Chapter 9
I carried the sparkle of her eyes with me through the rest of the day
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The tide was wrong again.
Lorenzo stood at the end of the quay in the bright wind and scrutinized the tide being wrong.
It filled the harbor to the brim. It winked and glittered all the way out to the island, innocent as milk, and on it, plain as handwriting, seven boats of Whitcombe were out working the water with their sails full.
“Wrong how?” he said. “Forgive me. I am a foreigner. Explain to me the way in which it is wrong?”
Tucker did not look up from his nets. He was a broad young man with white eyebrows and forearms like mooring cable, and he had been mending the same corner of the same net since Lorenzo had walked up, though Lorenzo would have sworn on the saints that there was no hole in it.
“Sets hard round the point,” Tucker said, to the net. “Rips. Wants local knowledge.”
“You have local knowledge. That is the thing I am attempting to hire.”
“Boat’s spoke for.”
“You said yesterday the boat wanted caulking.”
“Wants that too.”
A gull walked along the quay wall between them, insolent, and peered at Lorenzo with one yellow eye. Lorenzo stood with the wind pulling at his coat and counted, in Italian, silently, to ten. He reached six.
“Signor Tucker. I will speak plainly, because I respect you and your nets, which are in beautiful condition. Two miles of water.” He held up two fingers to help.
“I have crossed the Alps in February. I have crossed the Channel in a gale that had grown men calling for their mothers and a priest. I am not asking you to carry me to the Americas. Name any figure you like. Double it. I will pay it and think myself in your debt besides.”
The white eyebrows came together. And there, there it went, the thing Lorenzo kept doing.
He watched himself do it and could not stop.
The money landed on the man like water off the back of a duck, and the face that had been merely shut bolted closed.
Tucker gathered his net over one shoulder and stood.
“Not for hire,” he said, no longer to the net. To Lorenzo. It was not unkind, just final. The way rock is final. “Not out there. Good day to ye, sir.”
And he walked away up the quay with his beautiful nets, past old Braddick, who at Lorenzo’s approach an hour earlier had discovered urgent business inside his own boat and had not come out since, past two boys who had been diving off the steps all morning and who fell silent as owls whenever Lorenzo passed, past the whole white, stacked village that had smiled at him at supper two nights running and had, since the first time he uttered the word island, become a town of closed doors standing open.
Lorenzo turned back to the water.
Out there, the pale rock lay along the horizon with the sun on it.
Two miles. He had come a thousand from Florence.
Somewhere in his chest, a rope was being wound tighter, turn on turn, the way it had wound in libraries and archives and customs houses for years, the winding that meant close now, close, and it was in the closing that trails died.
That rope hauled him straight up the quay to the harbor wall where a third boatman was coiling a line, and he heard his own voice come out too quick and too loud and too rich with consonants.
“Buongiorno! A fine morning. It occurs to me we have not been introduced—”
The man knuckled his cap, picked up his coil, and left.
The wind blew. The boys watched him from the steps, treading water, owl-eyed. The tide lay in the harbor being, apparently, wrong.
Maledizione.
He found Lucy at the seaward end of the quay, with her bonnet pushed back on its ribbons and her face turned to the wind.
He arrived beside her at a pace that scattered gulls and delivered the morning’s account in one breath.
Tucker, the nets without holes, the caulking that came and went like a tide of its own, Braddick entombed in his own vessel, the third man walking, walking, while he was in the middle of a sentence, walking, and the money, they would not even hear the money, in what country on the earth of God does a fisherman turn his back on double—
“Lorenzo.”
He stopped. Partly, it was the hand she set on his sleeve.
Mostly, if he was honest, it was the name.
Bare, no signor to it. Each time she used it, it went through him absurdly, a warm bolt straight down the middle.
By the time he had recovered, she had turned him by the sleeve to face down the quay, the way a man turns a horse.
“Look at them,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”
He looked. Tucker had stopped to speak to Braddick, who had risen from the tomb.
Both heads turned toward the strangers at the end of the quay, and turned away again too quickly.
The two boys had come out of the water and stood dripping beside a woman gutting fish at a plank trestle, and the woman had put her arm out.
