Page 32 of The Beloved Escapade

“Mr. Sandys,” said Lorenzo, with complete honesty, “it is the finest company my name has kept in three hundred years.”

The vicar walked them through the churchyard himself, between the leaning stones, to show them where they would stand.

The church took Lorenzo the moment he crossed the threshold, as he had known it would. Norman work, the nave low and thick-walled, the round arches springing squat and sure from their piers, the light falling in blades through deep windows onto floor slabs worn into hollows by seven hundred years of fishermen’s boots.

It smelled of lime and damp and candle. Zigzag molding round the chancel arch, cut by some mason dead six centuries who had never signed anything and never expected to be thought of again. He would have been wrong because Lorenzo thought of him now.

Lorenzo stood in the aisle and thought of that mason, and thought, with the strange doubled vision that had been coming over him all day, of Matteo praying somewhere.

A man did not keep a vow beyond death without praying. If he was in this country, in this valley, and every fiber of Lorenzo now believed that he had been, then it was not impossible, it was not even unlikely, that Matteo di Bianchi had stood upon these same hollowed slabs, a Roman in a stripped church, saying what he had to say to God in whichever language made sense to him.

And in one month, his descendant would stand there and be married.

The doubled vision swam, and settled, and became simply the view. Peace came into his chest for the space of perhaps a minute, a condition so foreign to him that it took him most of the minute to identify it.

Then they went out through the porch into the sunny afternoon, and the entire village was waiting for them.

Not the entire village, perhaps. But a solid deputation of it, disposed with transparent carelessness about the church gate, the lane, and the churchyard wall, leaning, loitering, examining the sky, conducting conversations of no words whatever, and at the front of it, glowing like a lamp, stood Puddy of The Rusty Anchor, who had plainly abandoned his taproom to destiny.

And Lorenzo understood, in one stride between the porch and the gate, that the news was already out.

He could see it travel. It moved along the wall like wind over barley, a bending of heads, one to the next, and he caught the words in fragments as they passed.

Banns, the Eye-talian, Miss Carroway, up at the great house, this Sunday, Mrs. Sandys had it from the housekeeper. A stout woman at the gate looked from Lorenzo to Lucy and back to Lorenzo and pressed both hands to her bosom with an expression of such rapturous scandal that Lorenzo very nearly bowed to her out of professional respect. One did not often see an emotion so purely rendered. Painters attempted that face for years and got mannerism.

“Give you joy, sir!” burst out of Puddy, who could contain himself no longer. “Give you joy, miss! That is, begging pardon, none of my—” And then, abandoning the retreat halfway through, said with his whole heart, “The Rusty Anchor’ll stand a barrel the day of it, and that’s said before witnesses!”

The wall cheered. It was a modest cheer, gruff and half-embarrassed and instantly regretted by several participants, but it was a cheer, and the two boys from the quay ran off down the street with the news at a speed suggesting outlying farms would have it by milking.

Lucy laughed, the low, ungoverned laugh, out in the open street, and they liked her instantly and forever. Lorenzo watched it happen. She took his arm to walk to the carriage, and said something to the stout woman in passing that made the stout woman bloom like a peony.

And Lorenzo, pacing beside her through the gauntlet of delighted eyes, felt the afternoon quietly change its weight in his hands.

Because this was serious now.

It came to him not as alarm but as a cold clarity, like ice water. Until this hour, the extraordinary bargain in the library had lived in a world of two, three, counting Bessy Smith, whose silence was a vault.

Words spoken behind a shut door could, at terrible need, have been unspoken. A door shut could have stayed shut. The lady could have come to her senses in a day or a week, and no one the wiser, and no harm done that did not fall entirely on him, where harm belonged.

But the banns were in the book. The village had the news at a full gallop. By Sunday, it would be called from the chancel steps before God and the parish, and by Monday, it would be in Gloucester, and within the fortnight, it would be in a letter on a barrister’s desk at the King’s Bench.

Her name, a young woman alone, one day in the county, already the raree-show of the district, was now lashed to his in every mouth from here to the river, and there was no gentle unwinding, no version of events in which Lorenzo di Bianchi could walk away from this and leave anything standing behind him but a ruin with her name on it.

He must marry her. Not as an adventure, not as a bargain, not as terms sealed inside the parish book. As a plain matter of honor, from this hour, whatever came, whatever lay behind the secret door or did not, whether the trail ran to glory or to nothing, he must see it through to the church door and beyond it, all the way, for the whole length of two lives.

He examined the obligation from every side, standing there handing her into her father’s carriage while the village watched.

And found, Dio, for the second time today the search had failed him, that he could not locate the hardship in this either.

She settled her skirts. The coachman gathered his reins with the face of a man now composing a much longer letter home. Bessy took the rear seat and directed at the crowd one final look under which the crowd tidied itself. And Lorenzo swung up beside his betrothed. His betrothed. The word still fit him like another man’s coat, and yet.

He thought of them all, his casualties, his fallen. Marco, who had crossed Europe a heartbroken tutor and now debated wallpaper. Angelo, who had lectured Lorenzo on the banns and the residence with shining eyes not weeks ago, word for word the same machinery, and Lorenzo had listened with sympathy and superiority in equal parts, thinking, Poor Angelo, netted at last.

Sebastian. Gabriel. Nicholas, who had gone to Oxford a sardonic invalid and come back married to a woman who corrected him publicly. Corrected everyone publicly, truth be told.

One after another after another, down the ladder into the sea, and Lorenzo di Bianchi standing safe at the rail the whole while, inoculated, immune, too fanatical about his dead ancestor to catch anything from the living.

One morning. It had taken this village one morning.