Page 78 of The Beloved Escapade

His arm tightened around her. His voice dropped, went suddenly younger.

“And the workshop. My father’s workshop, that smells of pigment and stone dust and history. I posted him a letter this morning, four lines, the worst four lines I ever wrote, the trail is ended, I am coming home, and Lucia, we will outrun it. We will be in Florence before the mail. I will pay any courier on the Continent to lose that letter in a ditch, and I will walk into the workshop with you on my arm and I will say, Papa, I found treasure. And then I will watch his face while he looks at you, and I will say … I brought it home.”

Lucy lay in the wreck of everything she had thought this day would be. Listening to Italy pour out of the man under her cheek. Plans and colors and his father’s face. She felt happiness of a kind she had no previous entry for. Vast and noisy and slightly sore. Her eyes drifted, heavy, gold-washed, across the sleeping library.

And found, beyond the reach of the firelight, in the deep shadow of the far shelves, standing ajar into blackness, the shelf-door.

Memory detonated.

Lucy sat bolt upright out of the ecstatic heap so fast that Lorenzo made a sound as if he had been shot. She paid it no mind at all. The whole night before the knocking came flooding back in one wave. The candle. The skirting. The little worn sword in its ring. The clunk in the bones of the house. The cold breath out of the black seam.

She had walked away from it to fetch a lantern, and a man had knocked and the world had ended and begun, and she had forgotten. She had forgotten. The discovery of the age had gone clean out of her head because the boat on the river had come back for her. And … Faith!

“Lucia?” He was up on one elbow, hair wrecked, alarm arriving through the wreckage of bliss. “What⁠—”

“The wall.”

Her voice came out strange to her own ears, high and bright. She was already up, snatching for clothing, seizing his shirt because it was nearest and hauling it over her head, wrestling her arms through his sleeves.

“Lorenzo. Before you came. Tonight, past midnight, in the secret room, I dropped a page, and I went down after it with the candle, and the skirting, the baseboards, and there was a hollow, worn down to a breath, worn by fingers, Lorenzo, centuries of fingers, the sigil. The same one. The sword in the ring, the one that opens the shelf.”

She was pulling him up now with both hands. He was rising, half-dressed, wholly bewildered, only beginning to hear her.

“I pressed it. And the wall opened. Behind the desk, a seam cracked wide, and there is cold air coming up out of it, cave air, old air, and stairs, I think, going down, and that is why I had the lantern. I was fetching the lantern when you knocked, and then you were on my steps in the rain saying the only words in the world that could have made me forget it, and I forgot it, I forgot it, and⁠—”

She stopped. His face had gone somewhere she had only seen it go once before.

Every drop of the languor was gone out of it. He stood half into his breeches in the dying firelight with his lips parted and his eyes blazing black. His voice, when it came, came out on almost no breath at all.

“Where the stone was born,” said Lorenzo, “there is the door.”

“There is a door,” said Lucy. “There is a door, amore, under this house, under our feet, it was here the whole time, and I do not know what is at the bottom of it, but I know what might be.”

The last wild thought went through her like a rocket going up. The thought that had her bare feet already turning. The thought she would examine for accuracy some other year. That she might yet do it after all. That she might yet walk down into the dark of her own house and put Excalibur into this man’s two hands.

She seized the lantern off the floor.

“Come and see,” said Lucy Carroway, and she went flying back across her own library, lantern held high, trailing lamplight and the tails of his shirt. The man she loved was three steps behind her and gaining. The shelf-door swung wide under her hand. Beyond it, in the little room, the black seam stood waiting where she had left it, breathing its cold breath into the secret room. Patient.

The dark below breathed out to meet them as they swung the door open.

CHAPTER 20

I have finished. The words feel strange in my mouth.

From the personal journal of Matteo di Bianchi

* * *

They had dressed in something under two minutes, in a wild disorder of flung garments that would have sent Bessy to her bed for a week, and went back into the little room together, and stood in front of the wall.

The seam had waited. Of course it had. It had waited three hundred years. Another hour was nothing to it. The black line ran floor to ceiling where the paneling had leaned away from itself, and the cold breath still came through it, patient, mineral, old. Lorenzo put his fingertips to the edge of the opening the way he touched everything that mattered, lightly, listening through his skin.

“Counterweighted,” he breathed. “Dio. Feel it, Lucia, it wants to move, it has been kept wanting to move, somebody greased this within—” He stopped. His eyes came round to hers, black and blazing in the lantern-light. “Within living memory. This door has been used.”

“Centuries of fingers,” said Lucy. “I told you. The sigil is worn like a saint’s foot. Captain Belafonte never had the chance to tell my uncle about it. It is likely he planned to.”

“Then we are expected,” said Lorenzo, in a voice she would remember all her life, and set his shoulder to the wall, and pushed.