Page 61 of The Beloved Escapade

Matteo, the master from over the sea, took the stone to the mainland and worked it. Not enshrined it; not enthroned it. Worked it, the way the Whites worked it now, tablets and tombs and chimney-pieces and little queens for cottage windows, and he taught his art to other hands, and the school he left in a churchyard was a retired man’s school.

That might have been the whole of the truth. Matteo di Bianchi had lived out his days on that green mainland, cutting the loveliest gravestones in England for people who could not say his name, his real name, and the cathedral was a fire that had burned only in the journals, only at night, only in the cipher where a man keeps what he cannot have.

Perhaps the trove Lorenzo had sworn to carry into the light was a taproom mantel and a churchyard.

The nausea of disappointment came up in him suddenly, and he turned out of the wind.

Below the head, the cliff was cut by the cleft. The path down it was little more than a stitching of ledges. He went down it fast, faster than sense, needing his hands and his feet busy, or he would shout at a rock in Italian, and the day had no dignity left in it. The cleft closed over him as he went. The wind stopped as though a door had shut.

At the bottom, the landing opened the way it had to receive the boat: a fan of pale shingle inside walls of white stone eighty feet high, the water lying green as bottle-glass over a floor of the marble itself, and the evening sky hanging far overhead in a long slot. The whole of it, Dio, the whole of it was a nave. A cathedral of water and stone and firmament.

He stood on the shingle and hated the resemblance with all his heart. The white walls going up. The high light. The hush was not the sea’s but an interior, the one he had crossed a continent chasing. Even the Carvers’ sailboat and rowboat, hauled up above the tideline and canted on their sides, lay there like pews in an abandoned church.

He put his hand on a gunwale in passing. The wood was cold and damp with evening. Then he pulled at his neckcloth, at his coat, at his boots, with no decision made anywhere that he could find, only the body deciding for him that it would not stand in a mockery of a cathedral one breath longer with all its clothes on.

His hands folded the coat and set it on a dry rock, from a lifetime of handling things older and better than himself. He stared at his own hands doing it and could have wept at them, the obedient fools.

The water took him at the thigh like a blow and at the chest like a judgment.

He went under on purpose, all the way. The cold closed over his skull and squeezed. Every thought in his head went out at once like candles in a draft, which was the entire object. He came up gasping, swearing in two languages at a volume the walls threw it back as a congregation, struck out hard down the middle of the cove, and swam.

He swam until his shoulders burned. The water was so clear it was nearly cruel. Below him, the white floor fell away in ledges, pale, paler, pale-blue, blue-dark, the island going down into the deep the way everything he desired had sloped down into the dark.

Once, he took a breath and dove for it, down along a sunken buttress of the white stone with his ears aching, and laid his hand flat on the stone in the cold green light. The grain was there under his fingers, even here, wood-grain in drowned marble. He hung there a moment with the last of his air, touching it.

At least the stone will know I was here.

Matteo had written that, in the first winter, in the cipher, homesick and stubborn as he worked in secret workshops. And the stone had known. The stone knew everything. The stone was under Lorenzo’s hand this minute, keeping three hundred years of it, the workes, the door, the missing seventeen years of a man’s life, holding all of it the way stone keeps, entirely, and forever, and mute.

He came up hard, blowing, and struck the water flat with his open hand, once, a crack that went up the white walls and came back down at him thinned into something like laughter. Then he rolled onto his back and floated, spent, his ears under, his own blood loud, the slot of sky far above him going from gold to the color of a healing bruise.

I vowed to find it, he told the sky. The sky, being English, said nothing back.

He had vowed it at fourteen, with his father’s hand on his shoulder in the workshop and a cleaning-cloth in his fist. He had vowed it again last year, bent over a panel he had brought back to life with his own hands. A lady in a lake, pointing at secrets in the painted water: the first singular piece of Matteo’s brush he had touched.

Find the work. Carry it into the light. Give the name back to the man, centuries late. He had spent his youth on the vow, and his friends had married one by one and grown up around him like trees around a fence-post, and he had been proud, proud, of being the fence-post. And now he floated in the cold at the end of the trail with the possible truth lying on his chest like a slab.

There was no treasure. There was never a cathedral. Matteo grew old on the mainland, cutting stone. He was happy, perhaps, which was worse.

And you, Lorenzo, have spent half a year in England, from Cornwall to Gloucester, drawing God knows whose predatory eyes along a trail that ends at the door of living people, for a marvel that lives only in a dead man’s cipher.

His thoughts were black. Against everything he had believed, the truth did not kill him. Somehow that was the worst discovery of the day. A man could lose his heart and his dreams and still go on floating. The sea held him up with perfect indifference.

The cold was a deep ache in his bones, and he noted it from a distance, as he was noting everything now, from a distance, as though his own life had been sent away for judgment and he was waiting in the anteroom for the verdict. The master’s own hand. The school of the master. A copy merely, after some better original.

And into the emptiness where the cathedral had stood, quietly, without permission, came Lucy.

Not a thought about Lucy. Lucy herself, the fact of her, the way she came into rooms. Her hand on his sleeve on a tilting beach. Her determined chin. Her voice reading dead language aloud by lamplight, stumbling on Hwitmarbel, twice, and laughing at herself.

The heat of her hands under his in the stern of a boat while her world turned over. He had told her the quest came first. He had said it with a brutal bluntness, the worst truth he had ever told anyone, and she had barred a door with her body and staked herself on it, and he had thought, God forgive him, that he was the one taking the risk of the bargain.

He had sold her a forgery. That was the name for it, the name he would have used of any other man. He had sold her Excalibur, sold her a buried Sistine, sold her the whole golden ending, and she had bought passage with her narrow fearless shoulders, bought it on his word, which he had never doubted.

And the ship she had bought passage on was holed under the water, and he did not know how to face her. So for two days he had been telling her in the coward’s language, in furled hands and courtesy, by not reaching for her, because a man cannot reach for a woman he has let down.

He knew what he was doing. That was the shame of it. He watched himself bow to her on the cliff like a dancing-master and could not stop, because the alternative was to walk to her empty-handed and say, Lucia, the destination may not exist, and I no longer know what I am, and what will you do then with this failure … this disappointment of a man.

The cold made itself known, and there was no ignoring it. His teeth had begun a conversation of their own.