Not fussing them, not drying them. Placing herself.
Between the boys and the foreigner who wanted a boat.
“I see a village,” Lorenzo said slowly, “that has agreed about me.”
“They agreed before we came, I think.” Her eyes were moving along the harbor front, missing nothing.
“Yesterday, I thought they were sullen. They are not. Sullen does not organize. Every soul in this village tells the same lie in the same words. The tide, the tide, the tide. And lies that fit together like that have been fitted, Lorenzo. Fitted long since. This is not rudeness.” She looked up at him.
“It is a wall. Built and kept. They are protecting that island. All of them, down to the children. And I should very much like to know why.”
He stared at her. Then he stared at the village, which reassembled itself in front of his eyes. Not a row of unfriendly faces, but a garrison, drilled and provisioned, keeping a faith no one had named.
“Protecting it from what? From one Florentine and a lady with a map? What can they think we—”
“I do not know. But I know you cannot breach such loyalty.” Her hand pressed his sleeve, once, and he felt his galloping heart slow to the rein of it, resentful and grateful together.
The warmth of her fingers soaked through the cloth.
Then it sped up for an entirely different reason as he thought of their approaching wedding and what he would do with his sweet Lucy once he could have his way with her.
“Listen to me. You knocked. They heard the knock, they did not like it, and every knock now is louder than the last. So we stop knocking. As of this moment. No more boats, no more money, no more island. The word does not cross our lips. We are simply travelers who like fish and have nowhere better to be.”
“For how long?” It came out ragged. Two miles of water, and she was proposing to sit beside it drinking tea.
“Until they open the door themselves. Uncle Henry traded for years in ports where an Englishman was as welcome as the plague, and he told me how it was done. You do not ask for the pearl, the map, the introduction. You drink the tea. You admire the boats. You ask a man about his nets and his sons, and you listen. Truly listen, not waiting your turn. And one morning, the thing you wanted is offered to you as a gift, and it is worth ten of the thing you would have bought.” Her chin came up.
“I can do this. I have heard a thousand stories like this. But you must let me, and you must not undo me by pushing Tucker while I do it.”
The rope in his chest hauled against her, every turn of it. Wait. Wait, with the pale rock lying out there in plain sight. Every hour of waiting was a stone swallowed.
But he had spent his whole life failing to open doors that this woman opened by leaning in, with genuine interest and irrepressible charm. He had watched her do it to a vicar, a toll-keeper, an ostler with one tooth, and his own bolted heart.
“Va bene,” he said. It cost him. She saw what it cost him. He watched her see it, and the smile she gave him was worth the price and a premium besides. “We drink the tea. But Lucy, if the tea lasts a month, you will bury me here. Have them carve a boat on the stone.”
“I’ll allow a fortnight,” she said, “before I permit you to expire,” and went to work.
He had believed he understood what she meant to do. He had not understood at all.
The battlefield she chose was the fish trestle halfway down the quay, and the enemy was the woman who had put her arm out.
Mrs. Hannaford. A woman built like an ox, with forearms Michelangelo would have wept to draw, splitting mackerel with a knife so fast that the blade was only a bright rumor.
Her face, when Lucy stopped before the trestle, would have intimidated a troop of battle-weary soldiers.
Lorenzo took himself thirty feet off, sat on a bollard, opened his sketching-book upon his knee to justify his existence, and pretended to draw boats.
Lucy did not mention fish prices. She did not mention boats, hospitality, the beauty of the village, or the weather, and she did not, his shoulders were braced for it, mention the island.
She stood watching the knife with honest greed.
Then she said, as if confessing a debt, that she had been watching a full minute and could not for her life see how it was done so fast. Her cook, she added, gutted mackerel like someone settling an old grudge, and the fish came to table looking assassinated.
Would Mrs. Hannaford consider showing her the trick of it, if Lucy swore to be more use than trouble?
The knife stopped.
“You’ll spoil that frock,” said the ox, with contempt for the gown, the request, and the entire gentry of England.
“Yes,” said Lucy, and took off her gloves.
And Lorenzo, on his bollard, with his pencil stopped in the middle of a mast, watched the next hour happen.