Chapter 18 #2
Lucy stood on the landing with the candle guttering in her breath and gave the verdict against herself because she was her father’s daughter and the evidence was in.
She had done the one thing Uncle Henry never did in all his reckless, drowned, glorious life. She had stood on the bank and let the river wash by.
He had taught her every river he ever ran. She had learned about the Hooghly, the Pearl, the Guadalquivir, like scripture, and the single lesson under all of them was the same. Get on the boat. Storms, fevers, pirates, grief … get on the boat.
The bank was where nothing ever happened to anybody. This morning, the boat had stood with the whole of her life strapped to it, and she had folded her hands at her waist and wished it fair weather and not risked any part of herself.
Except she had risked every part of herself.
There was no crying about it. She noticed that with a kind of distant interest. She was past crying. So Lucy did what the women of no other family in England would have done at eleven o’clock at night in a house full of empty rooms.
She went down to the secret room, to her uncle’s papers, set the candle on the scorched blotter, and worked.
It helped, after a fashion. Her hands moved and her mind followed at a distance.
She sorted. She read. She went on with the slow work of putting Henry Carroway’s paper life in order.
Letters into years, lists into subjects, the racing downhill handwriting she knew by heart.
The little room held her the way it always had, smelling of dust and leather.
The one place built to the exact size of her grief.
Midnight came up through the house, twelve thin strokes from the hall below.
Lucy kept working. One candle. The house asleep around her.
Her uncle’s papers giving themselves up drawer by drawer.
Sometime after the twelfth stroke, reaching for the next of the tea-colored journals, she misjudged the distance.
Her knuckles caught a loose page beneath it.
It slid off the stack, hit the edge of the desk, and dropped down the far side, into the gap between the drawers and the wall.
Lucy said a word Mrs. Hannaford had taught her.
She took the candle, came around the desk, and knelt in the narrow space, skirts crushed under her knees.
She reached into the gap. The page had fallen flat against the skirting.
She had to put her cheek nearly to the floorboards to see it, holding the candle low and away so she would not set fire to her new home.
Her fingers found the paper’s edge. She was drawing it out when the candlelight, lying along the floor at that flat angle, caught the skirting board.
Lucy went still with the page half in her hand.
The baseboard was plain oak, the ordinary foot-high run that eyes passed over a thousand times without seeing.
But in one place, a hand’s span from the corner, the wood was different.
Worn. Smooth and slightly hollowed, the way a stair tread or a saint’s foot is worn by long, repeated touching.
The raking light made the polished place stand out against the rougher wood around it.
She set the paper on the desk without looking at it.
She crawled closer, candle nearly on the boards, and brought the flame to the worn spot.
In the center of the hollow, almost rubbed away, was a small mark.
An upright sword inside a ring. The same sigil that was carved in the library shelving on the other side of this wall.
The mark she pressed with two fingers every day to open the shelf-door.
Here it sat, at floor level, worn to a ghost by three hundred years of fingers that had known exactly where to reach.
Fingers. Plural. Centuries of them. This place had been used. Visited.
Lucy knelt on the floor of the secret room with her pulse throbbing in her throat and put her two fingers on the little sword, into the glassy hollow other fingers had made, and pushed.
Nothing. Her heart lurched. She shifted her weight, set her fingers harder into the worn cup, and pushed again, as one pushes a thing one believes in.
Deep in the wall, something let go.
Not a click. A low, heavy, wooden clunk, like a ship’s timber taking up its load. A sound with centuries of grease and patience in it. It went through the floor into her knees. Then the whole wall in front of her cracked.
A seam of black opened straight up on the right, past her eyes, beyond the candle’s reach toward the ceiling. The wall leaned away from her, grinding in its hidden joints, one slow hand’s breadth. Out of the black seam came air.
Cold air. Old air. It moved across her face and bent the candle flame flat.
It smelled of of stone and water and dark.
The breath of somewhere deep. Lucy knelt in front of the opening wall of her own house, skirts full of dust, fingers still pressed to the worn little sword, and her heart went up shouting one name.
Lorenzo!
The sword. Where the stone was born, there is the door.
And here was a door, a real one, opening in the very room where the whole trail had begun.
Everything in her leapt for him before she could stop it.
Maybe. Maybe the sword itself lay down there in the dark.
Excalibur under her own floors all along.
She was half up off her knees with his name in her mouth, turned toward the library door to run and fetch him, to see his face do the thing it did, to watch the light come up in him one more time—
And the room was empty.
The chair was empty. The house was empty.
The man she would have laid the sword in front of, the man whose whole line had waited generations for whatever breathed on the far side of this wall, was sleeping in some inn on the London road, released, discharged, sent away by her own hand in her best barrister manner, believing she had rejected him and his quest.
The excitement crashed down. It crashed down the whole way.
Where it landed, something already cracked broke the rest of the way.
Lucy stood alone in the little room, in the cold breath of the opened dark, with the greatest discovery of her life six inches in front of her and not one soul on earth to share it with.
She understood, finally and completely, the price of the bank.
Boats went by on the river of time only once.
The draft moved the candle. The flame leaned, guttered, and righted itself. The black seam waited, patient as everything in this house was patient. Very faintly, from far down in the earth under Grey House, so faint she might have imagined it, came a sound like water moving over stone.
Lucy Carroway wiped her face once with the heel of her hand, hard, pretending to herself those were not tears of a broken heart.
“Well then,” she said to the dark.
And she took up her candle and went out to get a lantern.