Chapter 8
In Florence our legends stay in the workshop or the library. Here they walk the lanes with you
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
After she had arranged word for her parents that she would not be home, they went out through the gates of Grey House at first light with their newly hired coachman from the village, and Lucy watched the manor dwindle between the trees.
Seven years of gates. Every one of them stood open behind her now.
The morning was still cold, and the grass lay silver. Mist stretched along the river in a long white rope, while her breath fogged the glass. Under the traveling rug, her feet were warm and her hands were cold and her blood fizzed like a kettle coming to the boil.
She could not have said whether she wanted to laugh or be sick. She had been awake since four and dressed since five and had eaten nothing, and none of it mattered in the least.
Bessy sat opposite with her hands folded on the hamper like a general reviewing a field already won.
Every strap in the boot had been buckled twice.
Every band-box had been argued into its place.
The newly hired coachman would have had them slung under the seats out of the way, being a flat man who saw no virtue in a light-lidded thing full of bonnets.
Bessy had prevailed by the ancient method of standing beside the box in question with her arms folded until it went where she meant it to go, which was on top, where nothing could crush the caps.
“You’ll crick your neck,” Bessy said.
“I am saying goodbye to my house.”
“You’ll see it again in a month, God willing, with a ring on you.”
Lucy settled back in her seat. On her lap lay the Malory she had taken from the library.
It was a fat calf-bound tome with its corners going soft, Le Morte d’Arthur stamped along the spine in gilt gone brown.
Lorenzo sat at her side with his hat on his knees and his gaze out the window.
The wheels found the Bristol road, and they went west.
She had braced herself, in the planning of this journey, for a silent companion.
She had seen how he was with the papers and the marbles.
A man gone down a well, sending up no bucket for hours on end.
So she had packed the Malory and a workbag and three letters she had not replied to against long, mute miles of him thinking.
She need not have packed a thing.
He talked. How he talked. Not at her, that was the wonder of it, but to her, turning to be sure she had seen, touching her sleeve, rapping his knuckle on the glass.
A church tower off among elms, which he dated by its windows alone and mourned that they could not stop.
A broken arch standing alone in a sheep field, and they did stop; he begged the favor with such tragedy in his face that she rapped for the coachman herself, laughing, and Lorenzo handed her down and walked her through wet grass to lay her glove against stone twenty generations cold.
“Norman,” he said, the way another man might present a friend.
“Feel. The chisel went there, and there. Some man stood where you stand, Lucy, before your Conqueror’s grandsons were dust, and he made this curve with his two hands and the sun on his neck, and it has not fallen down yet.
This is what stone is. Paper burns, paint is eaten, gold is stolen first of all. Stone waits.”
The sheep watched them from a polite distance with contented faces.
Mud climbed the hem of her traveling dress.
The wind had her bonnet ribbons. Somewhere behind them, Bessy sat in the carriage, radiating an opinion about empty fields.
Lucy stood with her hand flat on a dead man’s arch and thought that she had bought passage on a ship and no one had warned her the ship would be good company.
They lost half an hour to the arch. She begrudged none of it.
The Malory came unwrapped sometime in the first afternoon, when the road ran straight and dull between hedges and the light lay long across the fields.
She read to him. It had not been the plan; she had meant to read to herself.
But a line wanted saying aloud, and once said, there was no stopping, because he listened the way other men ate.
“Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil,” she read, “is rightwise king born of all England.”
“So. And the great lords, they cannot pull it.”
“They heave at it all Christmastide. Kings and dukes. Nothing. And then a boy who does not know what it is, takes it out as easily as drawing it from water, because he only wanted a sword for his brother.” She let the book tip.
“Do you suppose it would truly keep, signore? Three hundred years. A blade. If it were wrapped in oiled cloth, say, and kept from the damp … would there be rust? Would the edge survive? How large would such a sword be, if it were made for a king?”
He turned from the window altogether, and his face did the thing it did, the kindling, the lamp coming up from the back of the house. The hard edge of his jaw caught the light. The bronze of his skin looked warm even in the cool afternoon.
