Page 43 of The Beloved Escapade

“Va bene,” he said. It cost him. She saw what it cost him. He watched her see it, and the smile she gave him was worth the price and a premium besides. “We drink the tea. But Lucy, if the tea lasts a month, you will bury me here. Have them carve a boat on the stone.”

“I’ll allow a fortnight,” she said, “before I permit you to expire,” and went to work.

He had believed he understood what she meant to do. He had not understood at all.

The battlefield she chose was the fish trestle halfway down the quay, and the enemy was the woman who had put her arm out. Mrs. Hannaford. A woman built like an ox, with forearms Michelangelo would have wept to draw, splitting mackerel with a knife so fast that the blade was only a bright rumor. Her face, when Lucy stopped before the trestle, would have intimidated a troop of battle-weary soldiers.

Lorenzo took himself thirty feet off, sat on a bollard, opened his sketching-book upon his knee to justify his existence, and pretended to draw boats.

Lucy did not mention fish prices. She did not mention boats, hospitality, the beauty of the village, or the weather, and she did not, his shoulders were braced for it, mention the island.

She stood watching the knife with honest greed. Then she said, as if confessing a debt, that she had been watching a full minute and could not for her life see how it was done so fast. Her cook, she added, gutted mackerel like someone settling an old grudge, and the fish came to table looking assassinated. Would Mrs. Hannaford consider showing her the trick of it, if Lucy swore to be more use than trouble?

The knife stopped.

“You’ll spoil that frock,” said the ox, with contempt for the gown, the request, and the entire gentry of England.

“Yes,” said Lucy, and took off her gloves.

And Lorenzo, on his bollard, with his pencil stopped in the middle of a mast, watched the next hour happen.

He watched her ruin her cuffs to the elbow. He watched her make a butchery of her first mackerel, and a worse butchery of her second, and laugh at herself with her whole throat, head back, gulls startling. The sound of that laugh went through him like warm wine.

He watched the ox try not to laugh and lose, one short bark like a hatch cover dropping. He watched the knife handed over, and the thick red hands closing over Lucy’s white ones to set the angle of the blade, and the third fish come apart clean, and something pass between the two women at the trestle that no money he possessed could have purchased.

Then the talking began, and it was Lucy who did the listening. He was too far off for words. The fishwife’s knife pointed out to the boats, to one boat, her chin tipping toward the two owl-eyed boys, and the boys summoned, dripping, to be named. A hand pressed flat to her breastbone, once, and held there, at something. And Lucy through it all barely speaking, her head tipped, her whole body turned into an ear, taking the woman’s life into herself the way dry ground takes rain.

The boys were leaning against the trestle now. An old man had drifted into the orbit of it and was contributing opinions on gulls. Somewhere in the hour, a mug of something had appeared at Lucy’s elbow, and that was the moment Lorenzo understood she was being accepted.

The wind turned the page of his book for him. The page was empty.

He stared down at it, and it came to him, arriving around him, that an hour had gone by, a whole hour of a bright May morning, two miles downwind of everything his family had bled for since before the Spanish Armada sailed on England, and he had not thought of Matteo once.

Not once. He examined the hour and could not find his ancestor anywhere in it.

The alarm rang in him from habit, from far off, like a bell in another parish. He waited to mind.

He found he did not mind.

He wrote the date at the top of the empty page, because it appeared to him that something had happened on this day, and closed the book.

They had mackerel for supper, and no one had bought it. It was thrust upon Lucy at the trestle at day’s end, six fat fish strung on a withy, with a growl that defied her to refuse, and the innkeeper’s wife dressed them, and the innkeeper, who two nights past had left the room rather than discuss the island, stood over the table telling them where the fish had been swimming that morning, easy as an old friend.

The word island still stood scowling in the corner of the room, but the house had warmed a degree, and Lorenzo ate his supper slowly and marveled at his Lucy’s skills. She would make a fine wife. His own family would one day forgive that she was not Italian and accept her as she was, if today was anything to judge by.

“Tomorrow,” Lucy said, when Bessy had gone up and the innkeeper’s family had withdrawn to their kitchen and the two of them sat on in the little parlor that the household surrendered to them for the evening, a betrothed pair being, in the eyes of a busy inn, as good as wed, “Mrs. Hannaford is teaching me to mend a net. And you are to come and be shown to her properly. She thinks you are a painter. I let her. It made you seem harmless.”

“Harmless,” said Lorenzo.

“Entirely harmless. A lamb with a sketching-book.”

The fire had burned down to a red glow. The house creaked and ticked above them. The sea breathed against the shingle outside, long and slow. Her face was lit warm all down one side, and her hair was giving up the day’s pins by installments. Lorenzo gazed at her and had no more command of what came next than a man has of weather. The soft line of her throat, the way the fire caught the curve of her lower lip, the faint scent of cider and sea air that clung to her … he felt it all settle low and warm in his body.

“You were magnificent today,” he said. “I watched you win a village that would not be bought, and you took it by giving. I have never seen anything so …” The English word went missing. He went and fetched it. “So shrewd and so kind in the one act. If I forget every fish in the sea, I will not forget your face when the third one came apart properly. Dio, the pride on you. A victorious general at a surrender has never looked so proud.”

“It was a very good fish.” Her voice had gone unsteady at the edges. She was staring at his mouth.

“Lucia,” he said, warning her, or himself. The distinction was already lost.