Page 35 of The Beloved Escapade

“An order. A brotherhood, old even then, that called itself the Regis Aeterni.” He pronounced it like a spell. “The Eternal King. And here, Lucy, I must tell you the part that I could not believe when it was first told to me. I stood in a courtyard in Cornwall and asked the woman who said it whether she was mocking me, so you will forgive me if it sounds like a tale for children, because it is a tale for children, believed unto death by grown and wealthy and deadly serious men.” He picked up, from the shelf of marbles, the kneeling knight, and held it into her lamplight, and the grief-ruined little face looked up at them both. “They believed their king was coming back.”

“Their king?”

“The old one. The first one. The one under the hill, the once and future one. You are English, you have this legend in your milk. I had to have it explained to me with diagrams.” His mouth tilted, rueful. “Arthur. They believed, sincerely, Lucy, with money, which is the only sincerity that leaves records, that Arthur would return to Britain in her darkest hour. And that when he came, a certain object must be waiting for him. Kept. Guarded. Housed as a holy relic is housed, in a place worthy of it and hidden from every eye until the rightful hand should come to claim it. And so they commissioned my ancestor, the completest craftsman in Florence, to build that place.”

He turned the little knight gently in his fingers.

“A cathedral. Hidden, buried, concealed, I do not yet know how, somewhere in this country. A secret cathedral, Lucy, built by a pupil of Leonardo at the height of his powers, decorated by him, filled by him, his Sistine, his life poured out into the dark where no one would ever see it. Built to hold one thing against the day the king returns.”

Lucy heard her own heart.

“What … thing?” she asked, though she knew, she knew, it had risen through her like the tide through the mud, but she needed it said in this room, aloud, in his voice.

“The sword,” said Lorenzo. “Excalibur.”

And Lucy’s whole inner world ignited like a beacon line.

A sword. Not a metaphor, not a moral, not the wise lesson that stories collapsed into when governesses handled them. A sword, an actual, physical, legendary object, lying this minute in the dark at the end of an actual trail that ran through her own library wall.

A treasure, a true one, gold-and-glory true, the kind that made men mad for centuries, the kind Uncle Henry’s stories had always, always sailed toward: the idol in the drowned temple, the emperor’s seal, the chest below the reef.

Every tale he had ever told her had ended at treasure, and she had grown up and been gently taught that the endings were the made-up part, that real life kept the storms and the fevers and mislaid the gold, and here, here, here, in her uncle’s own secret room, a man with lamplight glinting in his black eyes was telling her the ending was real and buried in England and hers to hunt.

“Treasure,” she breathed.

“Sì,” said Lorenzo, and his eyes were shining, shining like the marble, like a boy’s, “Matteo’s work.”

“Yes,” said Lucy, radiant, thinking of long-lost swords.

They settled to it as the light died outside, and the little room became the whole of the world.

He took the visitor’s chair and the shelf-end of the desk without being assigned it, some instinct of courtesy operating below the level of his attention, which had already gone entirely into a sheaf of the rolled drawings. Lucy took her uncle’s chair, and her uncle’s desk, and had her moment.

She had known she would have this moment and had planned to take it privately, and the room granted her that. Lorenzo was in the sixteenth century and would not surface for a while.

The open journal on the blotter was Uncle Henry’s. She had known from the doorway this morning, but knowing and seeing were different countries.

The dear, dreadful handwriting, racing downhill off every line, the crossed-out words, the sudden capitals. She could hear it, that was the thing, the hand was his voice, and the page went briefly bright and unreadable. And the blotter itself … scorched, twice, in little brown-edged crescents where a pipe had been set down carelessly by a man leaning back to think, and Lucy laid her fingertip in one scorch mark very lightly, as though it were warm.

You sat here. You knew all of it. You were on the same trail, and I am going to finish it.

Then she blinked her moist eyes, because grief was cargo and she had thrown it overboard once already, and she began to sort his papers.

It was slow, absorbing, oddly tender work. Letters, lists, pages of notes that veered between three subjects in a paragraph exactly as his talk had used to, and the room filled with the sounds of it.

Her turning pages, Lorenzo’s turning pages, the lamps sputtering, the house settling, and the river of half-voiced Italian that started up from his side of the desk whenever he forgot her, which was constantly, and which she found she did not mind at all.

She learned to read its pitch. A rising note meant discovery. A dying fall meant a dead end. Once, a long silence made her look up, and she found him holding one of the marbles. A hand, only a hand, life-sized, open, reaching for something no longer there, cradling it in both of his own hands and staring at it, his lips parted around a sentence he had begun aloud two minutes before and never finished, and would never finish, and did not know he had abandoned.

If the trail calls, I go, he had told her, when he had accepted her proposal. I will have to be made to stop, and I do not know if I can be made.

She had thought it a warning. Sitting here in the pooled light, watching a grown man forget the existence of his own sentence, Lucy understood that it had never been a warning. It was simply a description, offered honestly, of the river on which she had chosen to sail.

She and Bessy ate dinner together without him, unable to entice him to leave his work.

At eight o’clock, she went and raided the kitchen over the new cook’s scandalized objections, and came back with bread and cheese and cold pie and small orgeat on a tray, and set it at his elbow. He thanked her with real warmth and did not touch it, and ten minutes later, she cut a piece of bread, put it directly into his right hand, and closed his fingers on it.

He ate it. All of it, absently, efficiently, like a horse. His eyes never left the page. Some time later, his hand patted the tray, located more bread by touch, and continued without him.