Page 58 of The Beloved Escapade

So she sat, and watched the upright dark stroke of him get smaller along the bright edge of England, and her hand lay on the warm stone between them where nobody’s hand came to find it, open, and foolish, and empty.

“Now,” her uncle said at last. “While it is only us and the gulls, I will tell you about the ship.”

Lucy turned to him. He was not looking at her. He was staring out at the sea, and his face had gone grim, the storyteller stripped out of it entirely, and she understood that she was about to be given the truth without varnish, and she folded her hands and waited.

“Seven years ago, there was a gathering,” he said. “The de Grey family had been scattered and thinned so long that the young ones had never once stood in the same room. The captain judged it could be done safely if it was done at sea. No drawing rooms. No parish eyes. His own ship, his own crew, and a slow passage along a coast he knew like his own signature. A reunion, Lucy-bird. A handful of de Greys under one deck for the first time in a generation, to eat together and say the old names aloud and let the children learn each other’s faces.”

“The captain,” Lucy said. “Captain Belafonte. He was⁠—”

“Blood. His grandmother was a de Grey. No claim in him, and nothing to claim for. Both his boys were in the ground from the wars. He needed me to take the reins and keep his secrets. He had been part of the hiding longer than I knew him. His money. His charts. His house.” A grim flicker crossed his face. “You have been sleeping in the middle of it and never knew, Lucy-bird. Grey House, once Greywick Manor. He inherited it. The family’s name over his door in plain daylight, and not a soul in Gloucestershire the wiser. He relished a jest he could never tell.”

Lucy sat with that, and it went down into her strangely, warm and cold at once. Her drafty, beloved barrack of a house, standing all these years with a hidden name in its mouth.

“There was no passenger list,” her uncle said. “There was never going to be a passenger list because names on paper are how this family died for three hundred years. He carried his own people and manifested cargo. And still they came.” His jaw worked once. “They knew, Lucy. The Dominus knew there were de Greys aboard the Lady’s Grace. They followed some or other member of the family to track the rest down. I have had years to turn it over, and I believe they followed the two of us to them, the captain and me. We thought ourselves careful men. We were careful men. It was not enough, and I will live with that the rest of my life.”

“The storm—” Lucy began, thinking about the gale off Land’s End, the rocks, the fragments.

“The gale was real,” he responded. “She was a sound ship, Lucy-bird. Sound ships labor in weather like that, but they do not drown in it. She began taking water where no sea had struck her, low and fast, seams that had been sprung for her beforehand, and when they went to the pumps, the pumps were fouled. Somebody had been aboard her at Falmouth with time and skill and no hurry at all. She was murdered, Lucy. They were murdered. Everything after that was only the sea doing what the sea does with what it is given.”

Lucy discovered that she had taken hold of his sleeve. She did not remember doing it. He put his rope-hard hand over hers and left it there.

“I tell you out here,” he said, “so our children do not hear it. I had my hand on a barrel, and the two youngest of the party were within my reach when the deck went, and by morning, the three of us were alive, washed up down the coast.”

The gulls cried. The sea glittered, blue and gold and utterly without conscience, the same sea, this same water, and Lucy looked at it and could not make the two things sit together in her head, the brightness and the night inside his sentence.

“She was three-and-twenty,” he said. “Her brother a year or two more. Children, to my eye then. Everyone older, everyone wiser, every soul who could lead them, explain who they were and what to do about it, gone in one night’s work. And here is the conclusion I reached on a Cornish beach with my teeth still chattering, Lucy-bird, and I have decided it again every morning since. The world would count every hand lost. The papers would say so, the Crown would say so, and, better than either, the Dominus would believe so, because there was no list on God’s earth to tell them who had or had not been aboard. As far as the wolves knew, the work of three centuries was finished that night. The de Greys had ended. And those two would stay alive exactly as long as that held. A living Henry Carroway was a thread, Lucy. A thread leading out of that water, up a Devon lane, to a door. A dead one was much better.”

He drew a breath that dragged.

“So I stayed drowned. We returned here.”

“And she—” Lucy’s throat was thick. “You⁠—”

“Not then.” Some of the plainness went out of his face, and something younger came up under it. “I was six-and-thirty and half-drowned and answerable overnight for two orphans and an island of strangers. Love was the last item on the manifest, Lucy-bird, believe me. It came the way spring comes on this coast. I cannot name the day. I only woke one morning and I married her, in the chapel, under your Matteo’s own painted saints, and the parson rowed home before dark and has kept his counsel the way this coast keeps everything. Somewhere he has hidden our true names.”

He glanced at her sidelong, and the old wicked warmth flickered.

“My only road was the hidden one, Lucy-bird. I took it at a run.”

Lucy sat in the sun with her hand under his and her eyes burning, and the seven years turned over inside her and lay down differently, and the new way they lay was heavier and easier both at once, which she would not have believed possible of grief until this morning.

“I am sorry. That you lost him. And the rest of them.”

Then she straightened her spine, because there was business, and she was her father’s daughter.

“But Grey House is yours,” she said. “All of it. The captain’s money, the Funds, the rents, every farthing and every floorboard. I will not keep it. I will sign whatever wants signing. Papa can—” She ran onto the rocks of it even as she said it, because Papa could do nothing, Papa could know nothing, a dead man takes no deed, and she heard the impossibility arrive in her own voice and hated it.

Her uncle was already shaking his head, and he did it without a shadow of hesitation.

“No, Lucy-bird.”

“Uncle—”

“Hear me. I am doing well. I am happy. The stone pays, the island feeds us, my children have never once been cold, and there is not one thing on that mainland I want with my old name on it. What would you have me do, walk into Chancery in a beard? No.”

His hand tightened over hers.

“Grey House was always meant to go down through family. The captain had none left, so he passed to me and mine. It is yours twice over now, Lucy. His will and mine. His blood-jest of a house, and my brother’s daughter inside it, is as it should be. Keep it. Air the rooms. Let there be lamps in the windows of Grey House and somebody arguing at the dinner table, and that, Lucy-bird, is inheritance. The rest is paper.” The warmth flickered again. “He liked you, the old man. He liked anybody who argued back.”