10. X
X
A Marriage Made Of Paper
The church rose ahead of them across the square, pale and scarred, one saint shot through the shoulder and another taken off at the neck.
Elizabeth walked fast enough to make hesitation impossible.
Pilar trotted on one side of her; the landlady bore down on the other.
Darcy kept the lantern close and her arm closer.
Every alley they passed was made for mischief, and holding her near enough to tread on his heels had stopped being a thing he could argue himself out of.
At the church door, she turned. “Do not let the landlady speak for us unless I faint or die.”
“Is that likely?”
“It depends on how long the ceremony runs.”
The side door opened before he could answer, and an old priest with a lantern and no evident delight in mankind peered out at them.
Spanish broke over him in pieces. Pilar’s eager rush. The landlady’s louder corroboration. Then Elizabeth, quick and cool, taking possession of the matter. Her voice altered in that language. Swifter, more musical, darting round obstacles and striking where it meant to.
The priest looked from her to Darcy and asked something, to which she retorted something back that sounded irreverent.
“What did he ask?”
She kept her eyes upon the priest. “Whether you are truly the gentleman in question, or merely the tallest available Protestant.”
“And your answer?”
“That, I reserve for leverage.”
The priest spoke again. This time, she answered without any amusement whatever, and he shook his head.
She came one step nearer to him and spoke very fast. His chin came up.
Their words met like foils. Behind them, the landlady crossed herself and made several gestures to suggest that English ladies were terrible creatures.
Darcy stood through three exchanges of it. “What is wrong?”
“He asks whether you understand that marriage is binding.”
“Tell him of course I do.”
“He asks also whether you marry me freely.”
Freely. His eye went to the half-open door, and the single lamp within, and the broken rail, and the side altar stripped by the war and mended afterwards out of stubbornness. Anywhere but the word, which had lodged under his ribs and would not be argued with.
“Do you require above an hour to decide it?”
“No.”
“Then I shall spare us both the luxury.” She turned and translated. “Sí .”
The priest did not take his gaze off Darcy. He asked a third thing.
“What now?”
“He asks whether you are promised to any other woman. Only men hiding from their real wives or women who are already prená marry in haste by night.”
The landlady drew in her breath and laughed aloud. “Y no será la primera que se casa prená!”
Darcy did not care to ask for that bit to be translated. “Tell him there is no wife.”
“That is not the same answer.”
“Miss Bennet —”
“No. Answer plainly or not at all. Shall I tell him you are free to marry me?”
The blood came up under his skin, hot and immediate. To be handled so was intolerable. To have earned it was worse. Worst of all, she knew both, and asked it regardless, and would not spare him the saying of it.
“Yes,” he said. “Tell him that.”
She held his eyes one instant longer, and then she turned and spoke.
The priest’s suspicion gave way by inches. He raised the lantern and surveyed the four of them as though weighing sin against inconvenience, and at length he stood aside.
“Now,” said Elizabeth. “Before his sense of righteousness improves.”
The ceremony was shorter than a lease and graver than a duel.
The chapel was cold. War had taken its silver and the lead from its roof. Above the altar, the wall showed a paler oblong where something had hung. On the altar itself, two candles burned in candelabras that once held six.
The priest stood before them in a stole mended at the edge with thread of the wrong colour. Pilar and the landlady kept to one side, grown devout in the presence of formal sin. Elizabeth drew off one glove, finger by finger, and laid it on the rail.
Darcy looked away too late. Her hand was still as slender as he remembered, and now it was unshaking. There was flour at the knuckles that she had not altogether washed away.
The priest began in Spanish. Matrimonio. Libre. Santa iglesia. The rest came to him as wreckage. Elizabeth translated where she must, and left the remainder to Providence.
“He asks your name,” she said.
“Fitzwilliam George Darcy.”
Then hers.
“Elizabeth Marie Bennet.”
Plain and entire. Asking nothing of him, promising nothing in return, exactly as she had been at pains to tell him. He believed her.
