Chapter 10 #3
He would remember all his life what it was to lay it open on the Whites’ long supper table, Matteo’s own crabbed cipher on the left, Nicholas’s fair English copy on the right, and watch Lawrence White put on his spectacles with unsteady hands and lean over the page of a man dead nearly three centuries whose eyes and hands and stubborn jaws were seated all around that table eating mutton.
The old man did not read at first. He touched the ink’s shadow with one finger, above the page, not upon it, the way Lorenzo touched panel paintings.
“Well,” Lawrence said at last, thickly. “Well, then, Granfer. There you are.”
And the stories came, in fragments, the way Lucy had taught him true things come, not hunted, offered.
How first Matthew married a Whitcombe girl, a rope-maker’s daughter, within two years of coming ashore, and how the parish had it that he asked for her in such English as he then possessed and she accepted him mostly on the strength of a carved gull.
How they had children, “Children, sir, like herring,” said Mrs. White comfortably, “and you’ll not throw a stone on this shore but you graze a cousin,” so that half of Whitcombe carried a thimbleful of Florence in it unknowing: the sexton, the Tucker boys, Hannaford’s late husband, God rest him.
How first Matthew lived to be old, truly old, white-haired in the sun at his own door with the tools still in his lap, and died in his bed with his wife’s people around him and was carried up to the yard by his own sons.
Lorenzo sat with his mutton untouched and let it break over him, wave on wave, the impossible news, the good death, the happy man, three hundred years of di Bianchi mourning, the ruin-story, the vanished-story, the quest-that-devoured-him story he had been suckled on.
Against it all, one Devon supper table saying calmly that Matteo lived long, he loved, he was loved, he made lambs sleep on children’s graves, and he had rather a famous fondness for gulls.
Babbo, he thought, and had to set down his fork and look for a while at the fire. Babbo, I must write to you tonight. Sit by your window. I am sending you back seventeen generations.
Only twice did the other loyalty of Whitcombe show itself, and Lorenzo honored it both times.
Once, when he asked, craftsman to craftsman, the most innocent question in his whole body, where such marble was got, that wood-grained white, he had met its like nowhere in Europe, and the room went one degree quieter, and Lawrence said only, “It comes across to us. Always has,” and the sentence closed at both ends like a box.
And once, later, when little talk of boats and weather bent, by its own current, too near the water between the shore and the pale rock out on it, and the current simply stopped, all of them at once, smooth as a school of fish turning in unison.
Lorenzo asked nothing. He reached instead for the bread, and passed it, and asked Mrs. White how in the name of all the saints she got such crust from a fish-house oven, and across the table, he felt Lawrence White watching him not-ask, and felt the not-asking counted somewhere, entered into some keeping older than any of them, and let it be.
After dinner, they stopped at the churchyard and found Matteo’s gravestone, tucked away in a corner, and Lorenzo paid his respects to the man he had hunted his entire life, on his knees, Lucy’s hand on his shoulder as comfort. He would need to return with parchment to take a rubbing for his family.
The quay that night held only the three of them, him and Lucy and the tide.
Bessy had gone up, yawning under the innkeeper’s lantern.
The village showed a last few lit windows up its dark hill, the Whites’ among them, high up, a warm square he could find without looking.
The water breathed against the shingle. Out west, the island lay along the horizon, a denser black on black, keeping whatever secrets it kept.
“Say the whole of it,” Lucy said.
She had his arm. The wind had most of her hair. The soft weight of her against his side, the scent of her, salt and cider and her skin, was a comfort he could not have predicted.
“You have been thinking about it since supper. Lay out the evidence for me, what holds and what does not, or you will lie awake trying the case at the ceiling.”
So he said it, and in saying it discovered it, the way talking to her always went.
The proofs first, enormous, past counting.
Matteo alive, alive in the only way that outlasts breath, alive in eyes around a table, in a rasp worn to silk, in a lamb asleep on a child’s grave.
The ruin-story dead. His father about to be handed back, at seventy, an unbroken family and a happy ancestor and a shore full of English cousins.
He heard his own voice shake on that and let it.
“And the loss,” he said. “One line. Seventeen years.”
The words came out over the water distant and cold, the historian’s voice, and underneath them, the old rope in his chest took another turn.
“Thirteen to thirty. The commission years. The only years I came for, Lucia. No. No, that is no longer true, and I thank God, but the years the quest came for. And he locked them. The one shut room in a talking man, Lawrence said, and he is right, and the door of it has been under the nettles in that churchyard since your Spanish Armada. Whatever Matteo built, whatever he buried, whatever he swore, it lives in those seventeen years, and tonight, I stood in the single house in creation where the answer should have been kept, among people with my own eyes who would give it to me if they had it, and there is nothing there. Not mislaid, amore. Not hidden. Never told.”
He sighed with force, running his hands through his hair.
“You cannot dig for what a man refused to bury. The trail does not go cold, you understand. The trail was burned by its own maker, three hundred years before I was born, on purpose, because he was faithful, and I am proud of him, Dio, I am so proud of him, I could lie down in that lane, and I could also put my head against this post and howl. Matteo lived a good life, but what of his art?”
The tide came in and went out, twice, three times, against the shingle.
“Then let us look at what he did leave,” said Lucy.
He turned. She had come around in front of him, her back to the black water, her face tipped up, and there was nothing of comfort’s softness in it.
It was her barrister’s face, her level face, the face from the library, and her eyes were blazing.
The hard clean line of her jaw caught the faint light from the inn.
The color was high in her cheeks from the wind.