Chapter 7
The figures must live. The hand must show the tendon, the face the grief
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
Lucy had lasted one hour and forty minutes.
She wished the fact recorded. She recorded it herself, privately, with some ceremony: she had genuinely intended to wait until tomorrow.
She had said tomorrow in the carriage in her firmest voice, the voice with Papa in it, and she had meant it.
There were letters to write. There was a household hanging half-assembled about her ears.
There was dinner to invent out of a kitchen that had woken from seven years’ sleep that very week, and a betrothal hours old, and every reason under heaven to keep the door in the library shut until morning like a rational woman.
She had opened it at half past four.
The trouble had been the wall itself. She had gone into the library to write to Papa at the long table. Neutral ground, she had reasoned. Good light. And the carved vines had sat there at the edge of her vision the entire time, keeping their three hundred years directly over her shoulder.
Her letter had gotten as far as, My dear Papa, I hope this finds you, and stopped, because how did one continue that sentence, and also because the wall was humming.
Not truly. She knew it was not truly. But a shut door with a secret behind it gave off something, some pressure on the skin, and Lucy Carroway had spent her whole life on the wrong side of shut doors, and she was one-and-twenty, and it was her own house, and Uncle Henry would have been ashamed of her.
So she had sent for lamps, and for Signor di Bianchi at The Rusty Anchor, and surrendered with, she felt, considerable dignity.
That had been two hours ago. She had seen him arrive.
She had watched him come up the drive at a pace suggesting the horse had been consulted and had agreed the matter was urgent.
She had opened the room, watched him remove his hat, and been called away almost at once by Mr. Tredwell on the matter of dinner, and then by one of the new maids on the matter of a bat in the blue bedroom, and then by dinner again, dinner being apparently a negotiation conducted in installments.
The bat had taken twenty minutes and won.
Now she came back along the gallery in the early evening light with a second lamp in her hand, through the library where the case stood swung wide on its hinges, and stopped in the opening of the hidden room, and forgot entirely what she had come to say.
He had taken off his coat.
It hung over the back of the visitor’s chair, discarded with careless abandon, as if he had forgotten he owned it.
He stood at the shelves in his shirtsleeves with the cuffs turned back to the elbow, a lamp raised in one hand, and he was talking.
Not to her. He had not heard her. Not to anyone.
A low, continuous river of Italian, half under his breath, rising and falling as his eyes moved along the spines.
Cataloging, she realized. Thinking aloud to an audience centuries old.
Lucy stood in the doorway and found herself facing a difficulty.
The difficulty was his forearms. She was not aware forearms could constitute a difficulty.
Nothing in her education had covered it.
But the turned-back cuffs revealed lean brown arms corded with use, the lamplight sliding along them as he reached and turned and reached again, and the sight did something absolutely disgraceful to the rhythm of her heart.
It was not as though she had never seen a man’s arms. Farm laborers.
The blacksmith at home. But she had never stood like this, close and quiet in a little lamplit room, with a man so informally dressed.
A man who was going to be her husband. With his collar loosened and his sleeves rolled and his tanned throat moving as he murmured to his shelves.
The whole of it was suddenly, overwhelmingly domestic, and that domestic atmosphere, was far more dangerous than the romantic. The romantic she had defenses against. Nobody had warned her about shirtsleeves.
Heat bloomed low in her belly. Her pulse stumbled. She took a breath and put her defenses back up where they belonged.
Passage, she reminded herself. Not love. You have bargained a berth on a ship, Lucy Carroway, not a heart.
The ship went on murmuring in Italian, unaware of its passenger.
She came in and set her lamp on the desk, and the second light changed the room. It lifted it out of its pools and made it whole, and she took her first proper look at what she owned.
The marbles caught the lamplight and drank it. There were eight of them ranged along the low shelf, none larger than a cat, and by lamplight, they were no longer white shapes in the dark, but people.
A knight kneeling with his helm in the crook of his arm, his face ruined by grief.
A crowned man asleep, or dead, or both, upon a bier no bigger than a prayer book.
A woman rising from a swirl of carved water with her arm at full stretch, offering upward something long and slender that Lucy’s eye took a moment to resolve … a sword.
