Chapter 16 #2
To his heart. To the house. To the sea, going on and on beyond the shutters, which tonight she could finally translate. She counted his breaths for a while, the way she had once counted the strokes of a clock on a birthday morning, waiting for a carriage that never came.
The window went from black to charcoal to a gray like the inside of a shell.
Somewhere below, the first door of the morning opened.
And Lucy Carroway lay in the circle of her beloved’s arms, on her last night on the island, dry-eyed and wide awake, turning the same hard truth over and over in the dark until it had no soft edges left.
The tide serving, they went down to the landing after breakfast, the whole tribe of them, and the beach filled up with farewell.
It was terrible and it was lovely and it was both at once, the way only families manage.
Her aunt held her a long time without one word, which said more than the words would have, and then held her at arm’s length and looked at her, one long look, woman to woman, that saw, Lucy was almost certain, straight down to the bottom of her, and said only, “Come back to us one day.”
Edward wrung Lorenzo’s hand and then, surprising everyone including himself, embraced him.
The boy stood at the water’s edge with his boots on the correct feet for the occasion and gravely presented Lorenzo with a stone, the best one he owned, which Lorenzo received on one knee with the solemnity of a knighthood and stowed over his heart.
And Emily came to Lucy last. She came with her hands behind her back and her chin down and her mother’s eyes lifted up, and she stood in front of Lucy working up to it, and then thrust out both hands at once, cupped together, and in the cup of them lay a bird.
A little marble bird, the length of Lucy’s thumb, white as the cliffs, with the wood-grain of the island running through its folded wings, its head turned back over its shoulder, every feather suggested with three strokes.
“Papa calls you Lucy-bird,” Emily said, in a rush, to Lucy’s hem. “Matthew made it, but I chose it and I polished it, Mama showed me how, it took ages, and it’s so you don’t forget the island. You have to keep it in your pocket. Not a box. A pocket, so it’s with you.”
Lucy went down on her knees on the wet shingle in her traveling dress, which appalled Bessy somewhere behind her and could not be helped, and took the bird, and took the child, and held both hard, and let two tears go where the wind would dry them before anyone official could see.
“A pocket,” she promised, against the warm blonde-brown hair. “Always. I swear it. I will think of you.”
Her uncle came last of all, because he had been putting it off, pretending to see to the boat. He gripped her hands in the old grip, the handshake that was a sentence, and for a moment the sentence would not come.
“Every mile, Lucy-bird,” he managed, finally, low, only for her.
“Every mile,” said Lucy. “Whites’ statuary by Michaelmas.”
“Signore.” Lorenzo had come to stand beside her, and he spoke formally, with his hand flat over the smooth stone in his breast pocket.
“What this island holds, I hold. To the grave. And if we come again, we come as strangers do, rarely, and carefully, and by Matthew’s word first. You have both our honors on it. ”
“Aye,” said her uncle, thickly. “I know I do. It is why you’re getting the boat and not a musket ball.” Which was as near as he could come, in front of everyone, and everyone mercifully laughed, and the laugh got them all through the shoving-off, which nothing else would have.
He rowed them across himself.
And midway over, Lucy watched him do the thing she had been dreading without knowing she dreaded it.
She watched him watch the quay of Whitcombe come up over his shoulder, and gauge the distance, and then, between one stroke and the next, put the dead man back on.
The set of the jaw changed first. Then the eyes, the light in them banking down to shoreman’s civility.
And when a boy on the quay sang out something about the tide, the voice that answered was burred and slowed and dressed in the coast, Jim Carver’s voice, a stranger’s voice, and her uncle was gone again, six feet away from her, rowing.
Lucy glanced away out to sea and let the wind dry her eyes.
The quay greeted them. Lawrence’s handclasp.
Matthew’s, longer, with a look that carried all the freight it needed to.
Mrs. Hannaford arrived at the last possible moment, at a fishwife’s pace, with a covered basket that she thrust at Lorenzo like an indictment, and it proved to hold enough pasties for a regiment, and she looked him over once, coat to boots, and said, “You’ll do,” which was Whitcombe for a benediction, and stumped off before anyone could commit sentiment.
Then their carriage stood loaded by the inn, and Bessy stood by the carriage, in her traveling cloak, with the trunks and band-boxes counted twice.
“Bessy,” Lucy said, low, while Lorenzo saw to the last strapping. “Before we start. What you have seen. I must ask you to be—”
“Seen, Miss Lucy?” Bessy’s needles could not have looked more innocent if she had been born yesterday.
“I’m sure I don’t follow. Lovely fortnight at the seaside, we’ve had.
Devon air. I said to myself the first morning, I said, Bessy, that’s proper air, that is, you can feel it doing you good.
I’ve slept like the dead and eaten like a bishop, and there’s a receipt for pilchards I mean to torment Cook with till one of us dies. ”
She settled her workbag on her arm and looked at Lucy with eyes as mild as a summer sea, in which, very far down, something old and iron lay keeping watch.
“Seaside, Miss Lucy. That’s the whole of my holiday, and a lovelier one I never had. Now get in before the horses take root.”
Lucy got in. Love, she thought, watching Bessy arrange herself and her knitting opposite like a garrison taking up a position, wore more disguises than the Dominus ever dreamed of.
The road took them up out of the combe, and the sea fell away behind, and the journey home began, and it was the same journey.
That was what Lucy had not been prepared for, though she could not have said what she had expected instead.
The same roads. The same climbing lanes between the same high hedges, the same gulls thinning out mile by mile until the sky forgot them.
The same red soil, running backward now.
The same inns, even, the same landlady at Glastonbury Tor who remembered them and gave them the same rooms, and it was all exactly, faithfully the same, the whole mirror of it, except for the silence riding inside the carriage where the delight used to spill over.
They were not silent, of course. They were worse than silent; they were pleasant.
Lorenzo pointed out a hawk, and she admired it.
She remarked on the harvest coming forward, and he agreed that it came forward.
He handed her down at every stage with his warm sure hand and asked if she was tired, and she was not tired, thank you, and the miles went by stuffed with civility like a drawing room with too many chairs.
Bessy shook her head, and did her knitting.
Through it all, his other hand kept straying, once an hour, to his breast pocket, to a child’s stone, and hers kept closing, in the folds of her skirt where nobody could see, around a little marble bird with its head turned back over its shoulder.
In the parlor of the inn on the second evening, the fire well up and supper cleared, Lucy sat with a book she was not reading, and Lorenzo sat across from her with a journal he was not reading, and Bessy sat between and a little apart with her knitting, and the needles, which had gone all day like a mill, went slower. And slower.
Lucy glanced up and caught her at it, the gray eyes moving from one bent, pretending head to the other, one, and then the other, and back, with the mildness worn clean off them, and worry standing in their place as plain as a lit window.
Bessy caught her catching, and did not trouble to disguise it, which frightened Lucy more than anything else in the whole long days of travel.
Then the needles picked up their pace again, click and click, keeping the little fire of ordinariness alight in the middle of the room, and the three of them sat on in the lamplight, being carried home together, with silence as the fourth passenger, a tangible form made of things unsaid.