8. VIII
VIII
Bloody Close to Ruined
He had got the door open and the trunk in view — the lid up, the shirts flung out, the writing case gone — before he understood that she had come up behind him and was standing in the passage.
It struck him as strange, until he thought on it for half a second.
Every other face in this building spoke a language that had been shouted at her by armed men an hour ago, and he was English, and known to her, however little either of them had pursued the acquaintance.
Anyone would rather be frightened near a familiar man than alone among strangers.
He only glanced at her, then returned his attention to the ruin of his room.
The trunk had been gone through, and gone through by men in a hurry. The plate was gone. The loose coin was gone. His good coat had been thrown across the room, and one boot with it. The other boot was still where it had been, on its side, half under the bed.
The pistol was gone. So was the dagger Darcy had kept for utmost need, and he had been a fool not to have both on his person.
Darcy went to his knees, took the trunk by the near corner, and dragged it out from the wall.
He put his thumbnail into the seam at the base of the trunk and lifted, and the false bottom came up as it was meant to. The money belt was still lying in it, and the oilcloth packet was lying under the belt.
“Not entirely,” he murmured. “Not entirely ruined. But bloody close to it.”
He drew it out and let it hang from his fist — a long girdle of stitched leather, sweat-dark on the inner face, made to be worn under the shirt where no cutpurse could reach it.
The weight of it dragged his wrist down and swung, and the coins jangled against one another with a low knocking.
Spanish gold. He had been careful to change it in Portsmouth, and had congratulated himself on the prudence.
It did him no good whatever now, for a doubloon laid on a table for bread in a village of ninety souls would be talked of in three parishes by dark and followed out of town by morning.
He put it back where it had been, and sat down on the floor beside the open trunk with his hands hanging between his knees.
“What did you mean, ‘bloody close to it’?”
He glanced back at Elizabeth. She was still standing inside the door, her arms crossed over her body. “It was not fit language for you to hear.”
“I have heard a great deal this morning that was not fit for me to hear.” She came closer. “I was not asking after your use of profanity, Mr Darcy. I was asking what you have left.”
For a moment, he considered giving her nothing. She had no business asking him that. He had not seen her for better than two years and had lost nearly everything this morning, and there was no reason on earth to lay his affairs open on the floor of a robbed room.
He reached into the trunk instead.
“That,” he said, and set the belt on the boards between them.
“And this.” The oilcloth packet followed it, and he opened the fold of it with two fingers and let her see what was inside without putting it into her hands.
“My licence to travel. Two letters of introduction, one of them wet. Letters of credit that do me no good whatever in any town smaller than a major port. And that.”
She looked at the sealed sheet a long moment “And the rest of it?”
“There is no rest of it. Everything else — the whole assembled case file, the proof that some junta here in Spain is answerable to the debt — went out of that door under my own man’s arm before the soldiers were in the square.
Like as not, he is on a fast mule for the coast, using my financial documents as proof of business travel and spending my gold. I have nothing else.”
She crouched down and looked at the three things on the floor as though she were pricing them.
“That is not very much,” she said, “for a gentleman eight hundred miles from home.”
“No.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“In Tudela. In Navarre. In a country half of Europe has been shooting at for six years. Men like you do not come here, Mr Darcy. They send someone. They send four someones and stay in Derbyshire and read the letters as they arrive. What are you doing in this town yourself?”
“My business is my own.”
“It was your own. It has been in the street since noon, and I am sitting in the middle of it. You may tell me to go to the devil. I shall go, and shut the door behind me, and we shall neither of us be the worse. But you have had a face on you since the square that I have seen on precisely one other man in my life, and he had just been told his ship was lost with everything he owned aboard her. So, what are you doing here?”
His jaw went hard. He refused to look at her when he answered, so he stared at the floor. “I came to Madrid in May to be paid on a loan.”
“Tudela is a long way from Madrid.”
“You have a gift for the obvious, Miss Bennet.”
“They would not pay you there?”
“They will not pay me there, here, anywhere, simply because I had papers and asked them to. It must be certified, and sworn, and carried up and down the river through the proper hands with every seal in its place, and God help the man who has misspelled a single word on his complaint.”
“Then how much is it, that you would come eight hundred miles to sit in a passage and be told to come back tomorrow?”
“That is not your concern.”
“How long do you mean to go on chasing it?”
“Until the sum falls due in England, and not a day past. After that, it will not matter whether I ever catch the man.”
She made a thoughtful noise. “And if you had every paper Jennings carried out of this house, and the whole of it sworn and stamped tomorrow morning, would what they owe you cover what falls due in England?”
“Miss Bennet —”
“Would it?”
“Good God, madam, will you leave it?” He was on his feet before he knew he had risen, and he stood over her in a room full of his own shirts with his voice ringing off the plaster. “What can it possibly signify to you?”
“Then it will not cover it.” Her chin had come up. “You are ruined whichever way the thing falls, there is nothing to be got by staying, so you may as well take ship at Santander tomorrow and leave me to walk to the coast alone. Have I understood you?”
“No.”
“Then it would cover it.”
“It would cover it, and a great deal besides, and I will thank you —”
“How much besides?”
He turned away from her. He got as far as the window and stood there with his hand on the frame. Behind him, he heard her getting to her feet.
