Page 64 of The Beloved Escapade

The chapel kept its answer where it kept everything.

The latch lifted at the west door, and a wedge of morning came in with a child.

The boy, Thomas, stood in the light with his dark curls on end and his boots on the wrong feet, gravely clutching a heel of bread, and announced, with the enormous dignity of his three years, “Brefkast.”

“Breakfast,” Lorenzo agreed, and the wasp in his head went quiet, just like that, the way it only did for the children and for her, Lucy, whom he was mistreating with his grief. “You are sent to fetch me, piccolino?”

“Mama says.” The boy considered him, then held out the heel of bread, already somewhat eaten, as if sharing last rations with a doubtful companion.

Lorenzo crossed the chapel and knelt and accepted one solemn bite, which was the ritual between them now. The bread was good. The child’s hand when it took his to lead him out was warm as a coal. Lorenzo di Bianchi went up the path to the manor holding hands with a knee-high cousin of Lucy’s, through air that smelled of turf smoke and low tide, and was, for the length of the path, mollified. Almost happy.

That was the trick the island kept playing on him. The happiness. It ambushed him a dozen times a day.

It ambushed him again in the workshop after breakfast, when he visited the mainland. He had promised Matthew an opinion on the memorial slab for the Bideford church, and stayed two hours. The long shed held stone dust hanging gold in the light from the seaward windows, and the bell-notes of mallets. Lawrence sat at the bench with a mouth full of nails. Young Sylvester was roughing out a scallop shell with his tongue between his teeth. Matthew worked the slab’s lettering with his left hand splayed flat beside the chisel. The lettering was so clean that Lorenzo forgot his disappointment entirely and simply watched.

“You crowd the serif on the R,” he said at last, because family told the truth.

“I do,” Matthew agreed, not stopping. “Father crowds it. His father crowded it. It’s how our R sits.” He glanced up, and the dark di Bianchi eyes in the brown English face were laughing. “You’ve an R of your own, I don’t doubt, cousin.”

Cousin.

He stood in a shed full of his own blood, watching his family’s hand come off a chisel that had been carving since Matteo left Italy. One of the White boys sat on an upturned crate beside him, sorting chalk stubs into an order known only to himself, and handed Lorenzo the best one, unasked.

He was rich. He knew he was rich. He could hold the whole warm weight of it in his two hands: the cousins, the school, the unbroken line, the boys who had begun demanding stories of Florence.

None of it, none of it, stopped the wasp in his head. The bee in the bottle.

Because standing there in the gold dust, watching Matthew’s chisel, the buzzing started again of its own accord. This skill did not come from a man cutting gravestones. The deep undercut, the fearlessness, the technique handed down through a dozen hands, had been forged somewhere, on work vast enough to school a dynasty.

Matteo did not learn cathedral skills in a churchyard.

Around his thoughts went, and around.

Lorenzo caught himself standing in the middle of his own family with his eyes fixed on the shed wall, lost in those thoughts, and hated himself so thoroughly that he made his excuses and went back to the island and the chapel.

Lucy found him in the afternoon, on his knees in the crypt.

The undercroft was a low vaulted room the length of the choir above and not a foot more. He had established the measurements with string and misery. He was going along the east wall on his knees with a candle, tapping the foundation stones with the butt of his folding rule and listening, tap and listen, tap and listen, when the light changed at the stair and he glanced up and she was there.

She had a cloth bundle in one hand. Her hair was coming down on the left side as it often did. The sea wind had put color on her, freckles across the bridge of her nose that London would have wept over and that Lorenzo privately thought were the most beautiful things currently in England. She stood on the bottom step, watching him kneeling in candle-lit dust with his ear against a wall, and he watched her decide to find it ordinary.

“You forgot to eat again,” she said. “Bessy has complaints. I have brought the complaints, but also cheese.”

“Lucia—”

“Tap away. I shall lay it out on the tomb, the flat one, he looks a hospitable sort.” And she did, spreading the cloth on the ledger stone of some prior, centuries asleep, bread and cheese and two apples, as easy as a picnic on a hillside. Then she came and stood beside him and examined the wall he had been interrogating. “Where are we?”

We. She said we.

She knelt in the dust beside him without one thought for her skirts, and held the candle where it threw the raking light he needed, tilting it before he asked, because she had watched him do this for days. She learned everything she watched.

They went along four courses together like that, tap and listen. Her shoulder was warm against his in the cold room. The stone answered solid, solid, solid. The silence between the taps began to fill with the thing they were not saying.

She said it at the fifth course.

“Lorenzo.” Her voice was gentle, and it had her chin in it. “The search is not over. Whatever this wall says. Large slabs of stone left this island, and it went somewhere, and somewhere is a place, and places are found. And even, even if the worst is true, even if the work was never …” A breath inhaled. “The sword was real to them. The sword is older than Matteo, older than the order. Excalibur has waited three hundred years in the dark. It can wait a season longer for us to find our road again. Surely it is out there still. Surely this is a turning, not an end.”

The sword.