Page 29 of The Beloved Escapade

Her name, in his mouth, in that accent, undid whatever the kiss had left standing. Her heart was pounding like a thousand soldiers marching on Napoleon, like ten thousand, like the whole Grand Army coming over a hill with the bands playing, and she stood in the circle of a stranger’s arms with her back against a secret three hundred years deep, one day into her new life, betrothed.

Betrothed. By her own demand. To an Italian she had met at a quarter past ten.

Somewhere, a hundred miles to the east, Mama was writing letters at her little desk, entirely unaware, still composing her campaign to bring Lucy safely home to needlework and eligible neighbors. A bubble of wholly disgraceful laughter rose in Lucy’s chest at the thought of the letter she would have to write in return.

Mama was going to be utterly, spectacularly distraught.

Despite this, Lucy could hardly wait.

CHAPTER 6

The churches still stand, but the words inside them have begun to change

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

Banns.

Lorenzo turned the word over in his mouth as the carriage swayed under him, the lane jolting up through the floorboards into his legs. It did not improve with handling.

Banns.

It sounded like a thing done to criminals. In the same quarter hour, she had given him parish, resident, license, and reading, each one delivered by Miss Lucy Carroway with crisp assurance. He had nodded through all of it and understood perhaps half.

“Say it again,” he said. “The whole of it.”

“The banns,” said Lucy, beside him, with the patience of a governess who liked her pupil, “are the public notice of a marriage. They are read aloud in church on three Sundays, one after another, so that anyone with an objection may raise it. You must be a resident in the parish. Mr. Sandys will want your name, your condition, and your church, and he will want to look at you for rather a long time without appearing to, and you will bear it beautifully.” A pause. “You are resident at The Rusty Anchor. That answers the residence. My father will want to see the entry in the banns book with his own eyes, so it must all be done exactly, in order, with nothing for a lawyer to pick at. He is a barrister at the King’s Bench, signore. When he descends upon us, and he will descend the moment my letter reaches him, I intend to hand him a proceeding so correct that he can find no purchase on it anywhere. It is the only mercy I can offer him.”

“You are fortifying your position,” said Lorenzo.

“I am.”

“Against your own father?”

“Against my own father, who taught me how.” She said it with love, which was the remarkable thing.

Behind them, on the rear seat, Bessy Smith sat with her workbag on her knees like a magistrate attending an execution of which she broadly approved.

She had received the morning’s news, conveyed by Lucy in the drawing room in approximately eleven words, without dropping a stitch. She had looked at Lucy for a moment. Then she had looked at Lorenzo for a considerably longer moment, a look that had gone through his coat and his waistcoat and his character and out the other side. Then she had said, “I’ll fetch my bonnet,” and that had been the whole of the opposition.

Lorenzo suspected the companion was not finished with him. He suspected the companion was a long-term undertaking.

The carriage, Lucy’s father’s own traveling carriage, its coachman wearing the expression of a servant composing his letter home, rolled between hedges white with blossoms. Lorenzo sat in a barrister’s carriage beside a woman he had known since that morning, on his way to post public notice that he would marry her, and waited to realize that it was madness.

It did not feel like madness. That was the strangest part of an entirely strange day. It felt like the click of a well-made mechanism seating itself in his chest.

What it also felt like, and this pressed on him harder with every turn of the wheels, was a letter he had not written.

His father was in Florence, in the chair by the tall window in the room that had been the good salon for three hundred years. The sun still came onto the wall in the late afternoon exactly as it always had. His father sat in that chair more of every day now, a rug over his knees against the drafts, and waited. He did not say he was waiting. In the letters taken down by Lorenzo’s cousin because his own hand wandered, he wrote that the weather was fine, that the roof wanted attention, that Lorenzo was to eat properly among the English who boiled everything.

But he was waiting. He had given his strength and his health and a good part of his life to the same silence Lorenzo had served, and he had passed the whole weight of it to Lorenzo without apology, only with the clear expectation that the work would continue. Now he sat by the window while the light crossed the wall, and waited to learn whether three centuries of di Bianchi men had finally found what they had been hunting.

And Lorenzo had not written. Not from Cornwall, when the journals opened. Not from the road. He had told himself there was nothing yet to say that would not be cruelty. Hope was the sharpest instrument one could use on an old man. One did not raise it without certainty.

But the truth had less dignity than that. The truth was that he had not known how to put into a letter what it was to stand at the end of three hundred years of pointing. The whole long compass needle of his family had swung west, and west, and further west, and it had come to rest at last on Grey House above a brown river, and everything in Lorenzo strained toward that house like a hound against a collar.

And first, first, he must stand in a vicarage and spell his name for a country priest.