1. I
I
Opportunity
Gracechurch Street, London
Gracechurch Street, in the first softness of an April afternoon, wore its prosperity without elegance.
Trade passed under the windows all day with no regard for gentility, and the back parlour, warm from the oven and faintly scented with bread, had that air of use which belongs only to a house where comfort is made and not displayed.
Elizabeth sat upon the hearth-rug with her aunt’s youngest boy upon one knee, while Marianne Gardiner, aged six and inclined to tyranny, declared that the fortress constructed from account-books and sofa cushions could not possibly be defended unless Aunt Lizzy consented to perish in it.
“I have perished twice already,” said Elizabeth. “A third death would expose me to remark.”
“You smiled when you died.”
“Then I was not treated with proper solemnity. Edward, if you pull my ribbon out altogether, I shall be obliged to appear before your mother like a woman escaped from shipwreck.”
Edward, being four and attached to ruin for its own sake, gave the ribbon one last tug and then chose a more ambitious devastation. He climbed the rear wall of the fort, which promptly collapsed and woke Thomas, in the cradle near the fire.
Elizabeth rose and rescued Thomas before he could gather himself to howl.
He settled against her shoulder, warm through the lawn of his gown and smelling of milk and lavender.
Marianne was already rebuilding the fortress.
Edward explained to the room at large that the fall had been occasioned by artillery.
Mrs Gardiner laughed, then checked herself with a hand over her stomach, as laughing too much still punished her.
It was a room meant to be lived in and used hard, and no finer room had ever been half so comfortable.
She knew this room too well—the light on its carpet at every hour, the temper of the house when her uncle was expected late.
It was a fine thing, to know a house so nearly.
It was another to want one of her own, that she might have the disordering of it by right.
“You will spoil him,” said her aunt, watching Thomas submit to Elizabeth with disloyal contentment.
“He was spoiled before I touched him. I am only the instrument.”
“Then ruin him while you may. His nurse means to reclaim him within the hour, and she will chastise you justly for meddling in her ways.”
“Nurses and sovereign princes resemble one another in that point.”
Mrs Gardiner chuckled. This last lying in had left her paler and thinner than usual, but had done nothing to diminish the sweetness of her temper or the soundness of her judgement. “You have been too long in London,” she said. “You speak like a pamphlet.”
“Then send me away before I start attending salons like a bluestocking. I do not think I could look myself in the mirror afterwards.”
Mrs Gardiner laid aside the little gown she had been folding. “My dear Lizzy, if London has begun to oppress you, you need not hide it from me. Why not visit your mother? I daresay she would entertain you.”
Elizabeth scoffed. Oppress was not the word.
Gracechurch Street gave her kindness, employment, a clean chamber, and children who flung themselves upon her with all the tyranny of affection.
It also reminded her every morning, in a hundred gentle forms, that she was a relation received from love and not a woman placed in the world upon her own footing.
Since Longbourn had ceased to be hers, usefulness had been the best condition within reach.
She translated Portuguese letters in her uncle’s office.
She kept accounts neatly. She made herself easy to keep.
“Mama would have me married to a shopkeeper before a week was out. No, thank you. I am only dull,” she said. “Which is not a tragedy, unless one endures it too long.”
“You endure everything a little too long, Lizzy.”
“A cruel summary.”
“A true one.”
Before Elizabeth could improve upon that reply, the front door opened below with such force that Marianne flew to the parlour threshold crying, “Papa!” Edward followed in a collision of limbs and squeals.
A moment later, Mr Gardiner entered, carrying the street in upon him—the damp of it in his coat, the briskness of it in his manner, and a creeping mischief in his face which in some men meant folly, but in him commonly meant profit.
He kissed his wife as he passed her chair, submitted to Marianne’s demand for equal notice, caught Edward round the middle when the boy attempted to scale him, and then nodded toward Elizabeth.
“Cousin, niece, clerk, conspirator, and nursery despot — whichever office you hold at present, I require you, Elizabeth.”
“That sounds expensive.”
“It may make us very rich.”
He drew off his gloves, cast them on the table, and produced from his coat a packet of letters so thickly folded and sealed that the whole had the appearance of a campaign rather than a correspondence.
“Spain,” he said.
Mrs Gardiner looked up at once. “Spain?”
“At last, Spain. The Peninsula is open; the French are gone; every man in the City with a pipe in his imagination has his eye upon the old ports, and because they all stare one way, nobody troubles himself to look another. I have letters from Bilbao, from Cádiz, Santander, and” — he tapped the thickest seal with a finger still darkened by ink — “from Tudela.”
Mrs Gardiner twisted to gape at him. “Tudela? What is that?”
“Tudela, my love! Southern Navarre, on the Ebro. Wine, wool, iron, inland trade, and hardly a British merchant on the spot before the scramble begins in earnest. I should like best to get my hands on the wool, but Herrera is pressing me to buy the wine first. There is a well-travelled road just there that meets up with the Ebro River, and Herrera says wool and wine could be got wholesale just now. They only want the right man to organise their rescue upriver for export.”
He spread the letters before them, sorting as he spoke. “The great houses will go where every other great house goes. Madrid, Lisbon, Cádiz. A smaller man may gain ground elsewhere, if he goes quickly and chooses well.”
“How long?” asked Mrs Gardiner.
“We should be gone by the first week of May, if I can have the letters answered in time, and I mean to. Once landed, twelve weeks if all prospers — fourteen, if roads and officials prove stubborn. Home well before the leaves turn, either way.”
“Those are the very things that trouble me. What can you know of the roads?”
