Page 62 of The Beloved Escapade

He swam in, waded out over the pale stones with his skin tinted blue, and dressed wet, clumsy, his fingers fumbling the buttons, the good coat going on over salt and gooseflesh.

Then he climbed the steep ledges out of the cleft into the last of the light with his hair dripping down his collar and his body at least, if nothing else, too tired to shake.

The manor windows were lit gold down the valley. He came in at the garden door with the dark folding up the paths behind him, and there in the passage, in candlelight, stood Lucy, dressed for dinner.

She turned at his step. He watched the light come up in her face at the sight of him, the quick lift, the search, hope with its lamp raised, searching for the man she knew. And he felt his own face fail to be that man. He felt it produce, out of the ruin, the day’s one remaining art, courtesy, laid on like clean varnish over scorched wood, a bend of the head, a voice that said, evenly, like a stranger’s, “Forgive me. I hope I have not kept the table waiting.”

And he witnessed the disappointment in her eyes. Watched her feel it, half a heartbeat of it naked in her eyes before the politeness rose over her face like a tide over sand, gracious, level, hiding the footprints. She said something easy about dinner keeping. She smiled at him, a beautifully made smile, and he of all men living knew a copy from an original. It was the smile of social graces, and he had earned it, and it slipped into him under the ribs like a blade.

He offered her his arm, because he could still do that much.

Her hand came onto his sleeve, light as a bird taking a branch, and through the damp cloth the warmth of her fingers reached his skin. Lorenzo di Bianchi walked them in to eat dinner with the quest lying dead in him and the living woman on his arm, and with no knowledge how to behave now that his dreams were crushed.

* * *

The next morning, Lucy visited the garden. It lay against the manor’s south front behind its own gray wall to protect it from the wind that came off the sea. The wind stopped at the gate as though a door had been shut on an argument. Inside was another climate altogether, warm and thick and murmurous, gravel walks raked to herringbone, low knots of clipped box with gillyflowers and stocks crowded inside them breathing out clove and honey, lavender coming out along the borders with the bees working it so loudly the border hummed, and old pear trees trained flat against the south wall with their arms spread wide, taking the sun full in the chest. A sundial stood at the crossing of the walks with centuries of wind and rain on its face. Over the wall, out of sight, the sea sounded on the cliffs.

Bessy sat on the bench by the lavender with her workbag, on a pretext. The pretext was a hem. Lucy had known Bessy her whole life and had never once seen the bottom of that workbag.

“You’ll wear a trench in this good gravel, Miss Lucy,” Bessy observed to the hem, “and then where will we all be.”

Lucy stopped mid-turn at the sundial and discovered that she had been walking the same circuit for the better part of half an hour. She came and sat on the bench’s end. The stone was warm through her skirts. The bees droned. Somewhere above the wall, a gull said something cynical and went away.

“He is still out on the head,” she said.

“I know it, miss. I can see him from the linen-room window. Standing like a post since dawn.” The needle went in, drew through. “He’ll come down when the light goes. Men do.”

“The sword is not here, Bessy.” It came out of her low and fast now that it had started, the whole morning’s freight of it. “The trail is not here. The trail his whole life has run on stops on this island like a road running straight into the sea. Three hundred years of his family keeping faith, the journals, the cipher, where the stone was born, there is the door, and we are where the stone was born, and there is no door. Nobody here ever heard of a door. And nobody can tell him whether Matteo ever finished the work at all. Whether the cathedral was ever built. Whether it is standing somewhere this minute in the dark with the sword lying in it to this day, or whether there was never anything at the end of it all but a story hung out like a false light to lure ships to their doom.”

“Mm,” said Bessy, and turned the hem.

“And what happens to him if we fail?” Lucy was staring at the sundial and not seeing it. “You have not watched what the quest is to him. It is not a venture, Bessy. It is not a scheme a man shrugs off and takes up another. It is the keel. Take the keel out of a ship and what you have left is driftwood that remembers being a ship.”

“If that sword’s anywhere, miss,” Bessy said, “it’s been wherever it is three hundred years. It’ll keep till Sunday. And roads that run into the sea,” the thread was bitten, re-licked, re-threaded, “is what boats were invented for.”

“Bessy.”

“And a man that’s lost his star will stare at the sky a good while, Miss Lucy. It doesn’t follow he’s forgot who’s standing on the deck next to him.”

“He bowed to me,” Lucy said, and hated how it came out, like a girl of fifteen. “On the cliff. A bow. And he has not—” Her hand moved and gave up. “Since we landed, he has barely … He is courteous. He was never courteous to me, Bessy. He was a great many magnificent things, and courteous was never among them, and I find I would rather he shouted.”

The needle paused, only just.

“And there’s the marrow of it coming now,” said Bessy, comfortably, to the hem. “I’ll wait for you to say it.”

Lucy looked at the box knots. The clove smell of the gillyflowers was thick as syrup. Out with it, then.

“I am betrothed to him as part of the adventure,” she said, low. “That is what it is, Bessy. That is what it was drawn up to be, and I drew it, and I was proud of the drawing. The quest first, and me alongside. The adventure is the marriage articles. And if there is no quest, if the trail is dead and the door was never anywhere, then what I am asking is—” and there it failed her.

“—is will there be any you,” Bessy finished, “without it.”

The bees worked. The sea broke on the rocks.

“It is a fair question of terms,” Lucy said at last, stiffly, to the sundial, in her father’s own courtroom cadence, and heard how it sounded, and did not take it back.

“Terms,” said Bessy. She held the hem up to the light, considered it, and laid it down. “You drew your bargain in good ink, Miss Lucy, I don’t doubt. Trouble with hearts is, they write in something that don’t blot.”

Lucy said nothing at all, which said enough, and she knew it, and could not help it.