5. V
V
Her Laugh
Aman might walk half of Navarre in hopes of escaping a laugh and find it waiting for him at the next turning.
Darcy crossed the broken street below the lodging house with his hat in his hand and the night air doing him no service at all.
Tudela after dusk was a hive of biting insects, which Darcy tried to fan away from his face with his hat.
It had been an unusually hot, humid season, so he was assured, so what might have been a pleasant evening last week had this week scarcely dipped below the daytime swelter that left his collar limp and his brow damp.
Gentlemen ought not wear waistcoats in the summer, he thought sourly, or at least might do away with the cravats.
None of his discomfort broke the tyranny of that one remembered note from the inn. Elizabeth Bennet had laughed within fifty yards of him, and another man had answered.
She was married. He was as good as pledged elsewhere.
No honourable action existed on either side of those facts.
Nothing in Tudela — not treasury stamps nor corrupt clerks nor the whole mouldering apparatus of Ferdinand’s government — had altered the condition under which she belonged to another man, and he had no business wanting even the sound of her voice.
He turned without thinking of where he was walking and came into a square where the French had left a church front gashed by shot.
A dog slept beneath the basin, scratching occasionally at his fleas, but did not trouble himself to bark at the intruder.
Darcy stopped and flipped his hat over in his hands twice, then set it decisively back on his head.
Mrs Collins.
He had said the words to himself so often that they ought to have lost force.
Instead, they gathered it. Another man held the rights of habit, of nearness, of lawful claim — received her laughter in private rooms, crossed a supper table to her nightly, possessed by law what Darcy had not been permitted even to want.
And the last turn of the screw was that any man found useful by his aunt could not have been clever enough to know what he held.
Her quickness, which had once left every remark of Darcy’s own examined and found wanting, would be spent on a husband who took it for pleasantness and never saw the blade in it.
Collins.
The name was intolerable, though it had no right to be.
He had seen almost nothing — a shoulder in the square, a masculine outline across candlelight when their shapes passed his door in the hall and he had glanced out to see their backs.
Out of that, his jealousy had built an impression of the man, and it likely did the real Collins no justice at all.
Husband to Elizabeth Bennet, he had been given two years to alter beyond Lady Catherine’s prescription, and a wife whose society might, by miracle or punishment, have improved him into something less insufferable.
That thought came near enough to laughter that Darcy despised himself for it.
He took off his hat to fan his face again and walked on.
It was worse because she had looked well.
Travel had touched her, certainly. The Spanish sun had browned her more deeply than any English summer could have done, and hard use had put a kind of capability into her carriage which could belong neither to Meryton nor to any drawing room in Kent.
Yet, she had looked alive in a country which ought by every reason to have worn every English comfort out of her.
If Lady Honoria came to his mind then, as duty rather than wish had lately obliged her to, the comparison was not to her credit.
She was amiable, handsome, and attached to him by all the threads a family calls prudent.
She laughed sometimes, though never as Elizabeth Bennet laughed.
The comparison was unfair, and he made it anyway.
Honoria's cheerfulness belonged to safe drawing rooms. Elizabeth's laugh had gone through a Spanish inn like light through a crack in the wall.
He halted beneath a wall patched with newer stone over older violence and shut his jaw against the direction of his own mind.
This would not do. He had spent two years and a great deal of dignity persuading himself he was cured, and one afternoon in a wine market had shown him the sum of that labour: he stood in a foreign town begrudging a woman her marriage and playing false, in thought, to a lady who had said that she would wait for him, and would trust him with her hand.
There was a word for that, and it was not fortitude.
He returned to the lodging house no wiser than he had left it.
It was dreadfully fitting that she would be lodging under the same roof. Practical, of course. He had seen no other inn worth the name, and English travellers would all be directed to the same place willing to provide beef and tea for a king’s ransom.
Then, from beyond the turn of the corridor, he heard her voice.
He had not heard it in two and a half years. He would have known it through a wall twice that thickness, and his frame arrested in the passage like a horse brought up on the bit.
She was saying something — the words came through the boards as sound only, unshaped — and then a man’s voice answered her with what sounded like gaiety in his tones, and Darcy’s hand closed on the rail.
The third door past the turn. He marked it, and stood there some while afterward, listening to nothing at all and unable to persuade himself to go to bed. Hang it all, she was another man’s wife! He had no business lurking outside.
At last, he went to his own room, shut the door, and found that exhaustion had made no promises about sleep.
He sat. Rose. Opened the valise and shut it.
Pulled the cravat loose and left it hanging.
The papers lay on the table, folded and sealed and useless.
The Spanish swam in front of him. Docket marks.
Instructions to present himself tomorrow, or yesterday, or before the world was made.
Without Jennings, he could not read a word of it.
The whole kingdom might as well have written to him in birdsong.
He ought to have been thinking of that. Instead, the only picture his mind would reliably produce was the image of Elizabeth Bennet taking her hair down before her vanity, half in candlelight, laughing with another man.
What precisely had he supposed would happen if chance ever threw them together again? That marriage would have dimmed her into ordinary contentment? That Collins — Collins of all men — could have made her commonplace? Vanity had entered at the beginning, and vanity remained.
Toward dawn, when even misery grew tired of its own company, he gave over the pretence of sleep and opened the shutter a hand’s breadth.
The town beyond lay colourless and cold, the roofs ash-grey, the church tower sparkling like bone by first light.
Somewhere below, a cart started. Somewhere nearer, a woman called for water.
Morning came with the same indifference as the river.
So be it. Day would bring clerks, officials, delay, and labour fit for a sane man.
He would conduct himself as one. He would find Jennings, recover the line of the treasury business, learn where the missing stamp might be had, and keep himself as far from the Collinses as the dimensions of Tudela allowed.
