9. IX #2
Mr Darcy was already there, coming toward her out of the wrecked common room with a leather purse in one hand and a candlestick in the other.
His coat had lost its symmetry. Dust darkened one knee, and wine had dried in a long stain down the cuff where he had carried the papers against his chest. He had the look not of a gentleman of consequence but of a man whom consequence had seized by the collar and dragged through a dinner party.
He halted when he saw her. “How much time have we?”
Not “What are we doing?” Not “Must it be tonight?” Not even “Is this necessary?” Only that.
For one absurd second, the violence of her relief almost turned her knees to water. “Very little. We need a priest, two witnesses, and enough silver to persuade sanctity into haste.”
His eyes went past her to Pilar, then back again. “Can it be done?”
“Yes. Can you pay for it?”
He lifted the purse. “I can pay for an offence against heaven, if heaven remains moderately priced.”
From the kitchen behind her, Pilar whispered in some awe, “Ay, senorita. Qué guapo es su novio!”
“Oh, miss. How handsome he is, your sweetheart!”
Elizabeth turned her head and gave the girl a look which required no translation at all, and the girl put her apron over her mouth.
“What did she say?” asked Darcy.
“Nothing whatever.”
“It was more than a dozen syllables of nothing.”
“It was a piece of impertinence.”
He frowned for a moment with the candle in one hand and the purse in the other. The flame dipped, and he righted it.
“I see. Then, I am to go and be married in a language I do not speak, by a priest I have not met, before witnesses who are laughing at me.”
“Yes.”
“Very well.”
By the time he had bought back two shirts, one cloak, half a wheel of cheese, and the use of the landlady’s testimony, catastrophe had revealed a vulgar genius for becoming domestic.
Ruined walls did not prevent a woman from haggling. Broken chairs did not settle accounts. The landlady had wept over her shutters, denounced every army in Europe with impartial fervour, and then turned practical, and now attached herself to the new emergency, preferring scandal to despair.
She kept up a torrent, rapid and aggrieved and loud enough to carry through three rooms, and Elizabeth stood between him and the whole of it, turning to him now and then to render perhaps a fifth into English. The gentlest fifth on offer.
There was no sense in testing her. He had only the small wince before each glance toward him, and the pause in which she pared something plainly scalding down to a sentence fit for a drawing room.
“She is glad to be of use,” Elizabeth said, while the woman brandished a torn shirt at the rafters and flung it aside.
Then something brisk in the tongue he could not parse, and a second shirt was held to the lamp, pronounced sound, and pressed upon him.
“She wonders whether the senor will want a cloak fit for a church.”
Whatever the woman had said had been a good deal longer than that, and twice as loud, and had concluded — to judge by the open palm held before him — in the matter of payment.
Darcy paid her.
He paid everyone. It was not the loss of the money; he had lost money before, and would lose a great deal more if Vega continued his present education in theft.
It was that every coin struck some bell drawing a close in the space between himself and Elizabeth.
Candle. Witness. Bread. Priest. Cloak. Wife.
He set the recovered shirts upon a bench and went looking for the second candle. One shutter rehung, one table righted, wine and lamp-black standing in the cracks of the boards. Jennings’s absence glared from every object the man had last touched.
“Mr Darcy?”
Elizabeth stood in the archway with a dark cloak over her shoulders, and Pilar beside her carrying a lantern.
The servant’s cap was gone, and she wore no bonnet to replace it.
Her hair was plainly styled, her face grey with fatigue, and her mouth set in that firm, alarming line which meant she had already calculated six possibilities and rejected five of them as too slow.
“Are we ready?”
“‘Ready’ is not the word I would use, but there remains nothing left to do.”
The landlady bustled past with the reclaimed cloak over one arm, paused to beam upon them both with appalling sentiment, and loosed a stream of Spanish — rapid, warm, and a good deal too long for its evident purpose — of which he caught guapo, and padre, and an unmistakable giggle.
Something pained crossed Elizabeth’s face and was gone.
“The priest keeps poor hours,” she said. “We should reach him before he sleeps, or drinks, or more probably both.”
There was that suspicious brevity again. The warmth left lying in the language he could not reach. In this instance, he was grateful to be spared it.
He took the cloak, and did not remark upon it.
“Will she come with us?”
“Yes. She intends to witness, advise, lament, and be paid separately for all three.”
“That seems comprehensive.”
The faintest light crossed her face and vanished. She took the lantern from Pilar and held it out to him.
He took it, then offered her the crook of his elbow. It was nothing but proper. Their fingers did not touch.
Even so, Pilar’s eyes went round as coins, and she was not looking at him at all, but at Elizabeth, with an expression he would have called reverence in any other house on any other evening.
“Have you everything?” he asked.
“No. But we have enough to do something foolish.”