Page 75 of The Beloved Escapade

Lucy Carroway wiped her face once with the heel of her hand, hard, pretending to herself those were not tears of a broken heart.

“Well then,” she said to the dark.

And she took up her candle and went out to get a lantern.

CHAPTER 19

Every stroke was a way of keeping her. The curve of her hip. The weight of her breast in the light. The soft place under her arm where the shadow gathers. I worked until the light failed and still it was not enough.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

The knocking started while Lucy was still in the passage from the kitchens. It stopped her cold. Lantern in one hand. Her heart slammed straight up into her throat.

Past one in the morning. Rain had set in since midnight. She could hear it now that she was listening, a soft rush against the passage window. Under it, the knocker on the great front door again. Three strikes. Urgent.

Every wolf her uncle had ever warned her of howled in the dark of her mind. Soft questions, he had said. Lawyers’ clothes. It may never come. But lawyers did not come at one in the morning. Nothing good did. Lucy stood in her own passage with the lantern-light shaking up the walls, a lone woman awake in a great house, the servants asleep.

Then the voice came through the door.

“Lucia.”

The lantern nearly left her hand as her heart resumed beating.

She crossed the hall with no memory of the floor under her feet. The bolts fought her, top and bottom. Her fingers had gone clumsy. The great door swung in on the rain and the night. There on her steps, in the spill of her lantern, stood Lorenzo di Bianchi.

He was wrecked. That was the first whole thought that landed. Wet air gusted in against her skirts. Hatless. Soaked through. His greatcoat black with rain and steaming faintly in the lantern-light. Boots and breeches, mud to the knee. Hair plastered and dripping into his collar. Behind him at the foot of the steps, a horse stood blowing with its head down, ruining the border of pinks like it had earned the right.

He had ridden through the night. Through spring rain on roads he barely knew in the dark. He stood on her top step breathing hard, as if he had run beside the horse half the way. Water ran down his face.

His eyes were lit. Like lamps carried up through a dark house. She had not seen them lit in a se’nnight.

“I have a speech,” said Lorenzo.

Lucy’s hand tightened on the lantern ring, and she did her best to keep her imagination from running wild.

“I composed it between the fourth milestone and the ninth, and it was very fine, and I have lost every word of it except the true ones, so you will have those, standing here, in the rain, which is fitting, because I have earned the rain.”

He dragged a wet hand down his face. It did nothing. He left the water worse and did not care. The words began to tumble out of him as they always did when the Italian in him broke loose, hands already starting to move.

“Ti amo. I love you.”

The rain fell. The lantern hissed where a drop found the glass. Lucy felt the sound in her chest, and she thought perhaps she might be dreaming. Dreaming the dreams of a desperate woman. Either that or she was ready for Bedlam, imagining Lorenzo.

“That is the whole of the speech, Lucia. Everything else is footnotes. Ti amo. I love you. I have loved you, I think, since you served me tea and peppered me with questions, sincere in your eagerness, and I have spent an entire month refusing to know it, because I am a coward with a very expensive education. And this morning, I let you hand me my freedom, and I bowed over your hand … your cold hand, Lucia, l’ho sentita, I felt how cold it was, and I refused to acknowledge it because my cowardice needed it to be meaningless, and I rode away and I could not read one word of Matteo’s journal, because every page had your face on it. So …” He spread his hands palm up. Rain pooled in them. He was laying his whole heart out for her to see. “I got a fresh horse.”

“Lorenzo—”

“Wait. Please. Or I will lose my nerve, and I have only just found where it was kept.”

He came up the last step. Close enough now that the cold of the rain off him touched her skin. His voice dropped and roughened, the Italian cadence thickening. “I have not found Matteo’s work. I may never find it. I want you to hear me say it clearly that I am not at peace with that. I will not stand here and lie to you that the wound is closed. It is not closed; it aches tonight, and it will ache for years. But Lucia. Lucia, I have spent my life learning one single skill. To know a masterpiece when I am standing in front of one. To attribute correctly. And tonight, on that black road, I finally attributed my own life.”

His wet hands closed carefully around the sides of the lantern, and around her hand that held it. They held the light between them. She felt the cold of his fingers and the heat under it.

“The old masters, maybe I have lost them. But the masterpiece I found in an old house in May. Sei tu. It is you. It was always you. Genuine. First rank. Worth more than every crypt in Europe put together. And I am the biggest fool of my whole family, because I had it in my arms and I tried to put it away in an attic so I could go and grieve in peace.”

The rain ran off the eaves. The horse munched on the pinks. Lucy’s pulse beat against the metal of the lantern ring.