It was an excellent plan.
It had the grave defect of requiring Elizabeth, Tudela, and his own mind to cooperate.
“The offices open at nine, sir. The clerk we want keeps his desk until eleven and dines after. I will go at nine and put the matter to him as I put it yesterday.”
“The offices open at nine,” Darcy repeated. “In this country, that is not an hour but a rumour. They opened at nine yesterday, by which the porter meant something nearer half past ten, and only then to inform us the man we wanted had gone to his brother’s christening.”
“His cousin’s, sir.”
“I stand corrected. It makes all the difference.” He did not rise.
There was no profit in presenting himself at a door that would not admit him before ten, and every reason to let Jennings go ahead and break the ground — so he told himself, and did not examine how readily the reasoning had arrived, nor that it kept him above stairs while the common room below was in use.
“He refused us yesterday,” he added.
“He did, sir. But a thing refused once is not always refused twice.”
It was, in Darcy’s experience, refused rather more dependably the second time, but he did not bother reporting that.
“There was an English party breaking their fast below, not half an hour ago,” he went on.
“A merchant and a lady, come from London, by the talk. I have seen the man twice with Herrera, the wine factor, and the alcalde’s clerk took his paper without leaving him to stand in the road.
Where we are told to come back tomorrow, this merchant is asked to dinner. ”
“Not a merchant. A gentleman, Jennings. Whatever his errand, he is no tradesman.”
Why it should matter, he could not have said, only that it did, and out of all proportion.
A clergyman with a living in Kent, a Bennet wife, and a Longbourn inheritance did not turn wine-dealer in Navarre.
If the man was abroad at all, he was abroad as Darcy was — on some business with this government, and the better received for being nobody to whom it owed money.
Beneath that ran a colder notion — that Lady Catherine, who never let a useful man sit idle, might have dispatched her parson to Spain herself, with some grievance of her own to press before this government.
The idea would not survive a moment’s scrutiny.
He kept it regardless. It gave the resentment somewhere to stand.
“Gentleman or merchant, sir, his door opens, and ours stays shut. And the lady does his asking in the shops. I make myself understood here; she makes herself welcome, which is worth a good deal more in this country.”
Darcy raised his head. “The lady has the language?”
“Better than I speak for you, sir.”
That was precisely the wrong detail. Darcy had a sudden rush of memory, images, a voice that had left all too familiar of an impression on his mind.
Not once had he ever heard her mention Spanish among her accomplishments.
But then, if memory served, she was not the lady trying to boast of her accomplishments back when he knew her.
“If our own door stays shut,” Jennings finished, “perhaps theirs might be borrowed. You might consider introducing yourself, sir.”
“We will borrow nothing. My claim stands on its own.”
“As you say, sir.” Jennings took up his hat.
“I pray your Spanish is equal to it. Mine would start a war between Navarre and Derbyshire.”
“Yes, sir. Your Spanish is not reliable.” He said it as another man might remark that it looked like rain, and let himself out.
The laugh came once more through the wall. Darcy took up his coat and quitted the inn rather than be required to hear it a third time.
He had been walking long enough to become uncertain whether the town had altered under him or whether it was only his own senses that had gone awry.
Carts wedged in the narrow streets, children bolting under wheels that ought to have killed them, a cooper somewhere hammering at a hoop.
He had bought a cup of wine from a stall where the seller looked too bored to cheat him, drunk it, walked, and bought another.
Neither had done anything for him but make him more willing to be miserable in public.
The morning’s business had gone as the last had gone.
The clerk was not at his desk; the clerk would return within the hour; the hour had come and the clerk had not; and when at length some under-official consented to receive them, it was to explain that the matter could not proceed without the stamp, and the stamp could not be had in Tudela, and he was desolated beyond expression.
The ill-judged oath he had flung at Jennings was still in his mouth, sour as the wine.
He had not even the excuse of meaning it.
Spain had failed them and Jennings had been standing there, not at fault, holding the useless papers, and Darcy had turned his epithets on the nearest face because it was the only one that would not answer back.
And then, sooner than unsay it, had told the man to go back alone.
Now, the wine sat poorly on an empty stomach.
It had not rendered him insensible. It had merely loosened the order of his thoughts and left his disgust with himself more candid than before.
Pride, jealousy, exhaustion, old shame, the new sharp misery of seeing her, near enough to breathe through the wall — all had gone walking with him, and none had grown quieter for the exercise.
If he had possessed the smallest remnant of wisdom, he would have gone back and made his peace with Jennings. A man who intended to repair his fortunes ought not to be found straying half-drunk through Navarre because a woman had laughed too near him.
Instead, he had crossed the square, and then another, and gone down toward the river.
He stood a while, watching the Ebro tumble past the broken stone.
Then he went on again. Bought yet another cup of wine somewhere.
And somewhere between one street and the next, he began to hate not just his circumstances, but the whole wretched snarl of his life.
Lady Honoria. Pemberley. Georgiana's portion.
Money he did not have. Spanish delay. Lady Catherine and her certainties.
And Elizabeth in the next room, married and unattainable, and still apparently capable of reducing him to idiocy without once addressing him.
He came round into the inn’s street still arguing his life over in his head, and the argument stopped in his mouth.
People were crowding at the door—a carter reined in to gape, neighbours pressed close and talking over one another, the landlady on the step with her hands going and nothing sensible coming out of her, and above her a shutter wrenched half off its hinge and hanging into the air.
He was across the street before he knew he had moved.
He stopped dead.
For one fraction of a second, his mind produced Jennings, papers, money, his own trunk, the treasury documents. Then something lower and swifter than thought seized hold of him.
Elizabeth!