Epilogue
Almost no one will see what I have made here. That was always the condition of the work.
From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi
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The Great Room at Somerset House had held half a century of England’s paintings. Lorenzo di Bianchi stood in the middle of it on a summer evening and watched the whole place surrender, wall by wall, to a Florentine.
Matteo was everywhere. The name moved through the crowd like weather.
Di Bianchi. Di Bianchi. The lost master.
The buried school. Every lip carried it.
Every wall carried him. The great panels burned quietly under the lamps.
The Lady with her offered blade. The doomed fellowship at their round table.
The queen keeping her state while her heart broke.
All of them cleaned and cradled and hung by hands that loved them.
Restored to the pantheon.
That was the phrase the President of the Academy had used, standing on a little dais two hours ago, his voice thick with it. Restored at last to the pantheon of the masters.
Lorenzo had stood beside Lucy with her hand wound tight in his and heard his ancestor’s name given back to him in front of the assembled art of England.
He had disgraced seventeen generations by weeping in public.
Nobody had minded. Least of all the seventeen generations.
The tears had come hot and shameless, and he had not tried to stop them.
He surveyed the room now from beside one of the smaller panels, a glass of champagne forgotten in his hand. Once an hour, he had promised Lucy. Only once. He thought about the wolves.
They were in the room. He would have wagered the whole exhibition on it. Somewhere in this brilliant crowd, wearing scholarship or rank or charm, the Dominus walked his walls with their cold calculations, hunting the one thing the walls would never give them.
The knowledge sat in him easily now, almost merrily.
He and Lucy had built this room to be a beautiful impasse.
Not one receipt or mention of Hwitmarbel’s living stone anywhere.
Not one panel, not one syllable of the catalog led to Devon.
The island might as well not exist. Officially, as far as this exhibition was concerned, it did not.
Everything on these walls had come up out of the earth of Gloucestershire, from the trove beneath Grey House.
The provenance stood published in the catalog’s front matter, plain as a tombstone and just as cold a trail: the estate of the late Captain Belafonte, R.N.
, passed by will through the late Mr. Henry Carroway, lost at sea, to his niece, after seven years’ proceedings in Chancery.
A drowned captain. A drowned heir. A decade’s gap.
A young wife at the end of it who knew charmingly little about anything before her own inheritance.
Let them pull that thread until their fingers bled. It led nowhere.
And for the hungrier sort, the ones who would want the source itself, he and Lucy had set the door wide open.
Grey House was receiving scholars. It said so in the catalog.
The cathedral chamber beneath the house stood open, by written application, to students of art and antiquity.
Applications arrived by the sackful. Some of those earnest correspondents would be exactly what they claimed, and some would be wolves in spectacles.
All of them alike would be walked down the great stair by the steward, shown the columns and the ceiling and the empty anvil, given tea, and would find nothing.
The journals were gone. Every cipher, every ledger, every page of her uncle’s racing pencil, everything the Dominus could use, had traveled quietly into Cornwall and vanished into the hidden hall at Grimsfell.
Walls that had kept a living woman secret for years would keep dead paper until doomsday.
Angelo stood guard over the house, and Isolde over its secrets.
The Dominus could come disguised as scholars and feast their avarice on beauty until their eyes ached. Beauty was all there was to find. The marbles remained where they belonged, in the dark under Grey House, under the painted ceiling.
“You are pulling a face,” said Lucy, arriving at his elbow in bronze silk, with two fresh glasses. “The general-reviewing-his-fortifications face. You promised me once an hour.”
“It has been,” said Lorenzo, consulting nothing at all, “an hour.”
“It has been twenty minutes.” She traded his warm forgotten glass for a cold one and tucked her hand through his arm. Her wedding ring pressed his sleeve. The pressure still hit him low and hard, the same way a masterpiece did when he walked into a room and found it waiting.
“Come. You are wanted. Half of England is waiting to congratulate you, and the other half is waiting to congratulate me for having the sense to marry you, and I want witnesses for that part.”
Half of England had, in fairness, made an effort.
They came at him in waves. Lorenzo, who had arrived in this country knowing nobody, stood in the finest room in London and was embraced, wrung, pounded, and toasted by what appeared to be an entire aristocracy of friends.
Lord Gabriel Strathmore came first, Viscount Trenwith, dangerous as ever and grinning like a boy, with his wife Henri on his arm already halfway into an argument about the Round Table panel’s iconography that she had plainly been saving up for weeks.
Lorenzo gave himself to it joyfully, hands already moving, until Gabriel pulled her away to meet an old friend from France.
Nicholas and Millie Scott were at the vigil-knight. Millie interrogated it at close range with her spectacles nearly on the paint while Nicholas watched her with besotted patience.
Marco Scott and his bride had claimed the Lady of the Lake and were not sharing her with anyone.
Sebastian was there as well, towering over the crowd in the way he always did, his wife on his arm, both of them smiling as if the whole evening belonged to them.
Lorenzo felt the old change in the air that came with Sebastian’s height, the same slight adjustment he made when Sebastian’s brother, the Duke of Halmesbury, later stopped beside him.
The Earl of Saunton arrived with his countess glowing on his arm, pumped Lorenzo’s hand, said something generous, and got a good deal of it wrong, art not being the earl’s strong suit.
He was corrected, kindly and at length, by his brother’s wife, the Balfour bluestocking, while Balfour himself mouthed an unrepentant apology over her head.
And Lord Trafford came, with his whole tribe.
Lorenzo had met Julius Trafford before and considered him one of the great ornaments of the nation, a flippant dandy of the first water with a mind like a razor kept deliberately in a scented glove.
He came through the crowd now flashing like a kingfisher, a bright flaxen crown of curls above darker chocolate-brown sides, his wife on his arm, a calm, clear-eyed lady who examined the panels with brisk interest.
