Chapter 10 #2
Matteo’s school had not died. The knowledge had come down.
Somewhere behind that glass, three centuries of his family’s grief were about to be contradicted, and his future bride stood beside him, gripping his arm and trembling with the selfsame certainty, her face blazing up at his, the two of them of one mind entirely, as always, about everything that mattered, the dear romance of her, half in the old stories even now, and he covered her hand with his and pressed it and could not speak.
The warmth of her fingers under his palm made his blood thicken.
The door of the cottage opened.
A man came out sideways, shouldering it, a limewood mallet in one hand, a young man, Lorenzo’s years or near them, in a leather apron white to the chest with dust, saying something back over his shoulder into the house as he came. And he turned into the lane and saw them at his window and stopped.
And Lorenzo stood in the Devon morning and looked into his own eyes.
Dark eyes, set deep, under strong dark brows.
The lean long frame the di Bianchi men handed down like a debt, the height that never carried flesh, the wide bony shoulders, the neck too long for every collar Florence could make.
And the hands. Ecco, the hands, his father’s hands, his own hands, gripped now around a mallet.
Broad through the palm, long in the fingers, the tools of the family laid out in flesh at the end of a stranger’s arms.
The young man was staring back at him with his lips parted, and Lorenzo understood, in a distant way, as one understands rain while drowning, that the mirror ran in both directions.
“Da,” the young man said, not loudly, not looking away. “Da. Come out here.”
An older man came to the door, wiping his hands on a cloth, gray, broad through the chest where the young one was still lean, upper fifties by his face, and Lorenzo watched him find them in the lane, the mild yard-dog interest, the landlord-politeness rising for strangers, and then it all stopped.
The older man saw what the younger had seen.
The cloth went motionless in his hands as the eye of an artist noted the family resemblance, the bone structure, the physical traits a sculptor would see.
Wind came up the lane from the harbor, smelling of weed and tar, and passed over the four of them and went on up the hill, and nobody moved.
From the open door behind the two men drifted the smell of stone dust, chalk-dry, mineral, the smell of Lorenzo’s childhood, his father’s shop, his grandfather’s coat, and three hundred years of mystery stood in a Devon lane while he breathed it, and he could not think of one word in either language.
It was Lucy who spoke. Of course it was Lucy.
“Good morning,” she said, to the older man, gently, as though the lane were not humming like a struck bell. “I think, forgive me, I think you had better tell us your names.”
The older man’s eyes never left Lorenzo. When he spoke, it was slow, as if he were laying stones one at a time across a stream.
“Lawrence White. My son, Matthew.” A beat. The eyes went over Lorenzo’s face again, feature by feature, disbelieving each one separately. “And I’m thinking, sir, I’m thinking before anything else is said, you’d best tell us yours.”
“Lorenzo.” His voice came out strange to him, arriving from a long way off, over water.
“Lorenzo di Bianchi. Of Florence.” And then, because the lane was tilting and the old man’s face was doing something extraordinary and the word had to be said by someone, “Bianco, signore. In my tongue, it is the word for white.”
And Lorenzo in English is Lawrence.
The cloth dropped from Lawrence White’s hands into the dust, and no one picked it up.
They did not stay in the lane. Afterward, Lorenzo could not have said who moved first, only that the door stood open and then they were through it, all four, into the long workroom with its wide window, and Whitcombe went on with its morning outside.
Wariness came first, but it did not come quietly, and Lorenzo would honor Lawrence White all his life for it. The old man planted himself between the strangers and his benches with his arms folded and put it plainly.
They knew who Lorenzo was. The whole shore knew. The foreign gentleman at the inn, free with his money, hot for a boat, and no man on this coast was fool enough to think a face, even that face, his eyes said, even that impossible face, was the same thing as an honest purpose.
Matthew stood at his father’s shoulder, mallet still in hand, not threatening, simply there, and Lorenzo looked at the two of them guarding their threshold, and something in his chest went down on its knees.
He did not argue. He did not reach for his purse, which he could feel Lucy not-looking at him about, and he did not mention boats.
