Page 7 of The Beloved Escapade

Lorenzo raised his head. “Yes.”

“It is Mr. Scott, sir. Mr. Scott has come back. Coach just come up the drive, sir. Mrs. Roskelly says would you like⁠—”

Lorenzo did not hear the rest.

He was already out of the chair. The chair went over behind him. He heard it fall as he crossed the library at a run, the flags cold through his stockinged feet, for he had taken off his boots at some point earlier, though he did not remember when, and burst into the corridor and made for the front door.

He was a scholar. He had always been a scholar. He had spent his life at desks with books open in front of him, and he had prided himself on the calm and the patience his subject required.

He was not, at this moment, a calm or a patient man.

He was a man whose ancestor’s silence might be about to break.

He flung the outer door open and stepped out into the chilly courtyard. The April cold hit him at once, and the sea wind coming off the cliff hit him a moment after, and he noticed neither.

The coach had come to a stop in the middle of the yard.

Nicholas was standing beside it. A book was under his arm and his cane in the crook of it and his hat in his hand. He appeared different in an unexpected way, not his usual sardonic self but … happy?

There was a woman beside him with curling fair hair and eyeglasses that had gone askew on her nose. She watched Lorenzo with an expression that suggested she had heard about him and was reserving judgment.

Lorenzo would deal with the woman later.

He crossed the courtyard in ten strides.

“L’hai trovato?”

He heard himself say it in Italian and could have wept for the waste of time. He tried again.

“Did you find anything?”

Nicholas reached into his portfolio without a word and produced three things.

An alphabet on a single sheet of paper. Lorenzo saw the pictograms in the left column and English letters in the right column, and his heart did something for which he had no name.

The journal he had lent Nicholas, safely returned.

A second notebook. In his neat hand, Nicholas had written across the top of the first page, Fair copy — decipherment of Journal I, pp. 1–14. Then, beneath, in Matteo’s cadences but in Nicholas’s script, the deciphered opening of the journal Lorenzo had been staring at for months.

Lorenzo took all three.

His hands went round them with the reverence he had for objects that had survived three centuries and would, God willing, survive three more.

He could not speak.

He examined the alphabet first. Twenty-six pictograms, twenty-six letters. The axe was E, exactly as Nicholas had said. The vertical sword was A. The wave crest was O. The circle with the inner dot was I. The horned helmet was S. The box with the pointed top was K. The broken chain was X. The X was N. Every symbol in Matteo’s journals accounted for. Every one.

He opened Matteo’s journal beside Nicholas’s fair copy. He checked. And checked again. He read the first line of pictograms, then moved his eyes along the copy, confirming each letter. He read the second line. He read the third.

It worked.

It worked. Nicholas had done it.

Lorenzo drew in a breath that shuddered. He turned to Nicholas’s fair copy and read, while standing there in the April courtyard with the wind pulling at the pages and the gulls calling somewhere above the cliff. He read with his lips moving because he could not help it, in English, but hearing behind it the Florentine voice of a man he had been chasing for years.

In the year of our Lord fifteen hundred and thirteen, Matteo’s first sentence read, in Nicholas’s careful hand, being taken into confidence by an Order that shall not be here named, and being given the commission that shall be, God willing, my life’s greatest work, and being sworn to a secrecy I would keep beyond death⁠—

Lorenzo stopped reading. Then he read the clause again.