Page 72 of The Beloved Escapade

Ask her. Ask her, on your knees on this hearth, if there is any version of you without the quest that she could still⁠—

The old defenses came down across it, smooth from long use.

Three heartbeats. He would count them for the rest of his life.

“I understand,” said Lorenzo.

He heard his own voice deliver it, polite and finished. He watched something flicker at the back of her eyes, too fast to read, and gone.

“You are,” he said, “as you have always been, more honest than the whole of my acquaintance assembled. I will not insult that honesty with a scene.”

The words came out in good order, one after another, dead.

“I will make my arrangements at once. I would not for the world add any complications. And Lucia … Miss Carroway. The correction cost him more than the rest of the speech. “Whatever is said in Little Severn, or in your mother’s letters, if any voice anywhere lays one grain of fault on you, they will answer to me first. You have behaved, from the first morning to this one, with more honor than any man I have ever done business with. I wish …” The sentence went out onto thin ice. He stepped back. “I wish you every happiness. All the miles of it.”

“And I, you,” said Lucy, “on whatever trail is left to you. There will be one. Men like you are not finished by one disappointment.”

She put out her hand.

He took it. Her hand lay in his, fine-boned and firm.

And cold. Cold as stone. For one instant, the fact of it went through him. Her voice is summer, and her hand is winter.

He bowed over the cold hand. A correct bow. He knew what it was even as he paid it. He released her fingers and walked out of the library and shut the door with almost no sound at all.

He wrote the letter when he reached his inn, before he packed his things and rode out.

It came easily now. He sat at the desk with the lamp lit and a clean sheet in front of him. The words arrived short and obedient.

Padre. The trail is ended. There is no more to be found. I am coming home. — L.

Four lines. Three hundred years. He read it over once. There was no fault in it, and no pulse either. He sealed it with candle-wax and set it on the corner of the desk for the morning post. He sat back in the chair, a free man, discharged, released, and could not remember what freedom had ever been for.

Against his heart, through the breast of his coat, he could feel little Thomas’s stone.

He did not take it out. He sat with his hand flat over it. Then he rose and packed his things.

CHAPTER 18

She is present even when the journal is closed. She remains when the lamp is put out. This is what it is to be in love. It claims every part of a man and does not ask permission.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

Gravel under the hooves, loud, then quieter. The trees passing, one and one and one. He would not look back. He had ordered it of himself before he rode out. He held to it, eyes front, hands quiet on the reins, while everything in his chest pulled backward. Then the horse slowed for a turn at the gates, and his head turned without permission.

The first hour belonged to the quest.

The road climbed a chalk shoulder and gave him twenty miles of England in one sweep. Farms, spires, the river shining. The old habit fired before he could stop it, a bee in a bottle as he thought of everything he had done to reach this point. Matteo’s secrets had died with him, and if there was a treasure trove, it was lost to time.

Then the road passed an inn with nets drying on a fence, ordinary brown river nets, and Lucy came up the beach at him with her cuffs pinned and her hands smelling of the sea, laughing.

That was the other wound. It did not wait its turn.

It used anything he saw. A woman in a garden in a plain straw bonnet. A chestnut mare. A milestone, because she had once read milestones aloud to him for an hour, inventing histories for every market town. The turnpike-keeper’s daughter had freckles. Lorenzo sat on the horse with his eyes shut while the toll was counted, breathing as if he were carrying a weight.

By five o’clock he could no longer separate the two. The dead quest and the living woman had run together. Every mile of English road took him farther from both. He would reach for Matteo but find her cold hand bidding him goodbye. He would reach for her laugh and find the crypt wall that had measured true and empty.