Page 60 of The Beloved Escapade

“Seven years, I have buried you every morning with the rest of my old life,” he said at last, roughly, “and you walked up out of the sea at me on a delivery tide. I will not ask Providence for more than that. But hear this. Some winters, when the watch says the coast is quiet, there is always a berth on this island with your name on it.”

Lucy nodded, because her voice had gone, and thought, with a clear cold ache, that she had found him and must now bury him again with her own two hands, and keep the grave tended with her own silence, for years, perhaps for always. She would do it, for doing it was the price of him breathing, and for that she would pay it every day.

She took her uncle’s arm, and they went down the track into the valley with the smoke and the wash and the noise of children playing rising to meet them. They talked of sheep, of weather, of nothing that mattered, like people who had all the time in the world. Inside, Lucy was hollow with worry about Lorenzo.

CHAPTER 14

The sea rose in walls and the ship labored until the seams opened. I clung to the rail and prayed in the language of my childhood, certain the water would take us.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

The head of the island ran out west into the wind, and Lorenzo walked it until walking stopped answering.

It had answered for the first hour. His boots on the sprung turf. The gorse tearing at his stockings where the path pinched and bent around the cliff edge. The wind coming up off the water with enough force to wet his sleeve.

A man could pour a great deal into his legs. His father had taught him that without once putting it into words, all those evenings tramping the Lungarno with some ruinous auction or some cheating dealer burning in his chest, walking and walking with his son trotting at his heel until the fire had gone down into coals a man could bank.

But his father had never had to walk off three centuries.

Does it exist at all?

He had asked it aloud on the cliff that morning, before her and before her uncle, and no one on this island could answer him. The question had been walking beside him ever since like a dog he could not send home.

Seventeen years, and no trace of the hidden work Matteo had done in that time.

His chest had an empty space where his hopes had lived. A lacuna, a restorer would call it, the place where the plaster has come away and taken the saint’s face with it. Lorenzo had filled a hundred lacunae in his time, with a sure hand and a quiet conscience.

This one would not take paint. From the first shipment to the last, in the old papers at Grey House and again in the island’s own tallies, the white stone had gone out on the tide and been delivered … somewhere. Twelve great blocks and fourteen and nine and eleven, carriage by water to the “workes” in “secrecie.”

Two words in a dead clerk’s hand, and the writing told him nothing. A clerk’s hand never did. It wrote out miracle and mutton in the same brown ink. The workes could be a buried cathedral. The workes could be a shed on any shore of the Severn with a roof of thatch and a dirt floor. He had built his life on digging up the past, and this was the first time he had understood, in his body, that the past owed him nothing.

That was the stone in his boot he could not walk out. Signor Carver. Henry. Jim. The drowned man. The keeper. The one soul in England who held the secret of the dead. Jim had looked at him this morning with honesty on his face and given him nothing, because there was nothing.

The island had cut the stone and shut its mouth. Whatever Matteo had built or failed to build, the knowing of it had not been passed down. Lorenzo had crossed a sea, learned a country, buried months of his life in ciphers and cold libraries, and come at last to the very rock where it all began, close enough to breathe the quarry dust. Matteo di Bianchi was as shrouded here, at the beginning of everything, as he had been in Florence with the width of Europe between them.

The path gave out at the head in a tumble of rock and thrift. There was nowhere farther to walk, which was the trouble with islands. He stood at the end of England with the wind pushing at his chest like a flat hand and let the worst thought come all the way up at last, because it was coming whether he wished it or not.

Perhaps there is no cathedral.

There. It was out. The gulls did not fall from the sky.

Perhaps there had never been one.

He made himself look at it as he would make a pupil look at a doubtful panel, coldly, the wishing wiped from his eye like grime off old varnish.

Say only what is in the paint, Lorenzo. Nothing that is not in the paint.

The order had commissioned a hidden marvel, yes. The money had been real. The stone was real. The intent was real. The journals planning it were real.

And in those same years the wolves had begun their hunting. The patrons were the de Greys, and the de Greys were being murdered.

The purse that was to raise a cathedral was being emptied grave by grave while Matteo cut his blocks. Commissions die when patrons die. Every man of Lorenzo’s trade knew that before he learned to shave. Half the unfinished glories of Italy were tombstones to a patron’s fever.

He had stood before San Lorenz more times than he could count, that great raw cliff of naked brick, the façade Michelangelo quarried half a mountain for and never raised. The marble was delivered, but the church did not always rise to meet it.

Why not here? Why not the greatest of them all, dead in the cradle, the crates unshipped, the plans burned for safety, and a Florentine master stranded on a gray coast with a quarry, a debt of silence, and the rest of his life to get through.