Chapter 19
Every stroke was a way of keeping her. The curve of her hip. The weight of her breast in the light. The soft place under her arm where the shadow gathers. I worked until the light failed and still it was not enough.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
The knocking started while Lucy was still in the passage from the kitchens. It stopped her cold. Lantern in one hand. Her heart slammed straight up into her throat.
Past one in the morning. Rain had set in since midnight. She could hear it now that she was listening, a soft rush against the passage window. Under it, the knocker on the great front door again. Three strikes. Urgent.
Every wolf her uncle had ever warned her of howled in the dark of her mind.
Soft questions, he had said. Lawyers’ clothes.
It may never come. But lawyers did not come at one in the morning.
Nothing good did. Lucy stood in her own passage with the lantern-light shaking up the walls, a lone woman awake in a great house, the servants asleep.
Then the voice came through the door.
“Lucia.”
The lantern nearly left her hand as her heart resumed beating.
She crossed the hall with no memory of the floor under her feet. The bolts fought her, top and bottom. Her fingers had gone clumsy. The great door swung in on the rain and the night. There on her steps, in the spill of her lantern, stood Lorenzo di Bianchi.
He was wrecked. That was the first whole thought that landed.
Wet air gusted in against her skirts. Hatless.
Soaked through. His greatcoat black with rain and steaming faintly in the lantern-light.
Boots and breeches, mud to the knee. Hair plastered and dripping into his collar.
Behind him at the foot of the steps, a horse stood blowing with its head down, ruining the border of pinks like it had earned the right.
He had ridden through the night. Through spring rain on roads he barely knew in the dark. He stood on her top step breathing hard, as if he had run beside the horse half the way. Water ran down his face.
His eyes were lit. Like lamps carried up through a dark house. She had not seen them lit in a se’nnight.
“I have a speech,” said Lorenzo.
Lucy’s hand tightened on the lantern ring, and she did her best to keep her imagination from running wild.
“I composed it between the fourth milestone and the ninth, and it was very fine, and I have lost every word of it except the true ones, so you will have those, standing here, in the rain, which is fitting, because I have earned the rain.”
He dragged a wet hand down his face. It did nothing. He left the water worse and did not care. The words began to tumble out of him as they always did when the Italian in him broke loose, hands already starting to move.
“Ti amo. I love you.”
The rain fell. The lantern hissed where a drop found the glass. Lucy felt the sound in her chest, and she thought perhaps she might be dreaming. Dreaming the dreams of a desperate woman. Either that or she was ready for Bedlam, imagining Lorenzo.
“That is the whole of the speech, Lucia. Everything else is footnotes. Ti amo. I love you. I have loved you, I think, since you served me tea and peppered me with questions, sincere in your eagerness, and I have spent an entire month refusing to know it, because I am a coward with a very expensive education. And this morning, I let you hand me my freedom, and I bowed over your hand … your cold hand, Lucia, l’ho sentita, I felt how cold it was, and I refused to acknowledge it because my cowardice needed it to be meaningless, and I rode away and I could not read one word of Matteo’s journal, because every page had your face on it.
So …” He spread his hands palm up. Rain pooled in them.
He was laying his whole heart out for her to see. “I got a fresh horse.”
“Lorenzo—”
“Wait. Please. Or I will lose my nerve, and I have only just found where it was kept.”
He came up the last step. Close enough now that the cold of the rain off him touched her skin.
His voice dropped and roughened, the Italian cadence thickening.
“I have not found Matteo’s work. I may never find it.
I want you to hear me say it clearly that I am not at peace with that.
I will not stand here and lie to you that the wound is closed.
It is not closed; it aches tonight, and it will ache for years.
But Lucia. Lucia, I have spent my life learning one single skill.
To know a masterpiece when I am standing in front of one.
To attribute correctly. And tonight, on that black road, I finally attributed my own life. ”
His wet hands closed carefully around the sides of the lantern, and around her hand that held it. They held the light between them. She felt the cold of his fingers and the heat under it.
“The old masters, maybe I have lost them. But the masterpiece I found in an old house in May. Sei tu. It is you. It was always you. Genuine. First rank. Worth more than every crypt in Europe put together. And I am the biggest fool of my whole family, because I had it in my arms and I tried to put it away in an attic so I could go and grieve in peace.”
The rain ran off the eaves. The horse munched on the pinks. Lucy’s pulse beat against the metal of the lantern ring.
“I said in this house that the quest came first.”
His voice cracked on it. He let it crack, hands still moving, his whole body speaking once his hands had left hers.
“I said it to your face, and I meant it, and you, magnificent creature, you signed on anyway. Hear the new terms. They are not negotiable, and I am aware that I am in no position to set terms, and I set them regardless. You first. You, first, always, before the quest, before the family, before the dead. And the quest, if God is ever kind enough to give it back to me in any form, comes a distant and grateful second. And if He never gives it back, then I stand here tonight with nothing under my feet but plain earth, and I find, Lucia, I find that it is enough. As long as I have you.”
His hands came back over hers, and Lucy stood in her doorway with the lantern held between their four hands.
Behind her, in the house, a black seam stood open.
The words there is, there is, there is a door beating against her teeth.
She did not say them. She could not. They were not the point.
They had never been the point. Everything in her that was her father’s daughter had one question left, and she would die before it went unasked.
She did not step back to let him in. Not yet. She stood her ground on her own threshold. Lifted her chin. Watched his face take in that the verdict was not yet given.
“Why did you always stop?”
It came out of her low and level. It landed on him like a facer. She watched it arrive. He flinched, honestly, the way men flinch at a true wound.
“Every night,” said Lucy. Her voice did not rise and did not soften.
“Every night you came to me, or let me come to you, and you gave, and gave, until I could not see straight, and then every night, at the last, without one exception, you took my hands away and kissed my knuckles and stopped. I called it respect because I could not bear to call it anything else. This morning, I called it a man with one foot outside the door, and I released you on the strength of it, and you let me. So before I move one inch, Lorenzo di Bianchi, you will stand in that rain and tell me the truth. Why did you always stop?”
For a moment, he could not speak at all. She watched him gather himself. The Italian in him was still there in the set of his shoulders, in the way his breath came as water streamed down his face.
“Because I was terrified,” he said.
The rain and the lantern. His eyes never left hers.
“Not of you. Never for one instant of you. Of me. Of what I am, Lucia, of what I have watched myself be my whole life. I am my family’s fever in a good coat.
A bee in a bottle. I have watched my madness eat everything it was ever given, my father’s peace, my mother’s patience, my own youth, every friendship that stood too close to the flame, and this spring, I watched it start on you.
I watched myself go absent from your arms. I watched your light bank down day by day. ”
His hands tightened on hers around the lantern ring. She felt the press of it.
“And I thought, in my great wisdom, that there is one thing I can still do for her. One gift left to give. I can leave the door open. If I never finish it, if I never take the last step, then the vows are not sealed, she is not bound, she can walk away. That was why I stopped, Lucia. Every night. It was never the heart withheld for lack of love. It was the heart withheld in terror of what its love does, hoarded like a coin sewn in a hem, so that when my madness had cost you everything else, you would still own yourself.” His voice went to gravel.
“A door that still opened. I stopped because I loved you past bearing and I did not trust myself to be loved back. It is the truth, and it is not a flattering truth, but there it is.”
And there it was. The whole of it. The spring’s black riddle answered on her own doorstep in the rain.
It was not the answer she had steeled herself against. Something in Lucy’s chest, that had been holding its position since a crypt in Devon, broke ranks all at once and ran free, racing to the river of time, racing to catch the boat.