7. VII
VII
The Bottom Falls Out
The common room was a shattered ruin. Chairs were overturned.
A bottle was smashed by the hearth and drooling all over the boards.
One shutter swung on a damaged hinge while the other looked like it had been splintered by a blow.
There was paper scattered near the door, and more of it strewn on toward the passage, as though a man had run with his arms full and lost what he could not hold.
Darcy picked up the nearest sheet, and the blood drained from his face into his stomach. It was… egad, it was a copy of the loan schedule, in Jennings’s hand. These were his papers. It was rumpled, with dirt smeared across the bottom by somebody’s heel.
“Jennings!”
There was no answer. Overhead, a door slammed, and somewhere below stairs, a woman was crying, but he did not hear a single masculine voice in the house.
He turned toward the stairs, then back toward the kitchen passage. Nobody was stirring. He rushed toward the front door again in the stupid violence of a man with too many fears at once and no order for any of them.
Where was Elizabeth?
His eyes went over the room — marks on the floor, a dropped kerchief, boot prints in flour near the passage.
His heart was thundering as if he truly had been there, been the one to see her dragged off, and he despised it.
This was absurd. She was Collins’s wife.
Whatever had happened in this house could be nothing to him.
He had a servant to find and a claim to save, and no business standing in a wrecked room listening for a woman’s step.
Then, somewhere back in the passage, a latch clicked.
He turned toward it. Whoever came through that door might be the landlady, or the girl who had been crying, or a soldier who had stayed behind, or Jennings. He stumbled three strides toward the passage before he even knew he was moving.
A figure resolved in the dim. A servant, by the cap, and there was flour down one sleeve, and her hand rested on the latch behind her as though she had shut something in there she meant to keep shut.
Then she came into the light of the broken shutter.
Every part of the morning scattered from his mind at once — Jennings, the papers, the money, the mortgage, Spain — and what was left was only that Elizabeth was standing there, on her feet, with her hair dragged half out from under the cap and the strings of it printed red across her throat. Filthy, upright, alive.
She checked at the sight of him.
The relief came so hard it passed for pain, and the name rose with it — Elizabeth!
— he bit it back, because he had no right to it.
Mrs Collins he would not say; his whole being refused the shape of it.
So, he stood a few feet from a woman he had not spoken to since Hertfordshire, with no name he was permitted to use and no notion how to begin.
“Are you hurt?” It was the one thing he could ask without a name.
“No.”
That should have reassured him. It did not.
“What happened?”
“They have taken my uncle.” Her voice was not her own; it came out flat and rapid, as though she were reciting an inventory.
“Soldiers came into the house and turned it over and took him away up the street. They took the strongbox, and his letters, and every coin in the place. And there was an Englishman — the man who was with you yesterday — he came through the kitchen at a run with a valise under his arm and papers falling out of it, and he went into the yard. I do not know whether he was stealing them or saving them. I could not tell. He did not stop.”
Darcy heard almost none of it.
“Your… uncle?”
She stared at him as if he were deaf. “Yes, Mr Gardiner. My uncle.” She had begun to shake and did not appear to know it. “He has done nothing wrong. He was telling them his own name as they took him out of that door, as though it were a thing worth anything at all in this country —”
“Your uncle.” He could not get past the word. “You were travelling with your uncle?”
She shook her head. “Who else should I be travelling with? My father is gone, and —”
“But where is Mr Collins?”
He hated the question as it left him — the name in his mouth, the need of the answer — and wanted only to have it and be done.
She looked at him as though he had asked after the weather on the moon. “Mr Collins?”
“Yes. Your husband.” Impatience sharpened it; he wanted the thing confirmed and finished. “Was he among them? Was that not him I saw with you yesterday?”
For a moment, she only stared, as though one of them had gone mad and she had not yet settled which. “I have no husband, and Mr Collins is in Kent, married to my sister Mary. Unless he has lately developed a taste for Spanish prisons, he is nowhere near Tudela.”
The correction struck him with such violence that he almost forgot the wrecked room around them.
Not married.
Not Collins’s wife.
Two years of resignation, all built upon Lady Catherine’s ponderous ambiguity and his own cowardly willingness to accept it, gave way so suddenly that for one dizzy instant, he could not have said whether the floor had shifted or only his understanding of the world.
“Then who —” He stopped, began again. “Who was taken?”
She sighed. “My uncle. Mr Gardiner, as I have said three times now.”
The name reached him faintly and lodged there, half-known.
Gardiner — an uncle in trade, he thought; a warehouse, a street he had never had cause to learn, a connexion the Bingley sisters had once made sport of.
