Chapter 11 #2
“It does that, this time o’ the month,” the man said.
The voice was burred and slowed, dressed in the coast like everything else on him. Underneath, at the floor of it, ran a current she had known before she knew words, and it took everything, everything, every governess and every drawing room and every hour at her father’s table, not to make a sound.
“So I am told,” replied Lucy. Level. Bright.
Twenty feet. Her dead uncle. Her dead uncle, breathing, going gray under a beard on a Devon beach, his eyes moving over her face like a starving man’s over a bakery window.
The eyes had not aged. They were the same.
“We find Whitcombe entirely charming. Everyone has been so very kind.”
Lawrence White had come down the last of the shingle, unhurried, and stationed himself at the man’s shoulder, casually, comfortably, and in the one spot that broke the sight-line from the cottages above the beach.
On the other side, Matthew ran the barrow squeaking down to the boat and set about the cargo with a great deal of unnecessary noise. Closed ranks, thought some cool, watching corner of Lucy.
They had seen it, they had understood it whole, and the village’s wall had just rebuilt itself in half a minute around a new thing to guard.
The rest of her went on standing in the wind being bright and level while her childhood roared in her ears like the tide in a shell.
Lorenzo’s hand stayed iron under her elbow, the only solid thing left in the world.
And the thing was, until this moment, they had not known that Uncle Henry was a secret they were keeping. It was clear. Whatever lay on Hwitmarbel, it was not him specifically they had thought they were protecting, or they would have ushered her and Lorenzo away before he had landed.
“This’d be your gentleman, then?” her uncle asked, moving toward them. His eyes had gone to Lorenzo, flicked down him, and stopped hard at something. Lucy did not have to guess at what. She had spent a day watching that face startle a whole family of Whites.
“Jim Carver,” the man said, to the two of them, and put out his hand.
He said it as if he were laying down a card he hated.
He said it looking straight into her eyes, and in his own, sunk in that familiar stranger’s face, there was such a freight of things, pleading and warning and grief and terrible hope, that Lucy took the offered hand mostly so that the beach would stop tilting.
Rope-hard. Scarred across the palm. And it closed around her fingers the way it had closed around them at every arriving and every leaving of her whole life before fourteen, the pressure the same, remembered in her bones, unchanged from the man who had taught her that a handshake was a sentence and most people mumbled theirs.
For one instant, inside the fiction, under the eyes of the Whites and the sleeping village and God, her uncle held her hand on a cold beach and neither of them breathed.
“Miss Carroway,” she said, and her voice did not break. She would be proud of that until she died. “Lucy Carroway of Grey House, in Gloucestershire. And Signor di Bianchi, of Florence.”
The hand let go of hers, unhurried, took Lorenzo’s, shook it once, and Jim Carver stepped back and looked at the pair of them with his thumbs going into his belt, a shoreman considering weather.
“Grey House,” he said, as though tasting a stone for salt.
“Long way south, miss.” A wave came in and spent itself, and went out.
“Tide serves back across within the hour. Stone’s coming off.
Boat goes back light.” He said it to the sand, to the boat, to nobody.
Then he tipped his head, left, chin up, one degree past level, and glanced back at her, and said, in that dressed and burred and utterly familiar unfamiliar voice, “There’s them on the island could show the gentleman where the stone’s cut from, if the lady and gentleman cared to make the crossing.
The maid and the boxes could follow on the evening tide, if it suited. Whites’d see to it.”
Behind him, Matthew White said, mild as milk, already turning up the beach, “I’d see to it.”
After days, the door in the wall of Whitcombe did not creak open.
It simply stood open, in a dawn tide, on the words of a dead man, as though it had never been shut, and Lucy Carroway, with her hands folded, and her heart in pieces, and her whole life brimming like the harbor, heard herself accept for them both in the visiting voice, and thank him, and say that it sounded a most agreeable excursion.
An excursion. God forgive her. Seven years, and she had called it an excursion, and the man in the beard had bowed his head gravely as though she had said something sensible, and the two of them had gone on being strangers with two feet of Devon between them because the world required it.
