Page 48 of The Beloved Escapade

“Say the name again,” Lawrence White said. “The whole of it. Slow.”

“Matteo di Bianchi,” said Lorenzo, slowly. “Painter. Carver. Pupil, in his youth, of the workshops of Florence. He left Italy in the year fifteen hundred and thirteen upon a commission he told no man of, and he wrote in his journals, I have one of those journals, signore, and it lies this hour in my trunk at the harbor inn, that he was sworn to a secrecy he would keep beyond death. And after the year of his leaving, my family never heard of him more. We are his brother’s line. We have grieved him three hundred years, signore. I was raised on the grief the way your sons, I think …” His voice went. He mastered it. It half went again. “The way your sons were raised on the stone.”

In the quiet, the young man, Matthew, set his mallet down on the bench. Turned. Went to the shelf below the wide window where the finished pieces waited, and came back, and put into Lorenzo’s hands the little kneeling knight.

“Matthew White,” he said. “It’s the name the eldest son carries. Time out of mind. There’s been a Matthew White carving stone in this parish since the eighth Harry sat the throne.” He nodded at the figure in Lorenzo’s hands, at the young stone back bent aching over the sword. “First one made that. Or one like it. That one’s mine, copied off his, the old one being too worn now to leave the house. First Matthew came ashore here, old folk always said, round about fifteen-thirty. Foreign and alone, with a bundle of tools.” Matthew White looked at him with Lorenzo’s own eyes out of a stranger’s face. “Talked like you, I’d wager. Till the parish wore it off him.”

Fifteen-thirty.

Lorenzo stood holding the vigil-knight, and the missing years assembled themselves in him coldly, of their own accord, even with his heart in pieces on this good, swept floor. Thirteen. Thirty. He did the sum on his fingers against the knight’s stone shoulder, openly, like a child, because his head would not hold numbers today.

Seventeen years between the oath and the Whitcombe shore. Seventeen years between a Florentine workshop and a bundle of tools in a Devon lane, the very years of the commission, the cathedral years, the everything-years, and standing at last in the one house on God’s earth where the answer had lived, he heard Lawrence White speak the sentence that he would hear in the dark for the rest of his days, said kind and final as a lid.

“He never spoke of before, sir. Not once, that ever came down to us. Not where he was, nor what he did, nor for whom. First Matthew talked, they say, like a mill-race, of stone, of weather, of his wife, of his children, God knows of gulls, and about the years before this parish, never a living word. It was the one shut room in the man. He took it under the sod with him, up in that yard you walked through, and, sir …” The old man’s face gentled, because he could see, everyone in the room could see, what the words were doing. “I’d tell you if I had it.”

They stayed the day. It was not a thing decided. It simply happened to them, the way weather happens, the workshop, and then the house behind the workshop, and Mrs. White, with her hands in flour, declaring that the inn could not be trusted to feed them properly. Bessy was fetched up the hill by a gravely courteous Matthew and installed by the fire with the household mending, where she took the measure of the family linen and was, by evening, more mollified than Lorenzo had yet seen.

He went down to the inn once, half-running, and came back with the journal.

He would remember all his life what it was to lay it open on the Whites’ long supper table, Matteo’s own crabbed cipher on the left, Nicholas’s fair English copy on the right, and watch Lawrence White put on his spectacles with unsteady hands and lean over the page of a man dead nearly three centuries whose eyes and hands and stubborn jaws were seated all around that table eating mutton. The old man did not read at first. He touched the ink’s shadow with one finger, above the page, not upon it, the way Lorenzo touched panel paintings.

“Well,” Lawrence said at last, thickly. “Well, then, Granfer. There you are.”

And the stories came, in fragments, the way Lucy had taught him true things come, not hunted, offered. How first Matthew married a Whitcombe girl, a rope-maker’s daughter, within two years of coming ashore, and how the parish had it that he asked for her in such English as he then possessed and she accepted him mostly on the strength of a carved gull. How they had children, “Children, sir, like herring,” said Mrs. White comfortably, “and you’ll not throw a stone on this shore but you graze a cousin,” so that half of Whitcombe carried a thimbleful of Florence in it unknowing: the sexton, the Tucker boys, Hannaford’s late husband, God rest him.

