Page 57 of The Beloved Escapade

He let that stand a moment.

“My wife is a Granger. De Grey, by the old spelling. She and her brother are the last of this part of the line, saving the little ones asleep down the valley this minute.”

Lucy sat with her hands folded on the cliff top and felt the whole of the past week rearrange itself around one sentence, quietly, hugely, like furniture being moved in the dark.

“And now,” her uncle said, “the part I need you to understand. The Dominus were never hunting the sword.”

Lorenzo’s head came up.

“I doubt there’s a man among them in this age who believes it exists, and if it lay on the table in front of them, they would not cross the room for it. Excalibur is nothing to them. What they want is the trail.”

He tipped his chin at Lorenzo, not unkindly.

“Your grandsire’s trail, signore. The stone, the ledgers, the ciphers, the whole beautiful thread of it. It is worth exactly one thing to them, and it is that roads end at doors. Follow the stone far enough, and you come to the place the family sheltered. Three hundred years, they have kept half an eye on Matteo’s riddle. Not to solve it. To see who solves it, and to follow him home. That is what the trail is. Not a treasure map, bird. A fuse. And they do not follow it only to remove claimants. That has long passed as a possibility. They follow it to remove knowledge of the Dominus’s very existence.

Lucy did not look at Lorenzo. She could not have borne to, and she did not need to. She could feel him taut beside her.

“You arrived without a shadow,” her uncle went on, gentler. “This village watches every stranger’s back-trail as a matter of course, and yours was watched from the day you took rooms at the inn. There was nobody behind you on that road. And in seven years, Lucy, you are the first soul to come off that shore and find me. But the trail is a fuse, and you have both been walking along it with a lantern, and you had to hear it from me before anything else was said today.”

The silence afterward had a texture to it.

Lorenzo broke it. His voice was low, and his accent had thickened the way it did when he was agitated.

“The cathedral?”

Her uncle waited.

“Signore, I must ask you the question I have been afraid of since we landed.” His hands came out from behind his back at last, and they did not describe spirals. They opened, empty, and stayed open. “Did Matteo finish it? Does it exist at all? The journals say, where the stone was born, there is the door. We are where the stone was born. Is there a door?” A breath. “Or was the whole of it a lantern? A false light, hung out to draw the wolves away from the fold. Did my family keep faith three hundred years with a decoy?”

Lucy’s heart broke a little, hearing him say it in that stripped voice.

Her uncle took his time, and when he answered, he answered like a man paying out rope to somebody over a cliff edge.

“I do not know.”

The wind moved. Nothing else did.

“I can give you this family to the last christening in the register. Of the work itself, of what your ancestor built or did not, finished or not, meant or not, I know no more than you, and likely a great deal less. The island cut stone and shipped it, and the Grangers asked nothing, because asking was the one luxury nobody here could ever afford. The old ledgers stop. The stone went out and payment came back, and no word ever came with them. If there is a door, no soul on this island ever found it, and God’s truth, signore, no soul ever went looking. What is in the chapel is all of what Hwitmarbel holds, so far as any breathing creature on it knows. I am sorry.”

Lorenzo sat with his open hands in his lap and looked at them as though they belonged to another man.

Then he stood. It was courteously done, all of it, and that was the horror of it, because Lorenzo had never in his life been merely courteous to her.

“You will forgive me,” he said. “Both of you. I find I want to walk while the light is on the water. I will not go far.”

He bowed. To her uncle, and then, God help her, to her. A bow. To her, on a cliff top, from a man who kissed her hand as punctuation. Lucy’s own hands clenched on themselves in her lap, as her worry grew.

“Lorenzo—”

“I will not go far, Lucia,” he said again, softly, and did not look at her while he said it, and went, not down toward the quarry, but out, along the cliff, into the wind, his coat pressed flat to his back and his dark head bare, growing lesser and lesser against all that shining air.

She was half off the bench before she knew she had moved.

“Let him walk, Lucy-bird.” Her uncle’s voice was low.

“He is⁠—”

“His church fell on him just now.” Her uncle came and sat where Lorenzo had been, heavily, and peered out after him. “The whole of it, spire and bells. A man wants no congregation as an audience for that. Let him walk.”