Chapter 20
I have finished. The words feel strange in my mouth.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
* * *
They had dressed in something under two minutes, in a wild disorder of flung garments that would have sent Bessy to her bed for a week, and went back into the little room together, and stood in front of the wall.
The seam had waited. Of course it had. It had waited three hundred years.
Another hour was nothing to it. The black line ran floor to ceiling where the paneling had leaned away from itself, and the cold breath still came through it, patient, mineral, old.
Lorenzo put his fingertips to the edge of the opening the way he touched everything that mattered, lightly, listening through his skin.
“Counterweighted,” he breathed. “Dio. Feel it, Lucia, it wants to move, it has been kept wanting to move, somebody greased this within—” He stopped. His eyes came round to hers, black and blazing in the lantern-light. “Within living memory. This door has been used.”
“Centuries of fingers,” said Lucy. “I told you. The sigil is worn like a saint’s foot. Captain Belafonte never had the chance to tell my uncle about it. It is likely he planned to.”
“Then we are expected,” said Lorenzo, in a voice she would remember all her life, and set his shoulder to the wall, and pushed.
It went back with a long grinding sigh, stone rollers somewhere taking up the load, the whole wall of the secret room swinging inward like the page of an enormous book. Behind it, the lantern found cut steps, going down.
Cut steps. Not cellar stairs. Dressed stone, broad and shallow and true, descending into the dark at an easy slope, made for burdened men to walk with dignity.
The walls on either side were dressed too for the first few yards, chisel-work fine as linen.
Then, as they went down, hand in hand, lantern lifted, the dressed stone began to give way by degrees to the living rock.
The tool-marks thinned. The walls went natural.
The stairs became a sloping passage through the underworld itself, and the maker had done nothing to it but smooth the floor for the feet of the faithful.
They walked a long time. That was the thing that kept undoing Lucy’s breath, the sheer length of the descent.
Fifty steps. A hundred. She lost the count somewhere after the passage bent and bent again, always descending.
The lantern-light slid along wet-gleaming rock.
The air grew colder and larger somehow, tasting of stone and deep water.
The sound of water itself arrived from far ahead, a soft ceaseless conversation.
Lorenzo’s hand around hers gripped harder with every yard, until she could feel his pulse in his palm, going like a drum.
“Three hundred years,” he said once, to the dark, in Italian, and then said nothing more at all, because the passage was opening.
She felt it before she saw it. The air changed.
The walls let go of the lantern-light and gave it nothing back.
The sound of their footsteps went suddenly out from them and did not return for a long, long moment, and then returned changed, hushed, vaulted, as sound comes back inside a great church.
Lucy walked out of the passage mouth into a darkness so vast that the little lantern seemed to gutter with the humility of it.
And the light found feet.
Marble feet, bare, at the height of her shoulder, planted on a marble crag.
Her eye went up from the feet with her heart climbing ahead of it, up a young man’s body braced and turning, up the drapery snapping about him in a wind carved out of nothing, up the two arms flung high above his head.
There, at the very top of the lantern’s reach, gripped in both stone fists and thrust at the darkness, a sword.
A young Arthur. It could be nothing and no one else.
A boy on the very cusp of kingship, holding his new-drawn blade aloft.
His face, tipped back to look up along the steel, held an expression of pure awe, wonder and terror and joy all struck together in the white stone, the face of a soul learning in one instant the size of what has been handed to it.
The whole figure stood twice the height of a man.
The elaborate mastery of it, every knuckle and buckle and wind-whipped fold alive, made her think of the tales travelers told of Michelangelo’s David, the giant of Florence.
Through the pale stone, faint and unmistakable in the raking lantern-light, ran the grain. Wood-grain, in marble.
“Stone from Hwitmarbel,” Lucy whispered.
Beside her, Lorenzo made a sound she had never heard from a grown man, and went down.
Not fainting. Kneeling. His legs simply gave their notice at the foot of his ancestor’s work, and he knelt on the stone floor in the dark with his face turned up.