“My father did not make the loan out of sentiment,” he said.
“He was told the Spanish would beat Bonaparte, and he believed it, and he wished to be on the right side of the war and to be paid for standing there. It was lent at interest. Under seal, upon security, at a rate that would have made him a very great deal richer than he was.”
“And the security?”
He did not answer.
“Mr Darcy, what did he set against it?”
“Everything,” he said, to the glass. “He set everything against it.”
Behind him, she made no reply, but when he turned round, her hands had come out from behind her and were shaking.
He had said too much. It could not be recalled, and there was no profit in looking at it, and he found that what he wanted, standing in that ruined room, was to have somebody else’s disaster to attend to for a quarter of an hour.
“What about your uncle?”
She lifted her head. “I have no idea.”
“Have you anybody in this country besides him? A correspondent, a house he traded with, a Spaniard who would answer for you?”
“There is Senor Herrera.” She said the name without any hope in it whatever. “My uncle was to have taken warehouse space from him by the river. They shook hands upon it yesterday.”
“Then Herrera has an interest in seeing him at liberty.”
“Herrera has an interest in not being seen to have shaken hands with a man the alcalde has arrested.” She got her hands folded around the bed post, as if it might keep her on her feet.
“He will be at his own door by now, wondering how many people saw us come out of his counting-house. He will not know me tomorrow.”
“There is a consul at Santander.”
“Two hundred miles, and the last of them over mountains.” She had begun to move again, along the wall, away from the window. “And who is to escort me there? Suppose I arrived. What am I then? A woman at a strange door with a fantastical story.”
“You would be an Englishwoman in distress.”
“I should be an Englishwoman nobody could account for.”
He had no answer to that. She was looking at the floor as though there were something written on it.
“What do you mean to do?”
She was so long in answering that he thought she had not heard.
“Miss Bennet, what have you?”
She blinked and returned to reality. “I have four pounds and some shillings sewn into a petticoat, which is money my aunt gave me for emergencies, and which will not keep me a fortnight. I have no passport of my own; my name is written on my uncle’s, and my uncle’s papers are in the alcalde’s hands.
I have a trunk of gowns that will fetch nothing, a bit of Portuguese that everyone here mistakes for Galician, and the goodwill of a kitchen maid of sixteen.
Everything else in this house that belonged to us has been carried off in a cart. ”
“Your uncle’s man of business —”
“In London. Seven weeks by post, if the post ran, and it does not. There is nobody in Spain who knows my name. There is nobody in England who knows I need them.”
“There must be some means of recovering your uncle.”
“Pilar says they have taken him to the town gaol. Not for any crime, but to hold him until they can make better use of him. These men mean to be paid, or petitioned, or overruled, and I cannot do any of those things.”
“You can go to the gate and ask.”
“With what? A clerk will come out to me and be perfectly civil. He will ask whose I am, and I will have no good answer to give. I may stand in that street until Michaelmas, and no one will hear me.”
“Then somebody must go for you.”
“Yourself, I suppose?” She let go of the post. “You have already offended every clerk in Tudela in Spanish so bad, there ought to be a law against it. Have you any notion how long a man may go on doing that in a country where every second house has buried somebody? You have no translator and very little tact. You cannot ask directions of a muleteer without being cheated, you are on no record locally which would make it inconvenient to wrong you, and you are a man whose very manner pronounces how much he is worth back in England. Sir, you will be in a cell beside my uncle by the end of the day, and you will not know what they have charged you with, and there will be nobody left to ask.”
He drew himself up. “You are speaking to me with a very great deal of freedom.”
“I have very little left to lose by it, and I am not wrong. You have been in the square and let a whole town listen to you argue about a large sum of money. What do you suppose they saw? A gentleman in a good coat with a seal on his hand, in a country where every man who fought has gone home to nothing. You are not a person to them, Mr Darcy. You are a sum. And a sum that travels alone, and speaks to nobody, and is not expected anywhere by anybody, is a very tempting sum, indeed.”
“Then by all means, let us have your remedy!” He stalked closer to her.
“I am to sit in this house until the money runs out, is that it? Or perhaps I am to be led about Navarre by a lady with four pounds in her petticoat, and be very silent, and be grateful? You have described my situation with great accuracy. You have not proposed anything whatever.”
“I have not finished.”
“You have been at it a quarter of an hour.”
“Because you have interrupted me at every turn!” She put her hand over her mouth, and took it away. “Forgive me. I am not accustomed to being frightened.”
“It is not a sentiment with which I am overly acquainted, either.”
She frowned faintly and crossed her arms. “There is one thing that grant me respectable access to the gaol, and would make you a man this country cannot make disappear without somebody writing it down.”
“I fail to understand you. You are asking for my protection?”
“I am asking for your name.”
For the length of a heartbeat, he was a fool in a wine market again, and everything he had spent two years burying came up his throat at once — she had said his name, three feet from him, in a room with a bed in it —
“Miss Bennet.” His own voice had gone somewhere he did not recognise. “You are speaking madness.”
“It is the only thing that makes sense.”
Heat rushed into his face. “But you cannot suppose that I would stake my name to such a —”
“Stake? Oh, that does sound so very irrevocable No, I mean only to borrow it. By the church door.”