Nothing Saved
XXXI
The office had not improved in four days. The same heat, the same flies, the same clerk with ink to the second knuckle, the same heaped and roped paper going quietly to rot in the room beyond.
What had changed was inside Darcy's own skull, where a headache sat behind his eyes like a meaner version of himself and would not be reasoned with.
Elizabeth stood a careful half-pace to his left.
Not a single unnecessary word had passed between them since dawn.
He had gone downstairs and taken a pot of something flavourless and cold out to the stables, where he ate beside the mules.
He had no idea if Elizabeth had eaten, but there was a dullness in her eyes and a sharpness in her manner that could have been explained by a headache, or an empty stomach, or simply by being forced to breathe the same air as him.
He did not ask, did not touch her, had not even held the door to the office for her because her skirt would have to brush his trousers.
When the clerk finally looked up, Elizabeth’s voice was courteous, but utterly devoid of hope or expression.
It was as if she had decided to be disappointed in advance, and he could well imagine why.
A disappointment meant a longer delay, more conversation, and perhaps another blind chase to some other Spanish town.
Another week, another month in his company, and after declaring so hotly this morning that she wanted nothing more to do with him, she would wish to make good on that desire as soon as possible.
Every time his eyes went to her, the night came rushing back, and he could not cherish the night without abhorring the morning.
He would have to teach himself to put a bar and bolt on that door and pretend, as she did, that the night had never happened.
He certainly could not afford for his eyes to cloud or his throat to close up in a public office, with his head splitting and his temper worn through.
So, he watched the clerk, who was not worth looking at, and tried to fool himself into thinking Elizabeth noticed his efforts.
The clerk left his desk and went to a counter behind him, then returned with something in his hand.
“Is that…?” Darcy asked.
She turned to him, and some of the resentment, some of the wall she had bricked up between them, faded for an instant. “Your bond. He found it — the junta’s own records.”
The words made no sense at once. “He… he found it? In that pile?”
“He says he paid two boys to sort through a stack of papers for three days. He wishes you to check the name and signatures, but he declares it is the very paper you seek. And he is hoping you find the effort worthy of your gratitude, which, I assume, means he thinks you will pay him handsomely.”
The clerk slid the paper across the counter, and Darcy caught it with his fingertips. He was still staring at it in disbelief when the clerk said more to Elizabeth.
“He says they found it yesterday evening in a bundle the French had shelved under the wrong year, mixed with troop requisitions and the junta’s ledgers and the general’s household receipts.”
Darcy was still blinking at the page. It seemed hardly credible. “This… this no ledger entry. This is his half of the loan agreement! The receipt of the money, naming my father, the sum, and the undertaking to repay!”
Elizabeth was gazing at him as if she had known that all along, and had assumed he did, too. “Well, yes. That was what I asked them to find.”
“But this… I thought this had been burned, or carried off. I do not think you understand, nobody acquires this. It is far beyond what might have been… Are you sure? How can we know it is not some forgery to make me part with more silver?”
“I never gave him the name George Darcy. I only gave him the surname, and he could not have invented the terms. Compare them to your loan schedule, and I think you will find they match.”
There was no need to consult the loan schedule. He knew it by heart, knew the numbers and terms, the name of the junta, the original date of signing… it was all there.
“He says the seals are whole,” Elizabeth added. “He even verified that they are the correct ones.”
It was real. The notary's mark, the countersign, the junta’s own stamp bitten deep into the paper, the phrases he could not read but had heard read to him in three towns as the thing that did not exist because the French had burned it.
Yet, here it was. Not burned, just stolen, and forgot, and shelved wrong, and here it was, on a table under his fingertips with a fly buzzing around it.
“Then we have it,” he murmured, still so much in awe that he had no recollection of whether he was repeating himself. “Better even than the case file Jennings stole. This is the document the case file was meant to prove.”
“Which is worth precisely what the man who receives it decides it is worth. And no office in this town can decide anything.”
