Page 22 of The Beloved Escapade

Yet it was unfamiliar. When the gentleman’s gaze landed on her and stayed, a surprising warmth spread low in her belly.

He made her a speech. It was headlong and hopeless, all of it tumbling out. He had prepared remarks for a gray-headed gentleman and could not deliver a word of them. He knew how this appeared. He had tried to wait and failed. By the end of it, Lucy was laughing before she had decided to. The laugh, the one Mama despaired of, came up from her comfortable boots and bubbled warm through her chest, easing something tight there.

Over the teacups, he told her why.

An artist ancestor of Florence, three hundred years gone, who had crossed the sea for his life’s greatest work and never come home. He walked into this country and this country closed over him like water. The sentence went into her like a splinter. She knew she would be taking it out and examining it for days. A family that had never stopped asking. A trail followed through paintings and libraries and one cliff-top house in Cornwall, ending at …

My house.

One day! She had been here one day!

She watched him say it, this stranger with three centuries in his saddlebags, and she thought, with a lurch that was half joy and half terror, It has started. I inherited a house, and an adventure rode up to the door of it before the dust sheets were off.

Her breath came a little quicker at the thought, a flush rising warm under her skin.

The second pot of tea arrived. Lucy set herself to learn him.

It was not difficult. He was the least guarded person she had ever taken tea with. Or no, that was not right. She corrected herself, watching him over the rim of her cup. He was guarded in one place only, like a man with one locked room in an open house, and everywhere else he simply spilled. She felt the pull of it. His openness made her want to lean closer, her body answering before her mind caught up.

“So your father is an art dealer?” she asked.

“Was. Is.” A gesture that took in the ambiguity. “He is not well, these last years. The business is mine now, in the ways that matter. Though I am a poor dealer, signorina. My friend Sebastian is the dealer. Sebastian could sell a sketch to the man who drew it. I am the one who cannot let go of things. A dealer must let go of things. It is the whole profession. Together, we are brilliant.”

“And what are you, if not a dealer?”

“A restorer. By training and by love.” He turned his hands over, palms up, as if presenting evidence. She saw the faint stains ground into the creases of his fingers, ochre and something darker, the kind of marks that no washing reached. The sight of them made her fingers tingle with the sudden want to touch.

“You cannot get it out,” he remarked, following her eyes, unembarrassed. “The pigment. My grandmother said God marks the trades He approves of. Fishermen with their hands, farmers with their necks, painters with their fingers.” He considered his own. “Lawyers stay clean, she said. She wished me to notice this.”

Lucy laughed again, choosing not to mention her father’s profession. “And you restore paintings.”

“Paintings, panels, once a ceiling, which I do not recommend. The neck is never the same. You lie on the scaffold with your arm up, and the whole time the saints look down at you, waiting to see if you are worthy.” His eyes had gone bright with the memory of it.

“That is the thing no one tells you of restoration, signorina. You are alone with the work as no one has been alone with it since the man who made it. Under the dirt, under the old varnish gone brown like a fog, there is the day it was painted. The actual day. The light of it. You take away three hundred years an inch at a time, and one morning the fog lifts under your hand and the color comes up at you, the blue he ground that morning, the blue nobody living has seen, and you are standing in his workshop with him. Both of you at the same easel. Three centuries apart.”

He stopped. He looked faintly surprised at himself, as though the speech had run off without permission.

“Forgive me. My friends have a signal they make when I do this. Like so.” He made a little cutting motion at his own throat. “And I am obliged to stop.”

“I shall do no such thing,” said Lucy, meaning it with her whole being. The warmth in her belly spread a little further at the way his passion lit his face.

He had been everywhere. It came out sideways, in pieces. Rome came up because of a ceiling. Vienna came up because of a dealer who had cheated his father. Genoa came up and brought a sea voyage with it, and a storm, and a crate of panels lashed to the deck that he had sat beside for two days in the wet because they could not sit alone.

Lucy drank her cooling tea and watched him talk with his hands. The feeling that had been circling all morning came and landed.

He is like Uncle Henry.

Not in feature. Not in voice. Uncle Henry had been all bark and bigness, sunburnt, loud in doorways. This man was cut finer and wound tighter. But the weather was the same. Some people carried weather with them. One could stand in an ordinary room and feel the horizon in it, feel that the person before you had come from somewhere and was going somewhere, that the world was wide and they were personally acquainted with the width of it.

Uncle Henry had brought that essence into her father’s careful house twice a year, and everything, everyone, had been more alive while it was in the room, and everything had been smaller when it left.

She had been fourteen when the weather stopped coming.

And now it sat in her drawing room asking for a second cup. This force, this coiled and traveled and impatient creature, a few years older than herself and a whole world older than that.

Lucy understood, watching him fail to sit all the way back in his chair, that whatever else this man was, he was going somewhere. He was mid-flight even now, only pausing. And she wanted, fiercely, disgracefully, to know where. The wanting settled low and insistent, making her shift in her seat without meaning to.

That was the intrigue of him. Not the dark eyes, though the dark eyes did no harm. The going.