3. III
III
A Thorn Left To Fester
Tudela, Navarre in Northern Spain
Elizabeth held her skirts clear of a channel best left unnamed and stepped after her uncle into the wine market.
The smell of it met her at the corner—river mud and garlic and mule.
A cracked wall shed its plaster into the gutter.
A cart stood on a broken axle where it had been left to stand.
Three discharged soldiers slept in the shade of the convent gate, and the bells rang over them without waking one.
The war was over, England said. Tudela appeared to have received the intelligence and found nothing in it worth rising for.
A fortnight in Spain had already taught her that disarray was no cause for alarm, and that a woman who waited to understand every foreign sound before she moved would stand still until she starved.
So, she moved. Across the square, the petitioners crowded the tribunal steps with their bundles of paper tied in string, as though the proper combination of shouts and seals might persuade a government to remember its own decrees.
Her uncle was already bearing down upon Senor Mendizábal with the cheerful rapacity of a man who liked a trade the better for being told it could not be done.
“If he swears by the saints once more,” said Elizabeth, “I shall conclude the wine is poor. Nobody invokes all Paradise for a sound barrel. You ought to consider rejecting the lot of them.”
“On the contrary,” said her uncle, “the saints are nowhere so industrious as in a rising market.”
Mendizábal’s speech came too quickly for comfort, but too near Portuguese for complete despair.
What her ear missed, her boldness could seize, and what confusion clouded, laughter and good spirits managed to clarify.
Elizabeth asked, guessed, contradicted, and bridged one language to another until the bargain was struck.
Mr Gardiner secured six casks, and the promise of two more when transport could be had. Mendizábal secured enough money to restore his confidence in Providence. And Elizabeth had the fierce satisfaction of making herself useful in a way she had not been since Longbourn.
“You improve daily,” said Mr Gardiner, as they turned from the market toward the tribunal square. “At this rate, by Santander you will abuse me in three tongues and invoice me for the privilege.”
“I suspect I am mangling my verbs beyond recognition. Rosa would correct me without mercy.”
Rosa had been an indifferent linguist, but she had been exacting when it came to the pronunciation of her mother language.
Elizabeth had learnt to roll her tongue and speak with a rapid, lyrical quality, for Rosa would refuse to talk to her at all if she did not please the ear.
In Tudela, the language came back altered, roughened by Castilian mouths, yet more alive than it had ever sounded in Hertfordshire.
“Then to Rosa,” said Mr Gardiner, “I suspect I owe the fortune we are about to lay hands on. Come. We must make our attempt upon the tribunal before dinner, or we shall find our competition multiplied by tomorrow morning.”
The tribunal stood above the square with a dignity the square had long since ceased to respect.
Its yellow front bore the royal arms in stone above a cracked arch.
Men read notices they plainly could not understand.
A widow in black argued with a scribe over a fee and crossed herself each time she named the sum.
Two soldiers kept order, which consisted chiefly in leaning upon muskets until movement occurred and then shouting at it.
Mr Gardiner consulted a folded letter. “Herrera promised to meet me here. If he fails me, I shall put him down as one more nuisance in a country already too hot for my liking.”
“If he does come,” said Elizabeth, “he will be late, for my stomach is already complaining.”
He laughed. “Wait here, where you will not be jostled overmuch. If Herrera appears, I must catch him before some man with older papers and a sadder history carries him off.”
He disappeared into the crowd with the agility of a merchant who had spent half his life getting where richer men hoped to stand first. Elizabeth moved nearer the wall and gave herself up for a moment to the business of attending to everything at once.
One watched in a market such as this, or one was cheated. One listened, or one was lost.
That was when an English voice cut the square.
It was the finest King’s English, delivered with the cold authority of a man unaccustomed to being kept waiting, and therefore impossible in Tudela to mistake.
She turned before she could think of any reason why she should not.
A tall man stood halfway up the tribunal steps, hat in hand, his dark coat carrying London into a place that had no leisure for it.
Beside him, another Englishman, rougher in face and humbler in dress, was labouring to make a clerk understand what the gentleman plainly believed ought to have been obvious to any Christian government.
The clerk shrugged, answered at length, and spread his fingers over a docket as though the whole kingdom of Spain were unfortunately contained in that one sheet and could not be hurried on any account.
The gentleman answered too quickly for his interpreter, clearly agitated by the refusal, and declaring he would not stand for it.
“Sir,” said the other man in English, “if you please, one at a time.”
Another man in a stained travelling coat had come up hard against the table, papers already thrust out, and began his own case over the top of the exchange. He got three words into it before the tall Englishman turned and interrupted him.
“You, sir, will wait until I have done.”
The man in the coat came on anyway, papers first. “Senor, if you will only —”
The gentleman turned on him. “Wait!”
The word went off like a shot, and the turn that carried it brought him full into the light — the man with the papers falling back a step, the clerks stopped down the length of the table, the whole square gone still around the one word.
He did not follow it with another. He let the man feel every eye that had come round, and only when the papers had sunk did he take up his sentence again, to the clerk, from the exact word where the interruption had carried him off.
She knew that face. Something dropped through her, quick and cold, the way a stair gave way in the dark. Her breath caught on it, and she could not for her life have said why.
Fitzwilliam Darcy.
Hertfordshire rose with such indecorous force that Tudela, the clerks, the soldiers, the market, and the smell of mule leather went thin for a breath. Meryton came with it; the assembly room; her own younger self, too ready to make entertainment of offence.
None of those things had any right to be in Navarre. Yet there he was, as unmistakable in Spain as he had been in Hertfordshire, carrying height, reserve, and offended dignity into a square full of men who neither knew nor cared what Pemberley might be.
He had not altered so much as circumstances had altered around him.