How first Matthew lived to be old, truly old, white-haired in the sun at his own door with the tools still in his lap, and died in his bed with his wife’s people around him and was carried up to the yard by his own sons.

Lorenzo sat with his mutton untouched and let it break over him, wave on wave, the impossible news, the good death, the happy man, three hundred years of di Bianchi mourning, the ruin-story, the vanished-story, the quest-that-devoured-him story he had been suckled on. Against it all, one Devon supper table saying calmly that Matteo lived long, he loved, he was loved, he made lambs sleep on children’s graves, and he had rather a famous fondness for gulls.

Babbo, he thought, and had to set down his fork and look for a while at the fire. Babbo, I must write to you tonight. Sit by your window. I am sending you back seventeen generations.

Only twice did the other loyalty of Whitcombe show itself, and Lorenzo honored it both times. Once, when he asked, craftsman to craftsman, the most innocent question in his whole body, where such marble was got, that wood-grained white, he had met its like nowhere in Europe, and the room went one degree quieter, and Lawrence said only, “It comes across to us. Always has,” and the sentence closed at both ends like a box. And once, later, when little talk of boats and weather bent, by its own current, too near the water between the shore and the pale rock out on it, and the current simply stopped, all of them at once, smooth as a school of fish turning in unison.

Lorenzo asked nothing. He reached instead for the bread, and passed it, and asked Mrs. White how in the name of all the saints she got such crust from a fish-house oven, and across the table, he felt Lawrence White watching him not-ask, and felt the not-asking counted somewhere, entered into some keeping older than any of them, and let it be.

After dinner, they stopped at the churchyard and found Matteo’s gravestone, tucked away in a corner, and Lorenzo paid his respects to the man he had hunted his entire life, on his knees, Lucy’s hand on his shoulder as comfort. He would need to return with parchment to take a rubbing for his family.

The quay that night held only the three of them, him and Lucy and the tide.

Bessy had gone up, yawning under the innkeeper’s lantern. The village showed a last few lit windows up its dark hill, the Whites’ among them, high up, a warm square he could find without looking. The water breathed against the shingle. Out west, the island lay along the horizon, a denser black on black, keeping whatever secrets it kept.

“Say the whole of it,” Lucy said.

She had his arm. The wind had most of her hair. The soft weight of her against his side, the scent of her, salt and cider and her skin, was a comfort he could not have predicted.

“You have been thinking about it since supper. Lay out the evidence for me, what holds and what does not, or you will lie awake trying the case at the ceiling.”

So he said it, and in saying it discovered it, the way talking to her always went. The proofs first, enormous, past counting. Matteo alive, alive in the only way that outlasts breath, alive in eyes around a table, in a rasp worn to silk, in a lamb asleep on a child’s grave. The ruin-story dead. His father about to be handed back, at seventy, an unbroken family and a happy ancestor and a shore full of English cousins. He heard his own voice shake on that and let it.

“And the loss,” he said. “One line. Seventeen years.”

The words came out over the water distant and cold, the historian’s voice, and underneath them, the old rope in his chest took another turn.

“Thirteen to thirty. The commission years. The only years I came for, Lucia. No. No, that is no longer true, and I thank God, but the years the quest came for. And he locked them. The one shut room in a talking man, Lawrence said, and he is right, and the door of it has been under the nettles in that churchyard since your Spanish Armada. Whatever Matteo built, whatever he buried, whatever he swore, it lives in those seventeen years, and tonight, I stood in the single house in creation where the answer should have been kept, among people with my own eyes who would give it to me if they had it, and there is nothing there. Not mislaid, amore. Not hidden. Never told.”

He sighed with force, running his hands through his hair.

“You cannot dig for what a man refused to bury. The trail does not go cold, you understand. The trail was burned by its own maker, three hundred years before I was born, on purpose, because he was faithful, and I am proud of him, Dio, I am so proud of him, I could lie down in that lane, and I could also put my head against this post and howl. Matteo lived a good life, but what of his art?”