Page 25 of The Beloved Escapade

The adventure. The real one. Hers.

And there was one thing more, arriving on the heels of the rest, unbidden and unpardonable, and she was honest enough to look straight at it.

She was very much afraid that she had fallen, a little, only a little, a manageable amount, surely, in love with the man beside her.

It was absurd. It was worse than absurd. It was the sort of thing Mama’s novels did in the second chapter, and Lucy had always despised them for it. She had known him only hours. But there it was, sitting in her chest, plain as the marble in the dark. A handsome stranger with three centuries in his pocket and pigment ground into his hands had walked into her drawing room, uncorked, and opened a door in her own wall that she had not known was there. It was not easy, being a young woman who wanted the world. Every road she had ever tried to take had a gate across it and a relation standing at the gate. But the wife of a Florentine art historian, a man whose whole life was ships and cities and workshops and locked rooms, the wife of such a man would not be stopped at gates. The wife of such a man could go anywhere.

Lucy Carroway, she told herself severely, you are measuring the gentleman for a wedding coat because he found you a cupboard.

It was not a cupboard, though. And she knew it, and he knew it, and neither of them had said a word for a full half minute. Her chest tightened with a warm ache at the thought, a flush rising to her cheeks and making her skin hot, a pull in her body toward him that made her want to step closer even now.

“Signore,” she said at last, and her voice came out low and not quite level and she did not care. “I believe you now owe me a very great number of explanations.”

“Yes,” he said. Just that. His eyes had not left the dark room.

“I intend to collect every one of them.”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Good.” Lucy picked up her skirts and stepped past him, over the threshold, into the hidden room first.

CHAPTER 5

I made them stand in the outer room and name their terms again, this time as equals. The man who closes the door holds the upper hand.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

The hidden room was cold, and it smelled of ocean and dust and exotic spices.

Lucy stood one step inside it with her heart pounding like a drum and understood the scent before she understood anything else.

Under the dust, under the paper and the candle-wax and the cold mineral breath of the place, there was pipe tobacco. Thinned by the years, but there. The very smell that had hung about his coats when she was ten, the smell that meant stories were coming. It undid her so swiftly that she had to press her nails into her palms to keep from swaying.

He had been in this room. Uncle Henry had known this room as a member of the captain’s household. He had sat at that desk with his pipe going, in the secret dark behind her library, and no one had ever told her. The discovery did not feel like a betrayal at all. It felt like a letter he had left for her to find.

Tears prickled.

Her eyes were adjusting. The marble figures on the low shelf gathered the gray light from the doorway and held it. A woman’s lifted face, a hand, a robed shoulder, each one no bigger than a foot and each one so alive that the skin crept pleasurably along Lucy’s arms. A lady, a knight, and one that appeared to be King Arthur holding a sword aloft.

On the desk, a journal lay open, its pages soft with dust, close-written in a hand she could not read in this light and did not need to read. The pipe smoke had already told her whose room this had become.

Behind her, in the library, Signor di Bianchi made a sound.

It was not a word. It was the sound of a man at the door of a church he has walked his whole life to reach, and it traveled up her spine like a struck note. That sound, not the marble, not the tobacco, not the journals, decided her.

Because she recognized it. She had been making that sound, silently, on the inside, for seven years.

Lucy stared at the little marble face, lifting itself toward three centuries of dark, and thought of a morning she never let herself think of. Fourteen years old, listening to her father’s voice in the hall below saying the words storm and all hands, and the household had gone on existing afterward, breakfast and needlework and callers, as though the world had not just been proven mortal.

That was the lesson of Uncle Henry’s death, and she had learned it young and thoroughly, and it was not the lesson Mama supposed. Mama believed the sea had taught Lucy that adventuring killed men.

What the sea had actually taught Lucy was the arithmetic of life. Uncle Henry had lived more in any given fortnight than most men managed in their allotted span, and the ones who stayed home died all the same, only slower, and with nothing to show the ferryman. Life was a river of time. One jumped in and swam, or one stood on the bank growing old, watching the water.

She had been standing on the bank for seven years, in a series of well-appointed drawing rooms, watching.

And now … Now there was a hidden room breathing cold on her face, and a trail three centuries long ending under her own roof, and behind her a man with the whole world in his coat pockets, a man who would search this house, find whatever his ancestor had left, and then go, because men like him and Uncle Henry were always going. That was the very thing that made them what they were. He would ride or sail off to the next city and the next mystery, and Lucy Carroway would remain in Gloucestershire, mistress at the bank of the river, watching.