The grave mouth was the same. So was the brow that, crossed, still took on an air of command injured by disobedience — the look of a man born to move through a world that made way for him.
This one did not. Tudela let him wait, put him under a clerk with ink on his cuffs and no English at all, and made him one more anxious gentleman with papers.
His interpreter said in Spanish, “My employer's claim was received three days ago. He has returned twice and been told only to come again.”
Elizabeth caught enough of the clerk’s reply. Treasury stamp. Regional authority. Not here. Perhaps Pamplona. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps after the present troubles. Always another office, another signature, another absent gentleman indispensable only because he could not be found.
“I do not ask him to discharge the claim this very day. I ask where the officer is to be found.”
The interpreter softened that into something for which the clerk might not call for his arrest. The clerk spread his hands. Nobody knew. Somebody else had the paper. The commissioner had gone north. The royal service had many demands.
Darcy turned from the table with a visible growl, the last of his patience spent… and stopped dead.
His gaze had gone out across the crowd without object, fixed on nothing, until something snagged and arrested the movement. His eyes caught on her and stayed.
His entire body locked. His interpreter was saying something, but Darcy seemed not to make sense of the words. He only stood, drawn up, arrested — a man who had steeled himself against every trial the square could offer, and met a shock he had not thought to guard against.
He knew her at once. She saw the composure flee and something else take its place. Not pleasure. Nothing so foolish. Yet perhaps it was flattering, after a fashion, that he should know her on the instant, after so long.
He did not bow. Neither did she. Between them stood one mule, two clerks, a widow in black, the interpreter, a boy carrying oranges, and two years and a half of silence.
Then the mule broke it. Something spooked it — a dropped shutter, a cur underfoot, she never saw what — and it flung sideways with a scream, scattering the boy’s oranges under a dozen feet and the boy after them, wailing; the widow’s basket went over; a clerk lunged for his papers and lost half of them to the wind; and the whole of the square broke at once into shouting and grabbing and the fury of men who had waited three hours and must now wait longer.
She moved while she still could. Not away from him in retreat — she would not give him that — but sideways, unhurried, as though the mule and not the man had decided her, turning her shoulder to the tribunal table and letting the crowd rise between them like a curtain rung down on a scene she had no wish to play out.
The same commotion that freed her fetched her uncle back.
He came against the current at a steady walk, calling her name before she saw him.
“Lizzy! There you are. I have found him.” At his shoulder walked Don Herrera, in a decent coat, who looked prepared to discuss warehouses, transport, and prices, provided no one asked his opinion on the king, the French, or his religion.
“Herrera says he will give us half an hour if I keep his glass full. I thought that a fair exchange. Come, keep me from accidentally insulting his ancestors or trading away more than I can fairly afford.”
She went, and for the next half-hour had no leisure for English ghosts.
Herrera had access to warehouse space by the river, knew which roads north still possessed bridges, and praised the owner of the vineyard that had produced the grapes with such passion that dishonesty might safely be assumed.
Mr Gardiner bargained, laughed, calculated, and drew out information with that air of frank enjoyment which made men underrate him until they found themselves bound to a price they had not meant to concede.
Elizabeth kept pace between them, one man’s Spanish going over into another man’s English across whatever improvised bridge she could throw up fast enough to bear the traffic.
Darcy stayed in her mind like a splinter left from an old fall.
An annoyance, but not a loathsome one. By the time Herrera had bowed himself away, and the bells rang the hour to a town that paid them no mind, she had settled on one sensible resolution.
She would not renew the acquaintance. He had no claim upon her history, and she had no appetite for his.
They walked back through streets too narrow for two carts to pass without violence.
“You lost half a sentence there with Herrera,” her uncle teased as they walked. “Tudela is teaching you humility.”
“Tudela is teaching me that merchants and pirates are in the same line of work.”
“No. That striking-looking fellow at the tribunal taught you something. You stood like a woman turned to salt, Lizzy. I saw you from across the square before ever I heard the mule.”
She stopped in the road. A mule train came on regardless of the lack of space, and she stepped from its path without looking where she stepped.
The heat filled her throat and flooded her face before she had any hope of dismissing it.
He had seen her. Not the mule, not the crowd — her, standing rooted, staring at a man across a market square like a girl at her first assembly.
“You were watching me?”
“I am always watching you. Your aunt would have my head otherwise.”
The heat in her cheeks would not go down. She turned her face to the road, to the mules, to anything with no name attached to it. “An English voice will catch the ear in a foreign square. It is a national weakness.”
“Ah. Then he is English. I had begun to suspect him a troublesome apparition, but you looked as though you might have recognised him.”
“I knew him slightly in Hertfordshire.”
“Slightly? Is he a merchant?”
“No.”
“A lawyer?”
“Much worse. A gentleman.”
Mr Gardiner laughed. “Poor man. Spain will use him cruelly.”
“It looks as though it already has.”
“He did seem rather put out about something. Was he disagreeable when you knew him?”
“Frequently.”
“You were forgiving, no doubt.”
“Never.”
“I would be disappointed if you had been.”
He looked at her sidelong with benevolent curiosity, but one of his chief merits lay in knowing when a relation preferred to keep her own counsel.
He let the subject go, and by the time they reached the lodging house, they had returned to wine, roads, and the perennial question of whether any muleteer in Navarre intended to honour his word after taking a deposit.
The house stood in a street so narrow that guests in opposite windows might almost have exchanged hats.
Foreigners went there because foreigners were tolerated there, and because the master had discovered that petitioners, traders, and displaced men with business before the authorities paid promptly if the stew were hot and the straw not quite alive.
Elizabeth spent the afternoon over her uncle's figures. By dusk, the room below had filled with the smell of cooking and the stable, and with men in a tired temper who had been cheated and robbed, by their own estimation, enough to make a bishop swear.