Page 24 of The Beloved Escapade

“What are you doing?”

“Mmm.” A pause. “One moment, signorina. Forgive me. One moment.”

He was at the carving now. The shelves along the inner wall were old, far older than the rest, even Lucy could see that now that she looked, the wood nearly black, the backing behind the books worked all over with vines and leaves in the stiff old style, and he was tracing the vines with one pigment-stained finger, following a stem through its loops the way one follows a line of music, frowning, muttering.

“Signor di Bianchi. I must tell you that in England it is customary, when a gentleman begins stroking a lady’s walls, to offer the lady some explanation.”

That reached him. He surfaced, and had the grace to look abashed, and gestured at the wall, at the windows, at the whole room, with both hands at once.

“Your library is older than your house, signorina.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The house, the front of it, the wings, the room we sat in, that is all of the last century. Georgian, you say. Symmetry, sash windows, everything in its pairs, very handsome, very rational.” He said rational the way other men said regrettable. “But this room, no. This room is the original building. The old manor. Look.”

He took her by the sight-line rather than the arm, one hand sketching the window bay.

“Stone mullions. The wall an arm’s-length thick, you see how deep the bay sits? And this.”

Back to the black shelving, the carved vines.

“This joinery is Tudor. The Belafonte family, the old owners, whoever they were, they were faithful to something, signorina. For three hundred years, while the fashions changed around them, they kept the core of the house and they built the new fronts around it. Like a new frame put around an old painting.”

His voice had dropped.

“Nobody does that for three hundred years by accident. You keep an old thing so carefully for so long for one reason only. Because you value it.”

The back of Lucy’s neck prickled, slow and cold and delicious. The sensation ran down her spine like fingers, making her breath catch.

“And what do they value?” she asked.

He did not answer.

He had stopped moving. His finger had stopped on the carving, on one worked medallion in among the vines, a round boss no bigger than a crown-piece, and Lucy saw his breath change, saw his shoulders lift and fill, and then he was pulling books from the shelf below it, quick and careful, a run of naval almanacs that hit the carpet in soft thumps, “Forgive me, forgive me,” said absently to the books themselves. His arm went into the gap to the shoulder, and his eyes went far away in the manner of a man working by his fingertips. Then his whole face changed, and he said something in Italian, low and reverent, that Lucy did not understand and understood completely.

“Signorina,” he said. “You may wish to stand back one step.”

She did not stand back one step. She came forward two.

He pressed on a sigil, a circle intersected by a sword, and something inside the wall went clunk, a deep, oiled, well-kept sound, a sound that had been maintained, and that maintenance itself made the hair rise on her arms. The whole case, books and blackened carving and all, swung slowly out of the wall toward them and let out the dark.

A room. Behind her library, there was a room.

Narrow, windowless, breathing out cold air that smelled of dust and paper and candle-wax and something older beneath, something mineral, like the inside of a church. The light from the library windows reached in a little way and gave up. But it reached far enough. A desk. A rug. Shelves stacked with journals, dozens of them, spines out, and with papers, and with rolled drawings sheaved together like kindling. Drawings pinned flat to the walls above, pale rectangles crowded edge to edge. On the desk and along a low shelf, catching what light there was and giving it softly back, were little marble figures, six, seven, eight of them, white as teeth in the dark.

Lucy heard herself gasp. She heard it from a distance, along with the thunder of her own heart beating so hard it shook her ribs. The cold air touched her face and made her skin prickle all over; a drop in her stomach felt like standing at the edge of something she could not see the bottom of.

Beside her, the signor stood in the doorway of the hidden room with his hand still on the shelf-edge, breathing as though he had run a mile, saying nothing at all, and she understood that his silence was the same thing as her gasp, that they had arrived at the same cliff from opposite ends of the earth.

And standing there on the lip of the dark, Lucy Carroway took the measure of what was happening to her.

I am excited.

Truly excited, the real thing, that she had not felt since she was fourteen years old, before word came of a storm off the Cornish coast.

Seven years of waiting rooms and needlework and being told what a young lady could not do, seven years of holding a hope she could not say aloud to anyone but Bessy, and all that time the excitement had been down somewhere in the dark of her, banked like a fire, and she had begun to fear it had gone out.

It had not. It was up and roaring. She was standing at the edge of an abyss, she could feel the drop of it in the soles of her feet, and every particle of her wanted to step forward off the edge, because down there in the dark was the thing Uncle Henry had always promised her the world contained.