He talked about stone.
He crossed to the nearest bench, asking leave with a lifted brow, receiving a grudging chin, and looked at the work clamped there, a gull half-born from its block, and he did not say it was beautiful.
He said the drill had come in from the left and been carved back after, there and there. He said the claw had been laid at the low angle, the old angle, the angle his father set by putting his own hand over his son’s hand on the tool, as his father had done for him.
He asked where under heaven they had found sharkskin for the finishing in Devon, or was it done with rushes, he had heard of rushes.
He picked up from the bench a rasp worn to silk and turned it over and said, quietly, in a voice that was no longer entirely governed, that his grandfather had owned its brother, and that it hung this hour on a nail in Florence in a workshop that smelled exactly, exactly, of this room.
And he spoke of Matteo, and of the quest to find him.
When he looked up from the rasp, the arms had come unfolded.
“Say the name again,” Lawrence White said. “The whole of it. Slow.”
“Matteo di Bianchi,” said Lorenzo, slowly.
“Painter. Carver. Pupil, in his youth, of the workshops of Florence. He left Italy in the year fifteen hundred and thirteen upon a commission he told no man of, and he wrote in his journals, I have one of those journals, signore, and it lies this hour in my trunk at the harbor inn, that he was sworn to a secrecy he would keep beyond death. And after the year of his leaving, my family never heard of him more. We are his brother’s line.
We have grieved him three hundred years, signore.
I was raised on the grief the way your sons, I think …
” His voice went. He mastered it. It half went again.
“The way your sons were raised on the stone.”
In the quiet, the young man, Matthew, set his mallet down on the bench. Turned. Went to the shelf below the wide window where the finished pieces waited, and came back, and put into Lorenzo’s hands the little kneeling knight.
“Matthew White,” he said. “It’s the name the eldest son carries.
Time out of mind. There’s been a Matthew White carving stone in this parish since the eighth Harry sat the throne.
” He nodded at the figure in Lorenzo’s hands, at the young stone back bent aching over the sword.
“First one made that. Or one like it. That one’s mine, copied off his, the old one being too worn now to leave the house.
First Matthew came ashore here, old folk always said, round about fifteen-thirty.
Foreign and alone, with a bundle of tools.
” Matthew White looked at him with Lorenzo’s own eyes out of a stranger’s face.
“Talked like you, I’d wager. Till the parish wore it off him. ”
Fifteen-thirty.
Lorenzo stood holding the vigil-knight, and the missing years assembled themselves in him coldly, of their own accord, even with his heart in pieces on this good, swept floor.
Thirteen. Thirty. He did the sum on his fingers against the knight’s stone shoulder, openly, like a child, because his head would not hold numbers today.
Seventeen years between the oath and the Whitcombe shore.
Seventeen years between a Florentine workshop and a bundle of tools in a Devon lane, the very years of the commission, the cathedral years, the everything-years, and standing at last in the one house on God’s earth where the answer had lived, he heard Lawrence White speak the sentence that he would hear in the dark for the rest of his days, said kind and final as a lid.
“He never spoke of before, sir. Not once, that ever came down to us. Not where he was, nor what he did, nor for whom. First Matthew talked, they say, like a mill-race, of stone, of weather, of his wife, of his children, God knows of gulls, and about the years before this parish, never a living word. It was the one shut room in the man. He took it under the sod with him, up in that yard you walked through, and, sir …” The old man’s face gentled, because he could see, everyone in the room could see, what the words were doing. “I’d tell you if I had it.”
They stayed the day. It was not a thing decided.
It simply happened to them, the way weather happens, the workshop, and then the house behind the workshop, and Mrs. White, with her hands in flour, declaring that the inn could not be trusted to feed them properly.
Bessy was fetched up the hill by a gravely courteous Matthew and installed by the fire with the household mending, where she took the measure of the family linen and was, by evening, more mollified than Lorenzo had yet seen.
He went down to the inn once, half-running, and came back with the journal.