Chapter 15 #2
“Lorenzo.” Her voice was gentle, and it had her chin in it.
“The search is not over. Whatever this wall says. Large slabs of stone left this island, and it went somewhere, and somewhere is a place, and places are found. And even, even if the worst is true, even if the work was never …” A breath inhaled.
“The sword was real to them. The sword is older than Matteo, older than the order. Excalibur has waited three hundred years in the dark. It can wait a season longer for us to find our road again. Surely it is out there still. Surely this is a turning, not an end.”
The sword.
He heard it come. He felt the words arrive from a long way off, like a lamp on a headland arriving at a ship, offered kindly, faithfully, and falling on water.
The candle flame leaned and righted.
“Well,” said Lucy.
One word. Level. Bright. He knew that brightness now. He had learned it on a beach, watching her keep a dead man alive with it, and hearing it turned on him was like being handed a bill he could not pay.
“Eat something, at least,” she said, and rose, and shook out her skirts, and touched his shoulder once on her way to the stair, lightly, as a hand touches furniture in passing, and went up into the daylight.
Lorenzo stayed kneeling at the fifth course with the rule in his hand and could not for his life have said which of the two of them was more unhappy.
He ate her bread alone in the crypt, and it tasted like chalk.
The afternoon he spent on the roof of it all, literally, up in the vault pockets above the chapel ceiling with a lantern, on a seventh theory, that the void might be above rather than beside.
He found bat droppings and honest oak and dust, and came down gray as a miller with his theory dead.
Jim, who was waiting at the ladder foot with the patience of the whole island in his face, looked him over and said only, “She has stood since the third Henry, that roof. It is nothing but a roof.” And then, kindly, terribly, with a hand on Lorenzo’s dusty shoulder, he said, “What the family knows, you know. He took the stone over the water, and he worked it.”
There it was again. The blunt truth, offered by a good man.
Lorenzo thanked him, and meant the thanks, and went to wash for supper with the counter-arguments going around his skull like moths at a lamp, the tonnage, the undercut, the seventeen years, around and around, winning in his head and losing in the stone.
Supper was long and golden and full.
The whole table of them, the Grangers and the Carvers and the two of them, ate chowder and new bread with a maid fetching back and forth.
Lucy was radiant down the table’s length.
She was magnificent, telling the children about gutting fish in Whitcombe with the actions until even the serious Edward Granger wheezed.
Her eyes found Lorenzo’s across the candles at the laugh’s crest, bright, questioning, and he laughed too late.
Half a breath too late. He saw her see it.
The family drew them close, closer every day, plates passed and christenings promised and the wedding spoken of, a thing coming, certain and good.
Lorenzo sat in the warm heart of everything he had ever wanted except one thing, and that the one thing sat inside him, eating him hollow.
She came to him that night in the chapel.
He had the journals out again under the lamp, all three, open, the pictograms marching.
He was going down the rows with a dry pencil in his hand like a man raking a field he had harvested bare, when the door opened softly and she was there in her wrapper with her hair down her back.
She did not comment on the hour. She came and stood at the table’s edge in the lamplight and looked at the journals and then at him.
Then she reached down and took his hand up off the page and held it in both of hers.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Even if the cathedral was never built. Even if. The sword was before Matteo, do you see? The order held it, guarded it, somewhere, before ever they dreamed a resting place. It did not need his stone to exist. It exists. It is lying somewhere in England this very night, and we, you and I, we could hunt the sword itself, Lorenzo. Forget the door. Hunt the thing, and I swear to you, say the word, only say the word, and I will hunt it with you to the end of the earth and count myself the luckiest woman breathing.”
Her hands were tight around his. Her eyes were shining, full, fixed on him. The whole of her was gladly held out to him in the lamplight like the last coin of a fortune. Everything in Lorenzo rose up toward her, and could not get anything out.
Say the word.
He looked for the word. He was a man of two languages, and he went through both of them, and there was no word, because the word would have to carry all of it.
The sword is nothing to me. The work is everything. The work may not exist.
No word carried that. The seconds went by, and he watched her watch him not find it.
He did the only thing left in the wreck of him. He lifted her knuckles to his mouth and kissed them, once, carefully.
And felt it land as what it was. Courtesy.
Her hands went loose around his. Not suddenly. That was the worst of it. There was nothing sudden anywhere, only a slow, gentle letting-go, like a tide leaving a mooring. She straightened, and gathered her wrapper at the throat, and he watched the conclusion happen behind her eyes.
“Goodnight, Lorenzo,” said Lucy, evenly, from the door. “Do not read too long.”
The door shut with almost no sound at all.
He sat a long time. The chapel ticked and settled.
Out beyond the stained glass, the sea roared onto the rocks.
On the table, the lamp had begun to gutter, the flame drowning by degrees in its own spent wax, leaning, thinning, standing tall again in little desperate rallies.
Lorenzo watched it the way he had once watched panels and could not make his hand go out to trim the wick.
She had placed her faith in a drowning man. He had watched her realize it, chin up.
The flame sank. The pictograms marched away into the dark of the page. Somewhere a door had shut so quietly that he could go on pretending, if he chose, that he had not heard what it closed. This was who he was. A bee in a bottle, who could not return to its queen.