Chapter 7 #3
You are not one of Mama’s novels, swooning at a forearm. You have purchased an adventure, and the man happens to come attached to it, the way a mast comes attached to the sails, and one does not fall in love with a mast.
The assembly voted, carried the motion unanimously, and adjourned, and if one member abstained, some junior, back-bench member, sitting quietly in the dark with her eyes on his mussed hair, it did not record it.
The ledgers gave it up at ten o’clock.
They were not Uncle Henry’s ledgers. That was the first thing Lucy established when she pulled them from the deep drawer of the desk.
Three, flat folio volumes, bound in stiff vellum gone the same tea color as the corner journals, their pages crowded with a crabbed secretary’s hand in ink faded to the brown of old blood.
English, but Old English, the letters strange, the spelling wandering like a drunkard.
Accounts. Column after column of dates, sums, deliveries.
The dates began in 1514 and appeared to have been kept by a clerk or secretary.
But Uncle Henry’s pencil was everywhere in them.
That was what stopped her breath. The soft gray ticks in the margins, a modern hand annotating an ancient one, his modern hand, the racing downhill script.
A query here, an underline there, and on one page, boxed twice over in pencil with a force that had scored the paper, a single entry, and beside it, in Uncle Henry’s hand, three exclamation marks.
Lucy read the entry. She read it again. She could not make out every word of the crabbed old spelling, but she could make out enough.
“Lorenzo.”
The river of Italian went on.
“Lorenzo.”
He surfaced, and something in her face brought him out of his chair and around the desk in one movement, and then he was beside her, his lamp swinging over the page. She set her finger under the boxed entry and read it aloud as best the old letters allowed.
“Item, payd to the maisters of the quarrie at Hwitmarbel, for xij greate blocks of the whyte stone, greyned as wood is greyned, carriage by water to the workes, in secrecie, as before.”
She glanced up at him. “There are more. Look. Here, and here, the same name over and over, all through the year, payments and shipping notes, stone, stone, stone, from a private quarry. Hwitmarbel.” She tried the strange word twice. “Marble veined like wood-grain. Have you ever seen such stone?”
“Once,” said Lorenzo. His voice had gone soft and strange.
“This evening. In that corner.” He crossed to the low shelf and took up the marble hand, the reaching, open, life-sized hand, and brought it into the lamplight and turned it, and there, running through the pale stone like weather through planed timber, faint and unmistakable once seen, a grain.
“I could not place it. I have handled Carrara, Paros, Siena, half the stone of Italy, and I could not place it, and it has been shouting at me all evening.” He set the hand down beside the ledger, the object beside its receipt, three hundred years apart, and Lucy watched him go luminous.
“Lucy. Twelve great blocks in one year. And this is one year of how many? A man does not buy stone like this for a chapel doorway. This is quarrying for a lifetime’s work. For columns. For altars. For figures greater than a man. This is exactly, exactly what Matteo would need to fill a cathedral.”
He was already moving, to the corner shelf, to the tea-colored vellum journals, pulling the second one, and taking from his satchel by the chair a folded card that Lucy glimpsed only briefly: two columns, pictograms and letters.
A key. He laid journal and key side by side under the lamp and began to hunt, page after page of the marching symbols, his finger flying down the rows, muttering.
Lucy stood at his shoulder and watched a dead alphabet come alive under a stained fingertip, and it was, she thought, the finest thing she had ever been permitted to watch.
“There.” His finger stopped. He worked along a row, symbol by symbol, letter by letter, half-aloud, and then read it through, in English, slowly, in that voice that carried another man inside it.
“The white island gives the stone. The white island keeps the way. When the work is done, let no man seek the work. Let him seek the stone, for where the stone was born, there is the door.”
The lamps burned. The house held its breath. Lucy heard the words go down into her like an anchor finding bottom.
“The cathedral,” Lorenzo whispered. “Lucy, he is telling us where. Where the stone was born, there is the door. The cathedral is at Hwitmarbel, or the way to it is. The door, the beginning.” His hands had escaped and were describing spirals.
“It is there; it starts there. Where is there? Where is Hwitmarbel? Have you ever—”
“Never. But I know a man who had charts of every water in the world.” Lucy was already moving. “Bring the lamp.”
The chart drawers were in the long room off the gallery where the pistol case lived, exactly where they had been when she was ten, and Uncle Henry’s charts came out in great, stiff sliding sheets smelling of dust. The Levant, the Indies, half the oceans of the earth, until, near the bottom, England herself.
The whole southwest, the long peninsula, the Bristol Channel yawning between Wales and the West Country.
They spread it under both lamps on the great table and bent over it together, heads nearly touching, and hunted the coastline inch by inch, headland by headland, her finger on the north shore of Devon moving west, west.
“There.”
A speck of an island, standing off the Devon coast in the gray, engraved sea. The old chart gave it in letters smaller than ants, and gave, on the mainland shore inside it, a village name in letters barely larger.
Hwitmarbel I. And, on the coast, Whitcombe.
“Whitcombe,” said Lucy. Her voice came out not entirely her own. “The white combe. And the white marble island off it. Hwit is white in Old English.”
“Two days’ travel,” said Lorenzo. “Perhaps three.”
He was measuring with his fingers, walking them across Devon like a divider, and his hands were unsteady, actually unsteady, and his breath was audible. Then he stopped measuring and straightened and looked at her across the chart with his ancestral quest painted across his face.
“Lucy. Lucy, do you understand what you found tonight? Not I. You—”
“My uncle found it first,” said Lucy. “I only—”
He seized her.
It was nothing like the library kiss. That one had been a seal on a bargain, thorough and warm and half-smiling.
This one was a detonation.
His hands came round her, one at her waist, one splayed between her shoulder blades, and he brought her up against him and kissed her the way the tide came up the Severn, all at once and from everywhere.