Page 10 of The Beloved Escapade

She met his gaze without blinking.

“Signora,” he said, “I do not know your name.”

Nicholas said, mildly, “This is my wife, Mrs. Millicent Scott.”

Lorenzo blinked in surprise. But he would have been far more surprised if the three men who had accompanied him to England had not, one after the other, fallen in love and wed over the past few months.

“You went to Oxford,” he said, “to find an alphabet.”

“Yes.”

“And you have returned with an alphabet and a wife?” Lorenzo bowed to Mrs. Scott. “Signora,” he said. “È un onore … It is an honor. Welcome to Grimsfell.”

She inclined her head.

“Please,” Lorenzo said. “Both of you. Come inside. I have coffee⁠—”

He turned and led them toward the door, and it was only when Mrs. Roskelly caught sight of his stockinged feet in the entrance hall and let out a Cornish exclamation about the death of him that Lorenzo remembered he had come out without his boots.

CHAPTER 2

At home we dig up the old gods and the emperors, but here they dig up different ghosts. I do not know their names yet, but I shall learn them.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

The study was cold. The fire had only just been lit, and the coals still sulked in the grate, giving off more smoke than heat. Lucy sat in the leather chair with her hands folded tight in her lap and watched her father read the paper on his desk.

He had put on his court manner, and she could always tell the second it settled over him. His shoulders straightened a little and his voice dropped lower and the corners of his mouth firmed up. It was the voice he used with clients, not with her.

Today it was with her.

“Your uncle has been officially declared dead.”

The words landed like cold stone in her stomach. Lucy did not move. She had known it was coming. Her father had explained the whole process at Michaelmas. Seven years’ absence. The petition to the court. The affidavits from the Naval Office. The notice in the papers. He had said the ruling would come this year. Said it as if he were telling her the weather.

She had thought she was ready, but she was not.

The paper was written in a court clerk’s copperplate. She could see the flourishes on the capitals from where she sat. She wondered how many of these her father had read out to grieving families over the years. Dozens at least. This was solicitor’s work. Wills. Property. Death.

Today it was hers.

Not really hers. Uncle Henry’s. But it felt like hers too.

Seven years.

She could not make the number sit right in her head. Seven years since the messenger with the leather satchel and the smell of onions. Seven years since her father had wept into his hands. Seven years since she had said the words that had not left her since.

He might not be dead.

She had never stopped thinking them. Only stopped saying them aloud. There was a difference.

“Lucy.”

She glanced up. Her father had set the court paper down and taken up another. His face had slipped from the courtroom mask into something softer and more tired. Fifty-three this year, and until recently she had not thought of him as old. The last years had changed that. More gray at his temples now. Lines at the corners of his mouth she had not seen before.

“You understand what this means?”