Page 36 of The Beloved Escapade

Lucy returned to her side of the desk and did not laugh aloud, but it cost her.

Bessy arrived at half past eight on a pretext.

“That passage door is sticking again, Miss Lucy,” she announced from the library, in a voice pitched to carry through walls, secret and otherwise. “I have had to come through this way. Third time tonight.” She appeared in the opening of the hidden room with a candle in one hand and her workbag in the other, and stood, and inspected.

She looked at Lucy, cross-legged now in a barrister’s daughter’s disgrace upon the chair, papers in her lap. She looked, longest and levelest, at the gentleman in his shirtsleeves at the other side of the desk, coat abandoned, hair on end from his own hands, murmuring to a ledger in a foreign tongue, and the gaze conducted its complete inventory

Alone, hidden room, foreign gentleman, nine o’clock closing fast, filed under headings Mama would have fainted merely reading.

“Bessy,” said Lucy, “we are working.”

“I can see what you are doing,” said Bessy. She set the candle on the shelf, extracted her mending, and moved a stack of rolled drawings from the second visitor’s chair with the firm gentleness of a woman relocating a cat. “I’ll just be getting on with this hem, then, since the light in here is so good.”

Which meant, I will be sitting in this room until the gentleman leaves it, and we will all three pretend it is about the hem.

“The banns are called Sunday, Bessy.”

“They are, Miss Lucy. And till they’re called and a month run out and a ring on, you’re a maid alone in a cupboard with a man in his sleeves, and I’ve a hem.” The needle went in. “I knew a girl in service whose mistress was betrothed most respectably to a curate. Betrothed is a gate, Miss Lucy, not a wall.”

“What happened to her mistress?”

“Twins,” replied Bessy, and bit her thread. “Not six months wed, and twins.”

Lorenzo, in the sixteenth century, heard none of it, which was as well.

Lucy bent back over her uncle’s papers with her ears warm and conducted a brief internal assembly. She knew what this was, she informed herself. She had settled it that morning with her back against that very shelf. Passage, not love. A ship, not a heart.

You are not one of Mama’s novels, swooning at a forearm. You have purchased an adventure, and the man happens to come attached to it, the way a mast comes attached to the sails, and one does not fall in love with a mast.

The assembly voted, carried the motion unanimously, and adjourned, and if one member abstained, some junior, back-bench member, sitting quietly in the dark with her eyes on his mussed hair, it did not record it.

The ledgers gave it up at ten o’clock.

They were not Uncle Henry’s ledgers. That was the first thing Lucy established when she pulled them from the deep drawer of the desk. Three, flat folio volumes, bound in stiff vellum gone the same tea color as the corner journals, their pages crowded with a crabbed secretary’s hand in ink faded to the brown of old blood. English, but Old English, the letters strange, the spelling wandering like a drunkard. Accounts. Column after column of dates, sums, deliveries. The dates began in 1514 and appeared to have been kept by a clerk or secretary.

But Uncle Henry’s pencil was everywhere in them.

That was what stopped her breath. The soft gray ticks in the margins, a modern hand annotating an ancient one, his modern hand, the racing downhill script. A query here, an underline there, and on one page, boxed twice over in pencil with a force that had scored the paper, a single entry, and beside it, in Uncle Henry’s hand, three exclamation marks.

Lucy read the entry. She read it again. She could not make out every word of the crabbed old spelling, but she could make out enough.

“Lorenzo.”

The river of Italian went on.

“Lorenzo.”

He surfaced, and something in her face brought him out of his chair and around the desk in one movement, and then he was beside her, his lamp swinging over the page. She set her finger under the boxed entry and read it aloud as best the old letters allowed.

“Item, payd to the maisters of the quarrie at Hwitmarbel, for xij greate blocks of the whyte stone, greyned as wood is greyned, carriage by water to the workes, in secrecie, as before.”

She glanced up at him. “There are more. Look. Here, and here, the same name over and over, all through the year, payments and shipping notes, stone, stone, stone, from a private quarry. Hwitmarbel.” She tried the strange word twice. “Marble veined like wood-grain. Have you ever seen such stone?”

“Once,” said Lorenzo. His voice had gone soft and strange. “This evening. In that corner.” He crossed to the low shelf and took up the marble hand, the reaching, open, life-sized hand, and brought it into the lamplight and turned it, and there, running through the pale stone like weather through planed timber, faint and unmistakable once seen, a grain.

“I could not place it. I have handled Carrara, Paros, Siena, half the stone of Italy, and I could not place it, and it has been shouting at me all evening.” He set the hand down beside the ledger, the object beside its receipt, three hundred years apart, and Lucy watched him go luminous.

“Lucy. Twelve great blocks in one year. And this is one year of how many? A man does not buy stone like this for a chapel doorway. This is quarrying for a lifetime’s work. For columns. For altars. For figures greater than a man. This is exactly, exactly what Matteo would need to fill a cathedral.”