“They will not let me just take this, though. A copy at best. What can we do with it?”
“We put it where it cannot be lost again, and we make certain it goes to the one man who can act on it before the year is out.” She turned back to the clerk.
The clerk shook his head immediately when she started asking more questions.
Her speech had sped up, the fire back in her voice and half a spark returned to her eye as she bartered, haggled, possibly threatened and probably lied.
Bit by bit, she appeared to wear him down, as the clerk started shaking his head less and glancing towards Darcy more.
Elizabeth's courtesy had quickened into boldness.
She was not asking any longer. She was informing the clerk what he was to do and how quickly he was to do it.
And finally, after naming commissioners and officials, she gave instructions concerning a name that straightened the clerk's spine — Captain Ferrers, the liaison officer, the Englishman with the strings to pull at home.
The man who had told them, kindly, that everything they had done and meant to do was not only futile but foolish.
Finally, the clerk reached for his pen, drew out a fresh sheet of paper, and began scratching ink over the surface.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting it out of his hands before he forgets it exists.” She did not stop watching the man write.
“A certified original in a drawer in Vitoria is liable to burn in the next fire, or be shelved under the wrong year or confused with the wine merchant list. It cannot be lost again. So, I have told him it must be entered into the record as received, sealed, and forwarded under his hand to the British liaison, who has standing to carry it home. I have made it his responsibility. His name is on it now. If it goes missing, it goes missing from his desk, and a British officer will ask him why.”
“And he agreed to that?”
“He agreed to that because I told him we are friends with the liaison officer ourselves, a man in authority who will want to know who was helpful to his countrymen. Which is true. And because I frightened him a little, which is also true, and cheaper.” She drew a shaky breath as her hands tapped nervously on the counter.
“It is the best I can do. It is probably not enough.”
“It sounds a great deal like enough. The thing exists. It is certified. It is going to the man who can press it —”
“It is going into a channel, Fitzwilliam.” She turned on him then, and it was the first full look she had given him all day.
“Do you understand what a channel is? It is a slow river with a great many places to sink. It goes first to Ferrers, because Ferrers has the connections and the resources to put this into diplomatic hands and send it upstream from us.”
“Do we not still need to pass this through the commissioner’s hands?”
“No, because this is the original. No commissioner has the power authenticate or deny it.
But you are a British subject with a debt the Spanish crown has sworn it does not owe.
You may stand in Madrid until you rot, waving that seal, and no Spanish court will force its own king to honour a thing he has disavowed.
A subject cannot compel a crown. But a government can compel another government.
So the proof must reach a man at the Foreign Office, and he must decide your debt is worth England's trouble, and take it up as England's business — one kingdom telling another that it expects the debts owed to its people to be paid. And if he does that — if he leans on Madrid, and keeps leaning, until refusing costs Spain more in favour and standing than the money ever would — then Madrid pays. But only because London made it dearer to refuse than to yield.”
His heart was kicking randomly — in one instant, awed and awash in gratitude that an interminable wall had been suddenly removed from his path, and in the next, mortified that she was the one to whom he owed his salvation.
“I have it from… from an authority connected to the Foreign Office that London does, indeed, take these matters seriously. Elizabeth, you… you may have saved —”
“I have saved nothing. Not half of it will take place before the day your mortgage falls due.
I did all that could be done, but it is not fast enough, and it was never going to be, not even if you had found this two and a half months ago when you first came to Spain.
I knew it before I opened my mouth, and I did it anyway, because the alternative was to leave the only proof of your father's loan rotting in that room.”
Cold washed through him again, and it mingled with the sick twisting of his stomach whenever she refused to look at him. “Then… I am still ruined.”
She glanced up at him, but only briefly, and her eyes fell away as her lips thinned into some approximation of a smile. “Not if you hurry home and make yourself son-in-law to Lord Marchwood in time to appease your bank. All need not be lost.”
Getting out of Vitoria took the rest of the morning and most of what remained of Elizabeth’s patience.