He had not troubled to keep it then, and could not quite lay hold of it now, for the greater part of his mind was still labouring over a certainty more than two years in the building that had come down in a single breath.
“And Jennings?”
“I assume you mean your man? I already told you, he ran. I saw him bolt the moment the passage opened — out through the kitchen and into the yard with his arms full, and not a glimpse of him since. Whether the soldiers took him, or he is halfway to the coast with his neck unmarked, I am in no position to say.”
His body went cold. “My valise… all of it…”
Then he turned and braced his hand against the door frame as if the house were rocking.
“He has the strong box. He carried it himself; he always carried it himself. The letters of credit, and the draft on Ferreira, the pistol and my father’s papers —” His head went back.
“God in heaven. And the claim. The claim was in the black case, and the black case was in the strong box, and he has walked out of Spain with everything I came here to save.”
“Mr Darcy, I ”
“I paid him a year in advance.” He said it as if she had contradicted him. “In London, before we sailed. A year, and his passage home. I made a point of it. But I abused him on the steps today, and he —”
Then he did turn, and looked at her — actually at her, at the flour on her sleeve and the cap crushed in her fist and the way she had not let go of the chair, and the whole recital went out of him at once.
Elizabeth’s patience, never deep, had gone entirely.
“I am not sure what you would have had me do about it. I was not set to keep watch over your property. They have taken my uncle, and I could not so much as speak while they did it. You will forgive me if that occupied me rather more than your purse.”
“Forgive me.” He shut his eyes for one moment.
When he opened them again, she was watching him with impatience sharpened by fear. “Why are you dressed like that?”
She glanced once at the flour on her sleeve.
“Because my uncle and the lodging-house servant girl between them possessed more practical wisdom than most ministries. They pushed me into the kitchen and disguised me as help. Pilar saved the rest by crying on command and frightening armed men with the prospect of female inconvenience.”
As if invoked, a muffled sob came from behind the door she had shut. He looked towards it.
“Pilar is sixteen,” said Elizabeth. “She works here, and she is terrified. If you roar about the passage like a bull in a chapel, you will finish what the officers began.”
“If I had been here —”
“You would have been taken too, unless you had chosen flight over English pride. That would not free my uncle. It would merely give Vega a richer Englishman to hold.”
He ought to have answered her wit with something tart of his own, but the morning had left him too stripped for it.
The paper nearest his boot was a docket sheet in Jennings’s hand, ruled and totalled and trodden through the middle.
He picked it up. There was another under the settle, and two more against the hearth, and one that had gone into the wine and would never be anything again.
He gathered them as he went, holding them against his chest with his forearm like kindling.
“Where is the girl?”
“In the kitchen.” Elizabeth had not moved from the chair. “She will not come out.”
He went through into the kitchen, still finding papers. Pilar was sitting on the flagstones with her back against the cold end of the hearth and the pans down all round her, and when his shadow crossed the doorway, she made a sound and got her arms up over her head.
Darcy stopped where he was. “Tell her that the soldiers are gone up the lane. Tell her nobody in this house is going to touch her.”
Elizabeth came past him and knelt down in the mess of pans and spoke to her.
Pilar took hold of two fistfuls of her skirt and would not let go.
There was blood dried at the girl’s hairline where somebody had put her into the shelf.
Darcy set the papers on the table, poured water into a bowl from the jug, found a cloth that was clean enough, and put both down within Elizabeth’s reach.
Then he stood back out of the way, because he could not say one word to the girl that would do her any good.
The landlady was in the yard passage with her apron over her face.
A boy of eleven or twelve, who belonged to somebody, was standing on the stairs looking through the broken shutter.
In the room above the common room, an older Dutch gentleman had been robbed of his watch and his son and wished, at considerable length, to lament the affair.
Nobody was dead, or even seriously injured. It took a quarter of an hour to establish, and when it was done, Darcy came back through the passage and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen.
Elizabeth was still on the flagstones with Pilar’s head in her lap and her hand moving slowly over the girl’s hair. She had not put her cap back on, and the flour was still down the whole length of her sleeve.
“I will bolt the street door. And the yard. Nobody will come in.”
She looked up at him without any expression whatever.
“You are safe where you are. Stay with her.”
Then he went and bolted both doors, and stood a moment in the passage with his hand still on the bar. He was holding a quantity of paper against his chest with his other forearm, and had been holding it for a quarter of an hour, and that perhaps a third of it was worth the carrying.
He went up the stairs to learn what had become of him.