Behind them came the earl, Lord Stirling, solemn and upright as a churchyard yew, and the Countess of Stirling in bold, uncompromising color, her own flaxen curls dressed high and unapologetic.
Lord Stirling bowed over Lucy’s hand and said, with grave and unexpected warmth, that the late Captain Belafonte had been an acquaintance of his youth and would have been proud past bearing of this room.
And with them came Julius’s sister. Lady Penelope Trafford, just out, with a hint of the same chocolate brown in her hair and her moss green eyes, the family flash banked down into something quieter.
She stood before the great panel of the Lady of the Lake for a long time, longer than the crowd’s rhythm allowed, looking at the offered sword and the reaching hand.
There was something in her face that Lorenzo, who read faces the way he read surfaces, could not quite place.
A waiting expression. As if she were listening for hoofbeats.
Then Julius swept her off to be introduced to a bishop, and Lorenzo forgot it.
Then a duke wanted him, and the evening resumed.
“What I cannot fathom,” said the Duke of Halmesbury, some while later, in front of the knights of the round table, “is the light.”
Lorenzo liked the Duke of Halmesbury. The man looked at art the way he was said to manage his estates, thoroughly and without vanity.
He had been standing at the panel for ten full minutes, which in a crowd like this was a pilgrimage.
He also towered over Lorenzo in exactly the same way Sebastian did, so that Lorenzo found himself tipping his head back slightly to meet the duke’s eyes, the old familiar adjustment.
“The armor, I understand,” the duke went on.
“Metal is a discipline; a great hand may render it. But that—” He indicated the soft spill of light across the knights’ faces and the edge of a shield, the way it seemed to come from nowhere and yet fall exactly true.
“—that is not discipline. How does a man make paint hold light like that?”
“He watches,” said Lorenzo. “For a long time. He watches where the light actually falls, not where he thinks it ought to fall, and then he puts the bright paint only there. That is all. Most men paint the light they expect. The old ones painted the light they saw—”
He never finished the sentence.
The sound came first, from the far end of the Great Room.
It was a sound so odd to the evening that the whole room fell silent.
The flat, meaty, unmistakable crack of a fist arriving in a face.
Followed by the crash of a champagne glass.
A woman’s cut-short cry. The heavy, complicated noise of a grown man in evening dress meeting the floor of the Royal Academy.
The crowd surged and parted the way crowds do, everyone recoiling and craning at once. Down the sudden avenue of silk and shoulders, Lorenzo saw the heart of the commotion.
A gentleman lay on the floor beneath the Round Table panel.
An extremely elegant gentleman, even horizontal.
Lorenzo’s eye examined the cut of the coat in one glance and judged it from Paris.
A Frenchman, and a grand one, with a lip already welling scarlet, propped on one elbow and staring upward with an expression of astonishment so complete it was almost innocent.
And over him, breathing hard, with his fist still closed and his neckcloth still flawless, in the ringing hush of suspended conversations, stood Lord Julius Trafford.
Nobody moved. The hush went on and on, gathering scandal into itself. Lorenzo stood forty feet away beside a duke, his sentence about paint dead in his mouth, and had absolutely no idea what he was watching.
Fragments reached him in whispers, hissing outward through the crowd.
A marquis, somebody breathed. A French marquis, recently landed.
Then, urgently, from another quarter, No, but did you see, he only bowed to her, he did no more than bow over her hand and say something, and Trafford crossed the room.
And under it all, everywhere, deliciously scandalized, the oldest chorus in England, Well, I never. At an exhibition. At the Academy.
The fallen marquis touched his lip, regarded his own blood on his white glove with an air of profound philosophical interest, and said something upward, in French, quite softly, that made Julius Trafford’s shoulders bunch for a second blow.
Then a clear-eyed lady in gray was between them, Trafford’s own wife, kneeling by the felled nobleman with brisk, professional, entirely unimpressed hands, tilting his chin to the light to inspect the damage as though she had stitched worse before breakfast. The tableau held.
Lorenzo’s gaze, sweeping the frozen circle for sense, snagged on one figure at its edge and stopped.
Lady Penelope Trafford stood nearest the panel, white to the lips, scarlet at the cheekbones, both at once, with one gloved hand pressed flat to her breastbone and her eyes fixed on the man on the floor. Her face had stopped listening for hoofbeats.
The hoofbeats, evidently, had arrived.
“What the blazes,” remarked the Duke of Halmesbury, mildly, beside him.
Somewhere, bells of intervention were beginning to ring.
Lord Stirling, Trafford’s father, was cutting through the crowd like a solemn admiral at the helm.
The President of the Academy was arriving at a speed unbecoming his office.
Footmen materialized. The evening’s machinery heaved itself into motion around the wreck, and the whispering rose toward a roar.
Lucy appeared at Lorenzo’s side, with her eyes enormous and her champagne forgotten, and demanded of him, under her breath, in the tone of a wife expecting her husband to have sources, “Lorenzo, what has happened?”
“I have not,” said Lorenzo di Bianchi, with a rising and entirely disgraceful delight, “the slightest notion.”
He gathered his wife’s hand onto his arm and watched an earl’s son be escorted with terrible dignity toward an anteroom, and a French marquis be helped up bleeding under a painted fellowship of doomed knights, and the young Lady Penelope stare after both of them as her mother, Lady Stirling, stood protectively at her side.
A few weeks in this country as a married man.
A cathedral under their house. A hidden family on a far-off island.
Three hundred years raised from the dark.
And still the English could produce this unexpected oddity, out of an elegant evening, out of a bow over a hand, and decline to explain any of it.
The English, Lorenzo reflected, with the deep contentment of a man married into this foreign world, were never finished being mysterious.
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