If her nails had cut through her gloves into her palms, that was nobody’s business but her own. Lorenzo’s steady presence at her side was the only thing that kept the beach from tilting clean over.
The boat rode out on the first of the ebb with three aboard and the barrow-load of Whitcombe’s supplies in the bow, and the shore let go of them by inches.
Nobody spoke. Jim Carver rowed, facing them, his eyes everywhere but on her: on his oars, on his wake, on the falling-away village.
Lucy sat in the stern sheets beside Lorenzo with her hands gripped in her lap and watched the beard and the coat and the whole cruel masquerade of him rise and lean, rise and lean, six feet away, close enough to touch, farther than the grave had been, because from the grave at least he had not been obliged to look past her.
The solid warmth of Lorenzo’s shoulder against hers was the only real thing she could hold to as she contemplated the man she had grieved all these years.
The quay shrank. The cottages stacked themselves into a toy. The headland came slowly across behind them like a door.
And when the last window of Whitcombe had lost its power to see, she watched him judge it, watched the sailor’s glance measure the distance and find it sufficient, and Henry Carroway stopped rowing.
He shipped the oars, both blades rising and folding, and the boat lost way and swung a little, broadside to the long swell, rocking, alone on the bright water between the shore and the island.
He sat with his sun-browned hands hanging between his knees.
He looked at her, at last, at last, straight at her, nothing between them now but six feet of salt air and seven years, and his face came apart with a wide grin, and in his own voice, his real voice, the lamplit drawing-room voice, wrecked to a whisper, he said, “Hello, Lucy-bird.”
Lorenzo shifted in surprise but said nothing.
She went over the thwart to him with no memory of moving.
The boat lurched and shipped a cupful, and Lorenzo lunged for the gunwales with a strangled Italian blasphemy, and none of it mattered.
Nothing in the created world mattered except that her arms were around her uncle’s neck and his around her back, crushing, both of them heedless, the hat gone overboard entirely, and he was solid, he was warm, he smelled of salt and tar, and under it all, he smelled of him.
Lucy Carroway, who had not wept on the beach, wept now, great ugly heaving sobs with no bottom to them, years of grief coming up all at once.
“You were drowned.” It came out of her in pieces, furious, muffled in salt-stiff wool.
“They came on my birthday. My birthday, Uncle. I wore black for you. I learned your rivers. I kept your atlas under my bed like a Bible, and you were, you have been here, you have been an hour’s sail from a post road, seven years, you let Papa stand up in a church and say words over an empty …
” and the fury ran out of road and turned back into grief.
She held on harder and felt, against her hair, that he was shaking too, great silent seams of it opening in that granite chest, and heard him saying, over and over, into the top of her head, broken and useless and dearer than any words she had ever been given,
“I know. I know it. Lucy-bird, I know. Forgive me. There was no other way, and I will not ask you to believe that yet. I know, I know.”
The boat rocked. The water slapped and glittered. Somewhere above, a gull made its cold hilarious sound, and the two of them held each other in the middle of the brightness and let the worst of it pass through, and it did pass.
Grief is a wave, her uncle had told her once, long ago, a wave and not a sea.
It goes over you. It is not the whole of the water.
And when at last she could sit back and look at him, wet-faced, hiccupping, still gripping two fistfuls of his coat as though he might yet dissolve, he was gazing back at her with his eyes streaming openly down his brown cheeks, smiling the smile the beard had been built to bury.
“You grew up,” he said, roughly. “You went and grew up, you little traitor. Last I had of you, you were all elbows and questions.” The smile cracked wider, desperate, glorious.
“And now look. Mistress of Grey House. Trust you, Lucy-bird, trust you of all women to walk along the one beach in England I—” He stopped himself.
Shook his head. Laid it aside visibly, as if he were setting down a crate marked later.
“On the island. Everything, I swear it to you, the whole of it, every hour of the seven years, but not in an open boat in a working sea-lane, and not in fragments. You will have it whole. There are others involved in it, Lucy. That is all I will say on the water. It was never only my secret to spend.”