Page 45 of The Beloved Escapade

She was trying to be silent because the walls were thin, and Bessy slept the sleep of the just across the passage, and her silence kept failing in flutters and catches. He learned the places that made her breath break, the places that made her hips press against him, and the places that pulled a low sound from her throat that she could not quite swallow.

When his hand slid down over the curve of her hip, above the ribbon of her stocking, and found the heat between her thighs through the thin fabric of her shift, her whole body arched once into his touch.

He stayed there, slow and sure, learning the exact pressure that made her shake, until her silence came apart completely against his palm. Her breath broke hot and helpless into his hand while she shook, and shook, and quieted by beautiful degrees, like the sea calming after a storm.

For a long while, the room held nothing but the tide.

Then, drunk and muffled and barely a breath, from somewhere against his collarbone: “Well then,” she said, and started to laugh, and he had to gather her in and press his mouth into her hair while the two of them shook together like fools, silently, so that the bed would not betray them.

She surfaced eventually. Pushed her ruined hair off her face and propped herself and gazed at him, glowing, unstrung, her mouth swollen with what he had done to it, and her hand set out southward down his shirt with intent as legible as print.

He caught it. Held it flat over his heart, which was going like a smith’s hammer.

“No, tesoro.”

“That’s a foolish arrangement,” she mumbled, dreamy, mutinous. “You’re … I can see that you⁠—”

“You can see the Alps from Turin. One does not therefore cross in slippers.” His voice was not entirely under his governance. He heard the strain in it and so, plainly, did she. Her eyes went soft and wicked together, which was very hard on him. “It will keep. I am asking it to keep.”

He carried her captive hand up and kissed the palm of it, the knuckles, the inside of the wrist where her pulse still ran wild, and the effort of it, of stopping, moved through him in one long, visible shudder he could no more hide than he could hide the rest. “Fino all’anello, Lucia. Not until the ring. Let there be one thing in my life I did not seize the moment my hands could reach it. Let it be you.”

She stared at him for a slow moment, the candle glinting in each eye.

“There he is,” she said softly. “My adventurer, my gentleman.” And she brought their joined hands to her own lips and kissed his fingers once, a seal on a treaty, and folded herself against his side with a sigh that had the whole day in it. “The most devoted man in England, and he is not even English. Whatever will the parish say.”

He held her while the candle burned down, this bright unimaginable creature who had bricked him into her life with her own hands and now slept against his heart as though the arrangement were the most natural in the world, and he stared up at the sloped ceiling six feet above him, aching in body like one long toothache, his loins afire.

Presently he rose, and did up what could be done up, and saw her across the black passage to her own door. At her threshold, she turned and kissed him once more, brief and sweet and proprietary, kissing what was hers, and was gone behind the click of the latch.

Lorenzo stood alone in the dark of the passage of the fishermen’s inn at the end of England, listening to the sea.

Tomorrow, he was to be a harmless lamb with a sketching-book, and drink the tea, and watch a fishwife teach his betrothed to mend nets, and wait. Wait, with three hundred years lying in plain sight across the water. A week ago, the prospect would have flayed him.

He went to his cramped bed under the eaves and lay listening to the tide come and go against the shingle, and found, examining himself in the dark with the rigor he ordinarily saved for brushwork, that he was not flayed.

Something had gotten between him and the old pain and was standing there, warm, smelling faintly of mackerel and cider, with her ruined pins.

Tonight, he slept like a man with nothing missing.

CHAPTER 10

The stone does not yield all at once. It argues. It must be persuaded, tool by tool, until the form that was always inside it begins to show itself.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

The woman on the mantel had been watching him for three days, and on the third morning, Lorenzo finally saw her.

He was at breakfast in the taproom, alone with his coffee and his sketching-book, being harmless. Lucy was already gone, down the quay to her nets and the fishwife. The light came in low off the harbor and crossed the room and climbed the chimney-breast. It caught the little figure standing among the pewter tankards and the brass candlesticks. Lorenzo glanced up, set down his cup, and did not pick it up again.

A woman looking out to sea. White stone, the height of his hand. She stood with her weight settled on one hip and her skirts pushed against her legs by a wind the sculptor had somehow left in the stone. One hand up to shade her eyes, the other holding her shawl at her throat. Her whole body was one line of waiting, the long fall of it from her lifted elbow down through hip and knee to her bare heel, a curve Lorenzo knew as he knew his own signature, because he had stood in front of it in Florence with his father’s hand on his shoulder.

Contrapposto? The weight shifted to one leg so that the body sings. Men had died without learning what this carver knew about the contrapposto technique.

He crossed the room. He picked her up. She was heavier than she looked, and honest marble through and through. He turned her to the window light, and the light went into the stone the way it goes into skin, and the breath left him entirely.

The marble itself was wrong. Wrong for England. Wrong for any quarry he could name. White, warm-toned, and figured, faintly veined all through with a close soft grain, like wood sawn and polished, nothing like Carrara, and nothing he had handled in his life until he entered a secret room in Grey House.