Lucy stood beside him with her hand in his hair and her own eyes streaming.
That was how they remained for a while, the two of them and the boy king, at the threshold of everything.
It was Lorenzo who found the candle-tree.
He rose at last, unsteady, wiping his face with the flat of his hand, and took the lantern from her and began to move along the wall of the entrance, hunting with the raking light, muttering.
“He provisioned this place. He provisioned everything. A man does not build a church and forget the—there!”
A great iron stand, taller than he was, branched like a winter tree, and every branch crowned with a thick church candle gone ivory-dark with age.
Beside it, in a stone chest with a fitted lid, dozens more, laid up in straw like eggs.
Wax keeps. He said it aloud, laughing and weeping at once. “Wax keeps. God bless him.”
He lit them from the lantern one by one with his hands shaking, branch after branch after branch.
And the cathedral bloomed out of the dark.
Lucy would try, in the years after, to tell it, and would always fail at the same place, which was the beginning. There was no beginning. It arrived whole, as the sea arrives when a lane turns, and the mind simply could not hold the fact all at once and took it instead in pieces, in gasps.
The cave first. A cavern like the inside of a held breath, vast, its ceiling lost and then found as the candlelight climbed.
It was alive. That was the marvel under all the other marvels.
A living cave, working still at its own slow art.
Stalactites came down from the dark in ranks like frozen rain, cream and amber and rose.
Stalagmites rose to meet them. Where they had met and married across the centuries stood columns no mason ever turned, glistening, faintly translucent at their edges, taking the candlelight into themselves and giving it back softened, holy.
Water moved somewhere in the dark, a black pool at the cavern’s far side lying so perfectly quiet that it held a second cathedral upside down within itself.
Everywhere, the slow mineral patience of it, drop by drop, building on, indifferent to kings and wars and the whole history of mankind.
And into this living church, three hundred years ago, a Florentine had come with the finest stone in England, and he had not conquered the cave.
That was what broke Lucy open as she turned and turned in the middle of the floor.
He had listened to it. Where the rock made columns, he had dressed their feet and crowned their heads and let them stand.
Where the walls swept into natural bays, he had made chapels of the bays.
His carved pillars grew out of living flowstone so that in the candlelight you could not tell, and did not want to tell, where God’s work ended and Matteo’s began.
The whole vast space breathed as one made thing, half grown, half built, entire.
And it was full.
Panels stood in the bays, huge wooden panels the height of two men, painted, glowing under a few years of dust like fires banked but never out.
The Lady of the Lake rose from painted water with the blade offered flat across her palm, vast, tremendous, the water so wet and the silk so silken that Lucy’s hand rose toward it of its own accord.
A Round Table, thronged, every face along it a portrait, argument and fellowship and doom all seated together.
A vigil, the young knight kneeling the night through with his brow against his sword’s crossguard, done at a scale where his aching back was her aching back.
A grieving queen, listening to something being read aloud that was breaking her heart, and keeping her state while it broke.
And between the panels, among the columns, down the whole length of the nave that the cave had offered and the master had accepted, stood the statues.
Merlin with his head bowed over something cupped and shining in his two hands.
A knight sleeping, truly sleeping, in his armor under a carved thorn. The queen again, standing now, her hand at her throat.
Figures greater than life, white and grained and burning softly in the candlelight, a marble people inhabiting the underworld of her own Grey House. Lorenzo went among them as if he had walked into the country of the dead and found it populated by everyone he ever loved.
“Seventeen years.” He had stopped in the middle of the nave, turning, his arms out, tears running openly and entirely disregarded down his face.
“Lucia. Lucia. Here is where the mountain went. Twelve blocks and fourteen and nine and eleven, year upon year upon year, carriage by water to the workes, in secrecie, and here are the workes, here, under your house, under our feet, all along, forty feet under the room where I sat lamenting my dead trails like a madman, the whole time, the whole—” His voice went.