Chapter 14 #2
Find the work. Carry it into the light. Give the name back to the man, centuries late.
He had spent his youth on the vow, and his friends had married one by one and grown up around him like trees around a fence-post, and he had been proud, proud, of being the fence-post. And now he floated in the cold at the end of the trail with the possible truth lying on his chest like a slab.
There was no treasure. There was never a cathedral. Matteo grew old on the mainland, cutting stone. He was happy, perhaps, which was worse.
And you, Lorenzo, have spent half a year in England, from Cornwall to Gloucester, drawing God knows whose predatory eyes along a trail that ends at the door of living people, for a marvel that lives only in a dead man’s cipher.
His thoughts were black. Against everything he had believed, the truth did not kill him. Somehow that was the worst discovery of the day. A man could lose his heart and his dreams and still go on floating. The sea held him up with perfect indifference.
The cold was a deep ache in his bones, and he noted it from a distance, as he was noting everything now, from a distance, as though his own life had been sent away for judgment and he was waiting in the anteroom for the verdict.
The master’s own hand. The school of the master.
A copy merely, after some better original.
And into the emptiness where the cathedral had stood, quietly, without permission, came Lucy.
Not a thought about Lucy. Lucy herself, the fact of her, the way she came into rooms. Her hand on his sleeve on a tilting beach. Her determined chin. Her voice reading dead language aloud by lamplight, stumbling on Hwitmarbel, twice, and laughing at herself.
The heat of her hands under his in the stern of a boat while her world turned over.
He had told her the quest came first. He had said it with a brutal bluntness, the worst truth he had ever told anyone, and she had barred a door with her body and staked herself on it, and he had thought, God forgive him, that he was the one taking the risk of the bargain.
He had sold her a forgery. That was the name for it, the name he would have used of any other man.
He had sold her Excalibur, sold her a buried Sistine, sold her the whole golden ending, and she had bought passage with her narrow fearless shoulders, bought it on his word, which he had never doubted.
And the ship she had bought passage on was holed under the water, and he did not know how to face her. So for two days he had been telling her in the coward’s language, in furled hands and courtesy, by not reaching for her, because a man cannot reach for a woman he has let down.
He knew what he was doing. That was the shame of it.
He watched himself bow to her on the cliff like a dancing-master and could not stop, because the alternative was to walk to her empty-handed and say, Lucia, the destination may not exist, and I no longer know what I am, and what will you do then with this failure … this disappointment of a man.
The cold made itself known, and there was no ignoring it. His teeth had begun a conversation of their own.
He swam in, waded out over the pale stones with his skin tinted blue, and dressed wet, clumsy, his fingers fumbling the buttons, the good coat going on over salt and gooseflesh.
Then he climbed the steep ledges out of the cleft into the last of the light with his hair dripping down his collar and his body at least, if nothing else, too tired to shake.
The manor windows were lit gold down the valley. He came in at the garden door with the dark folding up the paths behind him, and there in the passage, in candlelight, stood Lucy, dressed for dinner.
She turned at his step. He watched the light come up in her face at the sight of him, the quick lift, the search, hope with its lamp raised, searching for the man she knew.
And he felt his own face fail to be that man.
He felt it produce, out of the ruin, the day’s one remaining art, courtesy, laid on like clean varnish over scorched wood, a bend of the head, a voice that said, evenly, like a stranger’s, “Forgive me. I hope I have not kept the table waiting.”
And he witnessed the disappointment in her eyes.
Watched her feel it, half a heartbeat of it naked in her eyes before the politeness rose over her face like a tide over sand, gracious, level, hiding the footprints.
She said something easy about dinner keeping.
She smiled at him, a beautifully made smile, and he of all men living knew a copy from an original.
It was the smile of social graces, and he had earned it, and it slipped into him under the ribs like a blade.
He offered her his arm, because he could still do that much.
Her hand came onto his sleeve, light as a bird taking a branch, and through the damp cloth the warmth of her fingers reached his skin.
Lorenzo di Bianchi walked them in to eat dinner with the quest lying dead in him and the living woman on his arm, and with no knowledge how to behave now that his dreams were crushed.
* * *
The next morning, Lucy visited the garden.
It lay against the manor’s south front behind its own gray wall to protect it from the wind that came off the sea.
The wind stopped at the gate as though a door had been shut on an argument.
Inside was another climate altogether, warm and thick and murmurous, gravel walks raked to herringbone, low knots of clipped box with gillyflowers and stocks crowded inside them breathing out clove and honey, lavender coming out along the borders with the bees working it so loudly the border hummed, and old pear trees trained flat against the south wall with their arms spread wide, taking the sun full in the chest. A sundial stood at the crossing of the walks with centuries of wind and rain on its face.
Over the wall, out of sight, the sea sounded on the cliffs.
Bessy sat on the bench by the lavender with her workbag, on a pretext. The pretext was a hem. Lucy had known Bessy her whole life and had never once seen the bottom of that workbag.
“You’ll wear a trench in this good gravel, Miss Lucy,” Bessy observed to the hem, “and then where will we all be.”
Lucy stopped mid-turn at the sundial and discovered that she had been walking the same circuit for the better part of half an hour. She came and sat on the bench’s end. The stone was warm through her skirts. The bees droned. Somewhere above the wall, a gull said something cynical and went away.
“He is still out on the head,” she said.
“I know it, miss. I can see him from the linen-room window. Standing like a post since dawn.” The needle went in, drew through. “He’ll come down when the light goes. Men do.”