“Now this is the right question. Think, Lucy, to keep such an object three hundred years is not a matter of oiled cloth. It is a matter of the housing.” His hands came off his hat and began to build in the air between them.
“The chamber must breathe or everything sweats and everything spoils, so how does air move through a place that no one may find? The light … You cannot have windows, so how is it lit? What does the flame do to pigment over centuries? Which colors hold in the dark? Azurite holds. Verdigris turns traitor. And the panels … Poplar cracks in your English damp. Matteo would have learned that the first winter, thus he would have gone to oak, and oak must be joined so, and so, or the seasons pull it apart at the seams—” He caught himself with his hands full of an invisible ceiling, and laughed at himself, and set the ceiling down.
“Ah. The English and their sword. Forgive me. You ask me of Excalibur, and I answer you of carpentry.”
“I ask you of the treasure,” said Lucy comfortably, “and you answer me of the treasure. We are in perfect agreement, signore.”
“We are,” he said, warm as the low sun coming through the glass, and went back to his window, satisfied.
She stared down at the page and did not read it.
He loves the clues the way a hound loves the scent. With his whole soul, nose down, deaf to the world, because the scent led to the quarry.
She smoothed the old paper with one finger.
A boy drew a sword out of stone because his heart was clean and he did not know it could not be done.
Somewhere at the end of all this carpentry lay an ancient sword that great kings had knelt to.
She was riding toward it in an inherited carriage with mud on her hem, as humble as the young lad who had drawn the sword.
They agreed, she thought, on everything that mattered. It was a fine thing, as they approached their marriage, to be so entirely of one mind.
The stages went by. Horses were changed at inn yards loud with ostlers.
Tolls were paid at white gates. Bessy dozed upright with the hamper under her hands like a state secret.
The country began to change, the hills drawing back, the land flattening and greening and going strange.
It was as flat as a floor for miles, cut with straight silver ditches, willows in rows, cattle standing to their hocks in grass so rich it looked wet.
“Rhines, they call them ditches,” the ostler at the next change said, when Lucy put her head out and asked. “All this were sea once, ma’am, or near enough. Marsh and mere, time out of mind. They drownded regular, folk did, before the levels was cut.”
Drowned lands. She wrote it into her hoard, next to the receipts and her notes on King Arthur, and watched the flat country slide by with new eyes. That was when the hill came up out of it.
It stood alone on the levels, a steep green cone with a broken tower on its crown, and it did not look like anything else in England she had ever seen. It seemed left over. It looked like the last word of an argument the sea had lost.
“Glastonbury Tor,” said the coachman, when applied to. “Inn’s at the foot, near enough.”
“We are stopping,” said Lucy. “We are stopping, and I am going up.”
“It’ll be supper directly,” said Bessy.
“Then I shall be hungry at the top of a mountain.”
The inn was a long stone place that had been feeding pilgrims, by the look of its passages, since before the Tudors.
Lorenzo handed her down from the carriage, his concern melting her heart.
He did this a dozen times a day now. It should have been nothing.
Her feet knew what to do, and her hand knew his.
But this time his hand did not let go at once.
His thumb crossed her knuckles, one slow pass, glove or no glove, and she felt it travel up her arm and bloom warm at the base of her throat.
For the space of a breath, neither of them moved, in an inn yard smelling of horses, with a boy carrying a bucket straight through the middle of the moment. The scent of Lorenzo reached her, leather and parchment and man, and her pulse stumbled.
Bessy coughed. It was a cough with gravel in it, and generations of warning.
He let go. Lucy reclaimed her hand, and did not glance at him, and felt him not looking at her, and the warmth stayed at her throat the whole way up the Tor.
She out-walked him on the hill. She had not meant to.
It was only that her legs had waited seven years and would not be delayed.
The path went up steep through sheep-cropped grass, and she took it with her skirts gathered in one fist. Behind her, she heard Lorenzo following her.
Whether he was breathless, devotional, or blasphemous was impossible to say, because she gained the top with her heart hammering gloriously against her stays and the wind hitting her like the flat of a great cool hand.