Page 52 of The Beloved Escapade

“I know. I know it. Lucy-bird, I know. Forgive me. There was no other way, and I will not ask you to believe that yet. I know, I know.”

The boat rocked. The water slapped and glittered. Somewhere above, a gull made its cold hilarious sound, and the two of them held each other in the middle of the brightness and let the worst of it pass through, and it did pass.

Grief is a wave, her uncle had told her once, long ago, a wave and not a sea. It goes over you. It is not the whole of the water. And when at last she could sit back and look at him, wet-faced, hiccupping, still gripping two fistfuls of his coat as though he might yet dissolve, he was gazing back at her with his eyes streaming openly down his brown cheeks, smiling the smile the beard had been built to bury.

“You grew up,” he said, roughly. “You went and grew up, you little traitor. Last I had of you, you were all elbows and questions.” The smile cracked wider, desperate, glorious. “And now look. Mistress of Grey House. Trust you, Lucy-bird, trust you of all women to walk along the one beach in England I—” He stopped himself. Shook his head. Laid it aside visibly, as if he were setting down a crate marked later. “On the island. Everything, I swear it to you, the whole of it, every hour of the seven years, but not in an open boat in a working sea-lane, and not in fragments. You will have it whole. There are others involved in it, Lucy. That is all I will say on the water. It was never only my secret to spend.”

“Others,” Lucy repeated, and her eyes went, without her leave, to the pale rock standing up ahead of them out of the morning. It suddenly made sense.

“Others.” He said it with his whole chest. And then he dragged a wrist across his face, and looked past her, and seemed to arrive all at once at the third person in the boat, at Lorenzo, who through the entire tempest had sat wedged in the stern sheets with a white grip on both gunwales and tears standing frankly in his eyes, keeping the trim of the boat and his silence with the same ferocious courtesy.

“And this,” said her uncle, in a voice not yet done wobbling, “this would be the betrothed. The Italian gentleman the village had such a deal to say about while I was collecting supplies.” The tilted head. The old assessing light kindling through the wet, the light every suitor in three counties would have fled from. “Offered Tucker double, I hear.”

“It is worse than that, sir,” said Lorenzo. “I offered him any figure he liked, and then I offered to double that. I have since been reformed by a fishwife.” He let go of the gunwale, visibly decided the sea could have him if it insisted, and put out his hand across the thwart. “Lorenzo di Bianchi. I would say to you that I will care for her, but we are past the hour for saying it as a promise. You have watched an hour of it as a fact. She stood, signore, with her world turning over, and lied like a queen to keep you breathing. I am marrying the bravest soul in England, and I know my fortune. I am glad beyond my English to see her not required to grieve you any longer.”

Her uncle took the hand. Held it, and looked at him a long moment down that measuring beam, Florentine face, ink-stained fingers, wet eyes, all of it, and something passed between the two men that Lucy could not read and did not need to.

“Aye,” said Henry Carroway at last, thickly, in full and final Devon. “Well. The tea works, they say.” And he wrung Lorenzo’s hand once, hard, and let it go, and took up his oars, and the boat came round and settled on its line for the island, and the sun came over the headland at their backs and laid every color of the morning on the water at once.

Her uncle rowed, and Lucy watched him row, and did not once stop smiling, and could not have stopped for anything.

The stroke went on, long and unhurried, the ebb doing half the work. The island stood up ahead of them by degrees, no longer a pale line but a place, cliffs of that impossible white taking the new sun until they burned, gulls wheeling off the heights in slow silver storms, a green crown of turf above the stone, and somewhere at the beach, still hidden, whatever landing the sea and three hundred years had agreed between them.

The morning smelled of salt and light. In the bow, the supplies of Whitcombe shifted in their sack. And on her folded hands, warm and sure, lay Lorenzo’s. He had taken them somewhere in the last furlong without a word, the whole of that torrential man gone quiet, doing nothing in the world but keeping her hands company while she stared at her living uncle.

The solid heat of his palm over hers, the quiet strength of his fingers, settled into her like an anchor. Lucy sat in the stern of a rowing boat between the two of them and understood that she was, at this present moment, on this bright water, the richest woman breathing.

Temper it, she told herself, and made an honest effort. Nothing was explained. Seven years and a false name and others, whatever that meant, and a wall of loyalty around an island, and every one of those things had a story that might yet be terrible. Joy taken on credit was her mother’s habit, not hers. A sensible woman would hold something back.

The effort lasted the length of one wave, her excitement mounting.

Which was not in the agreement to be sensible. Which was so far outside the agreement that the agreement could not see it from where it stood.

She would think about that later. She would be sensible later. She made herself the solemn promise, and knew herself for a liar even in the making, because the island was standing up over the bow all white and burning, and her uncle was alive, and her Lorenzo was warm against her shoulder, the solid living heat of him soaking through her sleeve into her skin. Somewhere on that rock there might be an ancient sword. She let herself think this aloud in the privacy of her own ringing head.

A cleft was opening in the white cliffs ahead, narrow as a held breath, where the swell ran in and did not come back out. Her uncle leaned on the starboard oar, and the boat came round, and the shadow of Hwitmarbel fell across them cool as a church.

Life, thought Lucy Carroway, with the last of the sun on her back and everything she loved in one boat, cannot possibly be this good. It simply would not be fair to mere mortals. It seemed she was tempting fate itself with such giddy joy.

The cleft took them in.

CHAPTER 12

Ordinary marble will not do for the work.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

The cleft was barely wider than the oars.

White stone rose on either side of the boat, close enough that Lorenzo could have put out a hand and touched it. The rock was cool as a cellar against the springtime air, and the sea ran green and quiet beneath them where a moment ago it had been running silver and loud.

He laid his hand flat against the passing rock as another man might touch a church door. The stone took the heat from his palm. The swell lifted them, set them down, lifted them again. Somewhere overhead, a gull called once and gave it up.

Then the walls opened, and the island let them in.

A lagoon lay inside the cliffs like a coin in a cupped hand. Still water, blue-green over pale sand, ringed all around with the white stone. A wooden landing stage stood out from a shingle beach. A path climbed away from it through turf cropped short as a lawn.