Page 34 of The Beloved Escapade

The ship went on murmuring in Italian, unaware of its passenger.

She came in and set her lamp on the desk, and the second light changed the room. It lifted it out of its pools and made it whole, and she took her first proper look at what she owned.

The marbles caught the lamplight and drank it. There were eight of them ranged along the low shelf, none larger than a cat, and by lamplight, they were no longer white shapes in the dark, but people.

A knight kneeling with his helm in the crook of his arm, his face ruined by grief.

A crowned man asleep, or dead, or both, upon a bier no bigger than a prayer book.

A woman rising from a swirl of carved water with her arm at full stretch, offering upward something long and slender that Lucy’s eye took a moment to resolve … a sword.

Draped figures. A hooded one. Every fold of stone cloth fell as cloth falls. She leaned close to the kneeling knight. Every hand had knuckles, and nails, and the little tendons fanning across the back, in marble, at the scale of a walnut.

Above them, pinned drawings crowded the wall edge to edge, brown ink gone soft with age. Arches, vaults, columns, a doorway drawn four times over with alterations.

Below the drawings, the rolled sheets in their dozens, sheaved and stacked. And the journals, a whole wall of them, shelf on shelf, and the longer she looked, the more clearly they sorted themselves into families: sober, modern calf bindings, older ones, brown and battered, and a few, low in the corner, that were older than old, vellum gone the color of tea.

And under everything, under the cold mineral breath of the place, the ghost of pipe tobacco, faithful as a dog.

Her uncle’s desk sat under the drawings with its dust and its dead candle and its open journal, waiting, and Lucy touched the back of its chair and did not sit yet, because there was a debt outstanding, and she had waited most of the day to collect it, which for her was a personal victory.

“Signore.”

He surfaced from the shelves like a swimmer, blinking.

“Signorina! Forgive me. I did not, how long⁠—”

“Some time, I suspect. You were conversing with the sixteenth century.” She folded her hands. “Signor di Bianchi. I have opened my home to you. I have entered your name in the parish book beside mine. I am, at the present moment, harboring you, your lamp, and your rolled-up sleeves in the most secret room in Gloucestershire.” She lifted her chin. “I have come to collect information.”

Something crossed his face. She was learning to read it. A flicker of the old guardedness, the locked-room look, and then, watching her, it went out, and what replaced it was relief so plain it startled her. He set down the lamp. He pushed the loose curl off his forehead with the back of his wrist, leaving a smudge of shelf-dust above one black eyebrow that she elected, for reasons of state, not to mention.

“Yes,” he said. “Every one of it. It is yours, and Dio, you cannot imagine what it is, to be permitted to say it aloud. I have carried this in silence through your whole country.” He paused. “But not signor. I cannot make explanations as a Signor di Bianchi. All this formality. Please. My friends call me Lorenzo.”

“Then I shall call you Lorenzo,” said Lucy, and the name felt warm and foreign and forward in her mouth, like trying on a ring, “and you had better call me Lucy, since you have already done it once without leave and I let it pass.”

“Lucy,” he agreed, gravely, and did not smile, and his eyes did, and her defenses required inspection again. The sound of her name in his mouth sent an unanticipated shiver down her spine.

“Begin,” she said, and sat down on the edge of her uncle’s desk like a magistrate, “at the beginning. You promised me the good parts.”

He did not lecture. She had half expected a lecture. He was so plainly a scholar, and scholars, in her limited experience, delivered. But what he did instead was walk her through it, moving along the shelves as he talked, and the story came in fragments, each one handed to her attached to an object, the way Uncle Henry had used to do it.

“Matteo di Bianchi.” He drew one of the tea-colored vellum volumes from the low corner shelf with both hands, reverent as if holding a sacrament. “Born in Florence, near enough to 1480. A boy in the great years. Imagine it, Lucy, the city crawling with genius the way this village crawls with gulls, and he is apprenticed young, and the workshop he passes through—” He opened the cover, angled it to her lamp. It was dense with faded brown pictograms marching in rows, an axe, a little sword, a wave. “—Botticelli. Da Vinci.”

“Da Vinci,” said Lucy, to be sure her ears were honest.

“Da Vinci. Not a legend. Documented. A letter survives in Ferrara, a payment record in Milan. My family has known this piece of it always. It was the coal we warmed ourselves at through the lean generations. He studied under the master. A boy grinding colors and holding candles for the greatest mind God ever housed in one skull, and learning everything. Paint, yes, but Leonardo’s workshop taught engineering, anatomy, architecture, machines, water, stone. A whole world in one room. That was Matteo’s schooling.”

He set the journal down, tenderly, and moved along the shelf.

“And he grows, and he works. Panels, a chapel ceiling in Genoa, portraits. Good work, admired work, and then, in the year 1513, when he is a man of three-and-thirty⁠—”

His hand found the wall of pinned drawings, and rested beneath them, beneath the arches and the vaults and the door drawn four times.

“—he is summoned. Englishmen come to Florence. Rich beyond argument, secret beyond patience, and they have examined the masters available to them, and they choose Matteo. Not Michelangelo, not Raphael, the ones history kept. They choose the one history lost, and they choose him because he can do everything. He can build, carve, paint, engineer. One man, one commission, one silence. He writes—” Lorenzo’s voice altered slightly, as a voice does when it carries someone else’s words inside it. “—‘Being given the commission that shall be, God willing, my life’s greatest work, and being sworn to a secrecy I would keep beyond death.’ And he settles his affairs, and he sails for England with what he can carry, and Florence never sees him again. Nor his brothers. He sends letters at first, then nothing. No word. No grave.”

The room was quiet. The lamps burned. Somewhere out in the house, a door closed, hushed by distance, and Lucy realized she had drawn her knees up onto the desk edge like a girl at a fireside, and did not put them down.

“Who were they?” she asked. “The Englishmen?”