“I am told quite reliably that they are passable. Bad in places, of course, but used. The war is over. Trade has begun again. Petitioners travel, lawyers travel, officers on detached business travel. Wives go, too, where the object justifies the journey. It is not fashionable, perhaps, but neither is it wild. Had I any conviction of real danger, I should say nothing at all and stay in London nursing my disappointment.”
That answered more than the question itself. Mr Gardiner had enterprise enough to grow rich if luck favoured him, but not the sort that mistook rashness for spirit. He loved a speculation; he did not offer his household to it blindly.
“You cannot mean to go alone!” cried Mrs Gardiner.
“No.” He turned to Elizabeth. “I had settled that before I even set down from the carriage. Lizzy, I want you to come with me.”
Had anybody else spoken so, she would have taken it for play. From him, the notion raised alarm.
“Me?”
“You. You know my Portuguese correspondence better than any clerk in the house. What Spanish you lack, you will mend faster upon the road than any fellow I might hire for wages and lose to drink at the first posting inn. Portuguese will carry us farther than most men suppose. Besides, you have been dying of good behaviour these six months, and I have no wish to leave you in London to become a model of female patience. You would be useful to me, and the journey may do you more service than the spring assemblies.”
“Am I invited as a companion or smuggled out to spare Aunt’s nerves?”
“As salvation to my ledgers.”
She laughed; then the laugh died in her throat almost as soon as it came. Spain. Roads. Inns.
Names Rosa had spoken in the back passages at Longbourn, when Elizabeth was small enough to sit on a flour barrel and believe every one of them a place out of a fairy tale.
Rosa had come from a country she fled as a young widow and never ceased to grieve, and she had taught the language in scraps, between tasks, glancing at the door, as though a person might hand a language on quickly, while there was still someone to take it.
It had been a useless accomplishment for years.
It was, now, the one thing Elizabeth owned that could be turned to account.
Mrs Gardiner frowned. “Ledgers are all very well, Edward, but you talk of taking a young woman somewhere possibly quite dangerous. Usefulness is not the whole matter.”
“No,” said Mr Gardiner, instantly sober.
“Which is why I have made inquiries before speaking. There will be letters of introduction. We shall travel where other English travellers lodge, take decent arrangements, and have no taste for heroics. Tudela is not the front. It is a town reopening itself to trade. And we go as British subjects into a country Britain has but lately bled to deliver. There is a consul at the coast and the Navy in her ports; an Englishman in difficulty there would not find himself without friends. If the reports before me implied otherwise, I would not carry Lizzy a mile beyond Hounslow.”
“Men often say a place is safe when they mean only that another man has not yet been killed there.”
“Very unjust, my dear. It is not at all imprudent. Many are travelling the very route I propose without inviting ruin.”
“And you believe it proper?” asked Elizabeth. “Proper enough, I mean, that you would answer to my mother for bringing me?”
“I do.”
Mrs Gardiner remained quiet a little while.
Then she said, “I cannot say what your mother might find decent, Elizabeth, but as a mother myself, I would not consent to it if I thought you were to be carried through a country still in flames. I have no relish for such courage in people who belong to me. But your uncle is right in one point at least: there are journeys a lady may make when the arrangements are decent and the purpose substantial. Uncommon, perhaps, but not disgraceful.”
Thomas stirred. Elizabeth bent and placed him back in the cradle before her arms betrayed how tightly they had drawn around him.
Gracechurch Street, with its useful rooms and kindly suffocation, had grown all at once too small to contain her. She had not known, until the door opened upon Spain, how nearly she had come to fearing her present life a permanent one.
“What would I be doing?” she asked, to gain a little time.
“I would have you translate, observe, keep me from trusting a rogue with eloquent manners, and prevent my agent from representing a vineyard as Paradise.”
She chuckled. “I had not known my value lay so high.”
“It rises every moment.”
Marianne tugged at Elizabeth’s skirt. “Will there be castles?”
“Undoubtedly, my pet,” said Mr Gardiner. “And mountains, mules, churches, and men who speak too fast for your cousin Lizzy to despise them properly.”
Elizabeth crossed her arms. “I never despise anybody improperly.”
“Then come to Spain and prove it abroad.”
Mrs Gardiner gave a short breath that was half resignation and half smile. “If she goes, she writes often.”
“If the roads contain ink, I shall write.”
“You shall write whether they contain ink or not. Your uncle will find some.”
“He had better, since he now proposes to risk his fortunes upon me.”
Mr Gardiner’s expression changed. Beneath all the pleasantry lay real hope—not only for profit, but for her. “Well, Lizzy?”
She meant to say she would think on it. That would have been the sensible thing, and the sensible thing was on her tongue, and what came out instead was —
“Yes.”
Marianne clapped. Edward demanded whether there were soldiers. Mr Gardiner laughed outright. Mrs Gardiner held out her hand; Elizabeth crossed to her and took it between both her own.
“Go, then,” said her aunt. “Be useful to him, since usefulness is the argument by which he means to carry us all. Be diverted too, if diversion offers. Only come back to me whole. Both of you.”
Across the room, her uncle had Edward under one arm again and was informing Marianne that Spanish girls, if they were wise, went to bed at proper hours and never laid siege to respectable furniture.
The kettle sang. The cradle rocked. Outside, Gracechurch Street pursued its noisy commerce as if nothing of consequence had occurred.
She was going to Spain.
The knowledge sent fresh air deep into her lungs like the abrupt recovery of a horizon. Whatever waited there — dust, fatigue, error, disappointment, profit — would at least belong to motion. Fortune, if it meant to refuse her, must do so in the open, and not from the corner of a borrowed parlour.
“Well,” said Mrs Gardiner, taking up her needle again, “if Spain is to have you, the least we may do is mend your grey merino travelling gown before you set off to astonish it.”