Page 69 of The Beloved Escapade

He was here because he had promised. She made herself say it honestly, in the privacy of her own skull, on the fourth morning, standing at her window watching him walk the terrace below with his hands behind his back, up and down, up and down, eleven steps and turn, as though the terrace too had become that secret room.

He had given his word in this very house, to her face, with her back against a shelf, and Lorenzo di Bianchi kept his word the way his family kept stone. He would stand up in the church. He would say the vows beautifully, in that accented voice. Nothing on earth would make him break the betrothal, and she knew it, and there was a time, nearly a month ago, a lifetime ago, when knowing it had felt like standing on rock.

Now it felt like watching a man walk to the scaffold punctually for his public hanging.

The banns had run while they traveled. Three Sundays, one after another, the vicar’s voice raised over a spring congregation, if any of you know cause or just impediment, and nobody in Gloucestershire knew any cause, and the third asking was done and gone this past Sunday. The thirty days her betrothal had been given to be validated were completed.

The nuptials were on Sunday. There was a date now, and a celebratory breakfast arranged, and her best gown hanging in the pressing-room with tissue in its sleeves, and her mother’s letters arriving with admonishments and a promise to attend now that Lucy was back from no one knew where. The vicar called to settle the details of the service, and the whole machinery of it went forward, smooth and kindly and inexorable, every cog turned by people who loved her, exactly like a funeral no one had the heart to cancel.

She finally said what she was thinking to Bessy while they folded linen.

The new sheets had arrived from Bristol. They needed airing and folding and laying up in lavender. It was work her hands could do while her mind went in circles. They stood at either end of the long trestle with the first sheet stretched between them. The linen was fine and cool under her fingers.

They folded the way they had folded since she was a child. Walk together. Corners met. Part. Snap the fold straight. Walk together again. Bunches of lavender lay at the end of the trestle. The afternoon sun came in low and turned the room the color of cream.

On the third sheet, when their hands met in the middle, Lucy heard herself speak.

“He warned me, Bessy. At the very beginning. He stood in the library and warned me to my face that the quest came first.”

Bessy took the corners from her and stepped back and snapped the fold. “He did, Miss Lucy.”

“The quest came first. Those were the terms. I heard them, and I bid on them, and I have never once been able to say I was deceived, because I was not deceived. I was told.”

Walk together. Corners met. She kept her hands quiet on the linen. The quiet felt wrong.

“Well, the quest is dead. It died and we buried it with honors and brought the mourning home in the carriage with us. And a man whose quest is dead, Bessy, what is left for him in this house?” Their fingers touched at the middle of the fold. “A promise. A church on Sunday. What is left for him here is a cage. And I am the lock on it.”

“Miss Lucy⁠—”

“No, let me say it all, or I never will.” The sheet came to its last fold, a neat square of white. Lucy laid it on the pile and put her hands flat on it.

“You will say he is fond of me. He is fond of me. I have proof of his fondness that would make Mama faint into her wine. But I have the other proof too, and I have been refusing to admit it since Devon, and I am done refusing.”

The sun lay along the linen. Somewhere below, faint through two floors, the pacing turned and came back. Eleven steps.

“Every night, Bessy. Every night since the island, he comes to me, or lets me come to him, and he is generous, he is everything ardent, he gives and gives until I cannot see straight, and then every night, at the last, he stops. He takes my hands away. He kisses my knuckles politely and says when we are wed, and he holds himself back, every time, without one single exception.”

The linen-room went quiet. Bessy had stopped folding. She stood with a pillowcase forgotten in her hands and let her finish, withholding her thoughts about proper behavior under these solemn circumstances.

“I called it respect.”

Lucy’s voice had dropped almost to nothing and stayed level. That cost more than crying would have.

“For weeks I called it respect, and I glowed over it, like a fool. Such a gallant man, guarding me until his ring was on my finger. That was the kind reading, Bessy, and I clung to it.”

Her hands pressed flat on the sheets.

“But I will not hold him to a promise that was made for a different road. The quest is gone. What is left is a wedding on Sunday and a man who will stand up in it because he gave his word. I will not trap him by a promise made to me in desperation.”

There. It was all out. Every word she had been carrying. Said aloud in a room that smelled of lavender and hot linen. The world did not end. The fear stayed standing right there with them.

Bessy laid down the pillowcase. She came around the trestle, took Lucy’s hands off the folded sheets, and held them, dry and warm.

“Then we’ll manage, Miss Lucy,” she said. “You and I.”

Lucy looked up.

“We’ve managed before, and worse, with less.” The gray eyes did not look away. “Whatever Sunday is, and whatever comes after Sunday. If it’s a marriage, we’ll manage a marriage. And if it turns out to be a man forever off with his papers and his ghosts, leaving my lady to her own life, well then. My lady has a life. My lady has this house, and income.” A short pause. “And if it comes to the worst, Miss Lucy, if it ever comes to very worst, then it’s you and me and the Continent, and no man’s leave to ask. Italy, I’ve heard, is lovely. Rome. Venice. We’d take rooms. I’d learn to shout at foreign laundresses; I’d enjoy that. And we’d hire a respectable young man to be your private secretary, to make the arrangements, see to the tickets and the brigands, and escort us on the boats. Good teeth, sensible boots, and no poetry. I’d interview him myself.”