Page 82 of The Beloved Escapade

The greatest adventure, her uncle had told her, on a cliff top with the gorse in bloom, was never the destination. She had married her adventure at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning, and he stood warm at her side with his arm around her, and before them, the future lay open as the cave itself had opened. It was vast, and full of waiting wonders, and dark only until one carried the light in.

“Well then,” said Lucy di Bianchi, to the whole of it.

And the cathedral, which kept everything and repeated nothing, merely existed.

EPILOGUE

Almost no one will see what I have made here. That was always the condition of the work.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

13th September 1822

The Great Room at Somerset House had held half a century of England’s paintings. Lorenzo di Bianchi stood in the middle of it on a summer evening and watched the whole place surrender, wall by wall, to a Florentine.

Matteo was everywhere. The name moved through the crowd like weather. Di Bianchi. Di Bianchi. The lost master. The buried school. Every lip carried it. Every wall carried him. The great panels burned quietly under the lamps. The Lady with her offered blade. The doomed fellowship at their round table. The queen keeping her state while her heart broke. All of them cleaned and cradled and hung by hands that loved them.

Restored to the pantheon.

That was the phrase the President of the Academy had used, standing on a little dais two hours ago, his voice thick with it. Restored at last to the pantheon of the masters.

Lorenzo had stood beside Lucy with her hand wound tight in his and heard his ancestor’s name given back to him in front of the assembled art of England. He had disgraced seventeen generations by weeping in public. Nobody had minded. Least of all the seventeen generations. The tears had come hot and shameless, and he had not tried to stop them.

He surveyed the room now from beside one of the smaller panels, a glass of champagne forgotten in his hand. Once an hour, he had promised Lucy. Only once. He thought about the wolves.

They were in the room. He would have wagered the whole exhibition on it. Somewhere in this brilliant crowd, wearing scholarship or rank or charm, the Dominus walked his walls with their cold calculations, hunting the one thing the walls would never give them.

The knowledge sat in him easily now, almost merrily. He and Lucy had built this room to be a beautiful impasse. Not one receipt or mention of Hwitmarbel’s living stone anywhere. Not one panel, not one syllable of the catalog led to Devon. The island might as well not exist. Officially, as far as this exhibition was concerned, it did not.

Everything on these walls had come up out of the earth of Gloucestershire, from the trove beneath Grey House. The provenance stood published in the catalog’s front matter, plain as a tombstone and just as cold a trail: the estate of the late Captain Belafonte, R.N., passed by will through the late Mr. Henry Carroway, lost at sea, to his niece, after seven years’ proceedings in Chancery. A drowned captain. A drowned heir. A decade’s gap. A young wife at the end of it who knew charmingly little about anything before her own inheritance. Let them pull that thread until their fingers bled. It led nowhere.

And for the hungrier sort, the ones who would want the source itself, he and Lucy had set the door wide open. Grey House was receiving scholars. It said so in the catalog. The cathedral chamber beneath the house stood open, by written application, to students of art and antiquity. Applications arrived by the sackful. Some of those earnest correspondents would be exactly what they claimed, and some would be wolves in spectacles. All of them alike would be walked down the great stair by the steward, shown the columns and the ceiling and the empty anvil, given tea, and would find nothing.

The journals were gone. Every cipher, every ledger, every page of her uncle’s racing pencil, everything the Dominus could use, had traveled quietly into Cornwall and vanished into the hidden hall at Grimsfell. Walls that had kept a living woman secret for years would keep dead paper until doomsday. Angelo stood guard over the house, and Isolde over its secrets.

The Dominus could come disguised as scholars and feast their avarice on beauty until their eyes ached. Beauty was all there was to find. The marbles remained where they belonged, in the dark under Grey House, under the painted ceiling.

“You are pulling a face,” said Lucy, arriving at his elbow in bronze silk, with two fresh glasses. “The general-reviewing-his-fortifications face. You promised me once an hour.”

“It has been,” said Lorenzo, consulting nothing at all, “an hour.”

“It has been twenty minutes.” She traded his warm forgotten glass for a cold one and tucked her hand through his arm. Her wedding ring pressed his sleeve. The pressure still hit him low and hard, the same way a masterpiece did when he walked into a room and found it waiting.

“Come. You are wanted. Half of England is waiting to congratulate you, and the other half is waiting to congratulate me for having the sense to marry you, and I want witnesses for that part.”

Half of England had, in fairness, made an effort.

They came at him in waves. Lorenzo, who had arrived in this country knowing nobody, stood in the finest room in London and was embraced, wrung, pounded, and toasted by what appeared to be an entire aristocracy of friends.

Lord Gabriel Strathmore came first, Viscount Trenwith, dangerous as ever and grinning like a boy, with his wife Henri on his arm already halfway into an argument about the Round Table panel’s iconography that she had plainly been saving up for weeks. Lorenzo gave himself to it joyfully, hands already moving, until Gabriel pulled her away to meet an old friend from France.

Nicholas and Millie Scott were at the vigil-knight. Millie interrogated it at close range with her spectacles nearly on the paint while Nicholas watched her with besotted patience.

Marco Scott and his bride had claimed the Lady of the Lake and were not sharing her with anyone.

Sebastian was there as well, towering over the crowd in the way he always did, his wife on his arm, both of them smiling as if the whole evening belonged to them. Lorenzo felt the old change in the air that came with Sebastian’s height, the same slight adjustment he made when Sebastian’s brother, the Duke of Halmesbury, later stopped beside him.