Page 73 of The Beloved Escapade

Somewhere in the long afternoon, on a stretch of road with nothing but stubble, the truth came through and stood in front of him.

I have chosen the dead over the living.

There was no gentler way to say it. For a month, an ancestor more than two hundred years in his grave had been set against a woman with the sea wind in her hair, and failing hairpins, and a laugh Lorenzo felt all the way to his toes … and he had chosen the grave.

Every day, in small decisions, he had chosen it. He had knelt in crypts while she stood on stairs. He had given his nights to a cipher and his silences to her. She had held light toward him more than once, and he had let it die while he grieved a hope that would not love him back, and could not. And when, at the last, she had offered him herself with nothing attached but herself, he had kissed her knuckles and held himself back.

The horse carried him on. The hedges went by. The truth rode with him and did not free him. It simply sat there. Behind it, the old defense still stood and said what it always said.

And what would you take back to her? A man with no quest, no purpose? A man with a fever? A bee in a bottle? She stood on her steps this morning with no tears and a finished face. The kindest thing you have done all month is the thing you did today. She is better without the broken man. Let departing be the one promise you keep.

He reached the inn at dusk.

It was a coaching house on the great road: noise, ostlers, the smell of horses and roasting meat. He handed the horse over. They gave him a room and a parlor fire. He took out Matteo’s journal.

The oilskin came off under his hands from pure habit. The vellum opened to the marker. Lamplight fell on the pictograms: the axe, the vertical sword, the wave crest, the marching rows. Lorenzo sat with three hundred years open on his knee and read not one word.

The page was only marks.

The fire flickered, and outside, the yard banged and settled. A man from London was loud about the state of the roads. Lorenzo stared at the journal and thought about Lucy.

He thought about her hands. That was where it began, and he let it run. Her hands covered in fish scales. Her hands flat on his chest. Her hands holding a candle at a raking angle in a crypt, tilting it before he asked.

He thought about the sound she made when her own laugh overtook her. He could picture the freckles that had formed at Hwitmarbel because she had frequently forgotten her bonnet. He thought, at last, because the fire was low and there was no one left to lie to, about the way she felt against his mouth in the dark, as if he had been away at sea and had come home, and how he had held her afterward and felt her lying awake and had pretended to sleep because he could not speak.

The journal lay open on his knee. For the first time, he closed it without marking the place.

He sat with his hand flat on the cover and could not make himself care where the page had been. The not-caring frightened him less than it should have. There was no room left for the quest. She was in every part of him. He had crossed Europe to mourn a man he had never met. Here, at a fire on the London road, he could mourn no one but a living woman several miles west, facing the condemnation of her community because of her failed betrothal.

Outside the window, the road stretched east into the dusk. London. Home. Away from her. The pull of it sat heavy in his chest.

He stayed by the fire until the last log crumbled into ash. Heat still clung to his face and the backs of his hands. The journal lay closed across his knee. He did not open it. When at last he rose and went through to the dining room, he drew the little stone from his breast pocket and set it on the table beside his plate, where a man might set a watch or a ring. Just a stone. The best one. Chosen by a boy on an island where, for a short time, he had been rich.

Which wound, he thought, the fork cold in his fingers, other men’s talk and the stamp of horses in the yard filling his ears. As if it mattered. As if a man bleeding from two wounds were helped by knowing which was which.

The candle on the table guttered. The room settled into the ordinary noise of the evening meal. The thing that stayed in him while he sat there was not Matteo, and not the art, and not the three hundred years. It was the sound of Lucy laughing.

* * *

The house was very large that evening, and very quiet. Lucy walked it because sitting had become impossible.

She had done everything correctly all day. She had eaten what Cook sent up, or moved it around the plate enough to look as if she had. She had answered the vicar’s kind, awful note. She had started a letter to Mama twice and burned both, because her parents were already on the way for the wedding, and a letter would not outrun them.

Now the lamps were lit and the servants had gone down, and there was nothing left to do correctly. She walked her inherited house from room to room with a single candle. Her uncle’s voice walked with her.

Adventure was never the destination, Lucy-bird.

She had thought she understood it when he said it. She had sat on the headland while he told her of his death and felt the words and believed she had understood the whole lesson. She had only absorbed half. She saw that now, with the candle throwing her own shadow up the stairs ahead of her. It was never the miles she had wanted. Not the Rhine. Not Venice. Not the Alps in June. Those had been the wrappings. She had spent so long dreaming of the wrappings, that she had never looked at what was inside the parcel. As a girl, she had loved her uncle and enjoyed his visits.

As a woman, it was about … him. Lorenzo. The intense Italian with his expressive hands, and his liquid black eyes, and his thirst for history.

Those were the blatant facts. One man who talked of treasure and read dead alphabets. The travels had only ever been the excuse to stand next to him while the world went by. The only thing worth fighting for had been the chance of his love in return. The chance to stand in front of him and say, I want your heart, and let him refuse her to her face if he must.

Instead, she had granted him his release in her father’s best courtroom manner and handed him his hat.

The memories came for her on the landing, all at once. She had held them off all day. Past ten o’clock, they broke through.

His mouth on hers against the chart cabinet the night the old invoice gave up its secret. The whyte stone greyned as wood is greyned. Him seizing her out of pure triumph, her name inside his Italian, her knees giving way. Mrs. Hannaford’s trestle in the morning sun, and him coming down the quay at a dead run in his beautiful coat, doubled over and out of breath, promising a full day’s gutting like a man offering his life. The fishwife saying he’d spoil his coat, and the expression on his face.