together, and the arithmetic answers itself. A month, signore. Can a Florentine survive a month in Little Severn?” The old eyes were shrewd and not unkind. “There is no reason for haste, I take it?”
“None whatever,” said Lucy, serene as a painted saint, and Lorenzo kept his expression under control, because the reason for haste was a mile up the hill behind a shut door, and it was three hundred years old, and it had nothing to do with what the vicar meant, and there was no possible way to say so.
A month. He worked his own arithmetic while the quill scratched. A month resident in the shadow of Grey House, with the freedom of it promised him from attics to foundations, and the secret room. Surely she would open it now.
The machinery was begun, the entry was in the book, with the room open, and thirty days of daylight, and the journals, and the marble, and the drawings.
A month ago, the prospect of a month’s delay in anything would have had him vibrating out of his boots.
Now he sat in a vicarage smelling of apples and thought, Thirty days in the treasure house, and at the end of them, this astonishing person.
He could not find the hardship in it anywhere. He looked for it twice.
He glanced at her instead. She was leaning forward to watch Mr. Sandys form the letters of her name, her curls making their bid for freedom on the one side as they had all day, her whole face lit with the gravity and glee of watching her own life being entered into a book.
Lorenzo had the sensation of stepping onto ground and finding it held.
She is clever, and she is brave to the point of lunacy, and she barred a door with her body and out-negotiated me in my own obsession, and when I told her the worst of myself, she was beyond persuasion.
He had spent months in a country of people who wished, at various volumes, that he would be less. She had listened to the whole of him for one morning and demanded, as her price, more.
Amazement was not the word. He had been amazed by objects. This was closer to what he felt before certain paintings, the ones where the attribution was impossible and the evidence of the eyes would not be argued with. It should not exist. It exists. Adjust the history of the world accordingly.
“There,” said Mr. Sandys, and blotted the page, and turned the book about for them to see.
“Lorenzo di Bianchi, bachelor, of this parish. Lucy Carroway, spinster, of this parish. First calling, Sunday next.” He regarded the entry with the satisfaction of a craftsman.
“In forty years of this book, that is my first Florentine. Indeed, my first Catholic. You come after three sets of Priddles and a Wickers, signore. I hope the company does not oppress you.”
“Mr. Sandys,” said Lorenzo, with complete honesty, “it is the finest company my name has kept in three hundred years.”
The vicar walked them through the churchyard himself, between the leaning stones, to show them where they would stand.
The church took Lorenzo the moment he crossed the threshold, as he had known it would.
Norman work, the nave low and thick-walled, the round arches springing squat and sure from their piers, the light falling in blades through deep windows onto floor slabs worn into hollows by seven hundred years of fishermen’s boots.
It smelled of lime and damp and candle. Zigzag molding round the chancel arch, cut by some mason dead six centuries who had never signed anything and never expected to be thought of again. He would have been wrong because Lorenzo thought of him now.
Lorenzo stood in the aisle and thought of that mason, and thought, with the strange doubled vision that had been coming over him all day, of Matteo praying somewhere.
A man did not keep a vow beyond death without praying.
If he was in this country, in this valley, and every fiber of Lorenzo now believed that he had been, then it was not impossible, it was not even unlikely, that Matteo di Bianchi had stood upon these same hollowed slabs, a Roman in a stripped church, saying what he had to say to God in whichever language made sense to him.
And in one month, his descendant would stand there and be married.
The doubled vision swam, and settled, and became simply the view. Peace came into his chest for the space of perhaps a minute, a condition so foreign to him that it took him most of the minute to identify it.
Then they went out through the porch into the sunny afternoon, and the entire village was waiting for them.
Not the entire village, perhaps. But a solid deputation of it, disposed with transparent carelessness about the church gate, the lane, and the churchyard wall, leaning, loitering, examining the sky, conducting conversations of no words whatever, and at the front of it, glowing like a lamp, stood Puddy of The Rusty Anchor, who had plainly abandoned his taproom to destiny.