Chapter 8 #3
Finally, after days in the carriage, Whitcombe sat in the fold of land like something a wave had set down gently and forgotten.
Whitewashed cottages stacked one above another down both sides of the combe, the deep valley that led to the sea.
Slate roofs were slick with the light, smoke drifting up from the chimneys in the evening calm.
There was a gray stone quay with the tide out and boats canted over on the shingle below it, patient as cattle, and nets hung drying on poles, and the smell that came in the carriage window was salt and tar and fish and weed, and Lucy drank it in like fine wine.
They came down the street at a walk, the wheels loud on stone, faces turning at doorways.
Those faces were not unfriendly, but only few strangers came down that lane.
That was plain. She was out of the carriage before the steps were properly down, crossing the quay to the edge, with the wind off the water taking her breath.
The sea lay gray and gold in the failing light, wrinkling all over like silk. She gripped the cold iron of a mooring post and could see offshore, perhaps an hour’s sail out, lay the island.
It was low and long, and where the sun caught its western face, the rock showed pale as bone on that darkening water.
Hwitmarbel.
Lorenzo had come to stand at her shoulder, and he said nothing at all.
She had not known until that moment that he had a silence in him.
It was louder than the talking. The smell of him reached her again, leather and parchment and the musky scent of a man who had been traveling, and she felt the nearness of him like a current along her skin.
Well then, she thought, to the pale stone on the water, and her heart went up like a gull on a brisk breeze. Soon we shall sail.
The harbor inn stood at the head of the quay, low-beamed and lime-washed, with a lantern already lit over the door. The innkeeper came out from behind his counter to meet them. A broad bald man with an apron across him like the mainsail of a merchantman, and welcoming as he was wide.
Rooms, aired that very week, the ladies should have the two that faced the water.
A fowl on the spit within the hour. Hot water directly, and his girl would take the boxes up, and had they come far?
From the Severn! He said it to his wife through the kitchen door, as though it were the far side of the world, and the wife came out to greet them with a smile, and Bessy went up to inspect the linen and came down mollified, which was the highest compliment of which Bessy was capable in a strange house.
It was the easiest hour of the whole journey. The fire was good and the cider was better and the fowl delicious, and Lucy sat with the sea-sound coming through the shutters … the long slow breath of it against the shingle, in and out, in and out … and felt the road ease out of her bones.
Over the clearing of the table, Lorenzo asked. He asked it easily, warmly, leaning back with his glass, as if they were already among friends, and they were among friends. The whole evening had made them so.
“Tell me, sir, who is the best man to speak to in the morning about the hire of a boat? We have a mind to go out to the island.”
The innkeeper was wiping a tankard that was already dry.
The cloth kept moving. But something went out of the room, the way warmth goes out of a grate.
Not cold, nothing so honest as cold. A single degree.
His eyes went across to his wife’s, in the kitchen doorway, and came back, and found the tankard very interesting.
“Tide’s been contrary,” he said, to the tankard. He said it as if it were an opinion about weather that had not happened yet. “Not much call to go out there.”
“Ah, but with a good tide—”
“Supper sat well, I hope,” said the innkeeper, warm as ever, to the room in general.
“Mary’ll have taken the warming pans up.
You’ll want your beds, I daresay, after such a road.
” And he was away through the kitchen door with the dry tankard still in his hand, and his wife had already gone before him, and the door swung shut.
Nothing rude had been said. Nothing at all had been said.
That was the thing Lucy turned over, sitting by the good fire with her full belly.
The innkeeper had answered a question about boats without once mentioning boats, and a room full of welcome had emptied of it between one breath and the next, softly, the way Papa’s witnesses went speechless when the questions found a sore point.
Every face on this road had opened to them. Two hundred miles of open faces, all the way from the Severn.
This was the first door that had shut. Quietly. Firmly.
She contemplated the shuttered window. Beyond the harbor and the dark water, the island lay with its pale stone drowned in deepest night, and she thought about the innkeeper’s reaction.
When she climbed into her bed later that night, she was a long time getting to sleep, and it was not the strange bed, and it was not the sea.