Draped figures. A hooded one. Every fold of stone cloth fell as cloth falls. She leaned close to the kneeling knight. Every hand had knuckles, and nails, and the little tendons fanning across the back, in marble, at the scale of a walnut.
Above them, pinned drawings crowded the wall edge to edge, brown ink gone soft with age. Arches, vaults, columns, a doorway drawn four times over with alterations.
Below the drawings, the rolled sheets in their dozens, sheaved and stacked.
And the journals, a whole wall of them, shelf on shelf, and the longer she looked, the more clearly they sorted themselves into families: sober, modern calf bindings, older ones, brown and battered, and a few, low in the corner, that were older than old, vellum gone the color of tea.
And under everything, under the cold mineral breath of the place, the ghost of pipe tobacco, faithful as a dog.
Her uncle’s desk sat under the drawings with its dust and its dead candle and its open journal, waiting, and Lucy touched the back of its chair and did not sit yet, because there was a debt outstanding, and she had waited most of the day to collect it, which for her was a personal victory.
“Signore.”
He surfaced from the shelves like a swimmer, blinking.
“Signorina! Forgive me. I did not, how long—”
“Some time, I suspect. You were conversing with the sixteenth century.” She folded her hands.
“Signor di Bianchi. I have opened my home to you. I have entered your name in the parish book beside mine. I am, at the present moment, harboring you, your lamp, and your rolled-up sleeves in the most secret room in Gloucestershire.” She lifted her chin. “I have come to collect information.”
Something crossed his face. She was learning to read it.
A flicker of the old guardedness, the locked-room look, and then, watching her, it went out, and what replaced it was relief so plain it startled her.
He set down the lamp. He pushed the loose curl off his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a smudge of shelf-dust above one black eyebrow that she elected, for reasons of state, not to mention.
“Yes,” he said. “Every one of it. It is yours, and Dio, you cannot imagine what it is, to be permitted to say it aloud. I have carried this in silence through your whole country.” He paused.
“But not signor. I cannot make explanations as a Signor di Bianchi. All this formality. Please. My friends call me Lorenzo.”
“Then I shall call you Lorenzo,” said Lucy, and the name felt warm and foreign and forward in her mouth, like trying on a ring, “and you had better call me Lucy, since you have already done it once without leave and I let it pass.”
“Lucy,” he agreed, gravely, and did not smile, and his eyes did, and her defenses required inspection again. The sound of her name in his mouth sent an unanticipated shiver down her spine.
“Begin,” she said, and sat down on the edge of her uncle’s desk like a magistrate, “at the beginning. You promised me the good parts.”
He did not lecture. She had half expected a lecture.
He was so plainly a scholar, and scholars, in her limited experience, delivered.
But what he did instead was walk her through it, moving along the shelves as he talked, and the story came in fragments, each one handed to her attached to an object, the way Uncle Henry had used to do it.
“Matteo di Bianchi.” He drew one of the tea-colored vellum volumes from the low corner shelf with both hands, reverent as if holding a sacrament.
“Born in Florence, near enough to 1480. A boy in the great years. Imagine it, Lucy, the city crawling with genius the way this village crawls with gulls, and he is apprenticed young, and the workshop he passes through—” He opened the cover, angled it to her lamp.
It was dense with faded brown pictograms marching in rows, an axe, a little sword, a wave. “—Botticelli. Da Vinci.”
“Da Vinci,” said Lucy, to be sure her ears were honest.
“Da Vinci. Not a legend. Documented. A letter survives in Ferrara, a payment record in Milan. My family has known this piece of it always. It was the coal we warmed ourselves at through the lean generations. He studied under the master. A boy grinding colors and holding candles for the greatest mind God ever housed in one skull, and learning everything. Paint, yes, but Leonardo’s workshop taught engineering, anatomy, architecture, machines, water, stone.
A whole world in one room. That was Matteo’s schooling. ”
He set the journal down, tenderly, and moved along the shelf.
“And he grows, and he works. Panels, a chapel ceiling in Genoa, portraits. Good work, admired work, and then, in the year 1513, when he is a man of three-and-thirty—”
His hand found the wall of pinned drawings, and rested beneath them, beneath the arches and the vaults and the door drawn four times.