His body did not. Some primal part of him had overleapt the priest and the vows and landed on the far side of the ceremony, where there was no inn-yard to cross, no crowded room to set at his back, and a woman who would be within six feet of him all night, for at least the next two weeks.
He had found it work enough to keep his eyes from her with the whole of England to retreat into, and now, he would have no escape.
The priest asked a question, and Elizabeth answered in irritated English before she bothered putting it into words the priest could understand.
“No, my father cannot be consulted from London by midnight, and my uncle is presently in prison, which seems a difficulty, but not an objection.”
The priest looked heavenward, in appeal or in fatigue, and spoke to Darcy directly.
“He asks whether you take me for your lawful wife.”
No bargain. No bond or stolen papers. No uncle in prison, no Vega, no understanding waiting an ocean off. All of it fell away before the simplicity of the word.
Wife.
“Yes.”
Her face did not warm, though something at the corner of her mouth drew one degree harder and did not slacken again.
The priest turned to her. “Si,” she said, in Spanish clear enough for any altar.
The next instruction wanted their hands. Darcy put out his own, meaning nothing by it but obedience.
She laid hers in it. Warm from the glove. Light. Entirely real.
His fingers closed because the priest expected it. The priest went on speaking. The landlady dabbed her eyes and sniffed. Pilar hiccuped once and was silent. A drop of wax slid down the near candle and hardened halfway.
Elizabeth kept her eyes upon the priest. Once, only, did her pulse betray her, a sharp beat under his thumb when the man said fidelidad, which wanted no translating whatever.
Darcy nearly looked at her. Prudence, or cowardice, held his head straight. He answered when he was prompted. So did she.
A ring would have improved appearances. Lacking one, the priest said something and put out his hand, and Elizabeth said, “Thirteen coins. He wants thirteen, a ‘gift’ from husband to wife for the consecration.”
Darcy counted them out of the purse. “It seems an unlucky number for the business.”
“I do not think we will be married long enough for luck to matter.”
The priest blessed them where they lay in Darcy’s palm, and then took his wrist and turned it, and tipped the coins into Elizabeth’s cupped hands.
“Las arras,” said the landlady, with enormous satisfaction.
“Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”
At the one moment that signified, the language turned, and the Latin came to him directly.
Her face had gone slightly blank, trying to work out the cognates to Spanish or Portuguese or whatever the devil language she actually spoke.
But this was the language of a scholar, words he understood without bothering to translate in his head.
He had conjugated worse at fifteen, half asleep over a candle.
I join you together in matrimony, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
The first thing all night he had understood entire, and without her. The thing that bound him.
The priest made the sign of the cross over them. Pilar burst into tears again. The landlady kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks before anyone could prevent it, and then embraced Darcy with a speed no delicacy checked. He endured it. Resistance was too complicated.
The priest held out his hand for payment. That, at least, wanted no interpreter.
He paid him.
When he turned back, Elizabeth had drawn her glove on again. It restored no distance whatever. It informed him only, and with unnecessary vividness, that beneath it was the hand he had held while promising before God to remain where necessity had put him.
“Senora Darcy,” said the landlady, delighted by the sound of it before the bride could possibly be equal to it.
Elizabeth’s head came round as though the woman had struck flint by her ear.
Nothing ready stood in her face. No answer. No strategy. No irony quick enough to arrive ahead of feeling.
“We had better go,” was all she said.
Pilar went ahead of them with the lantern and set it on the chest, turned back the coverlet, and looked at the jug and found it full and set it down again.
She did all of it without once raising her eyes above the level of Darcy’s waistcoat.
It was the officiousness of respectable indecency.
She was sixteen years old, and she knew precisely what the purpose of this room was meant to be on this particular night.
It was not the chamber Darcy had occupied before the raid.
That one had lost a shutter and half its lock.
This room lay above the stable court at the back, narrow but whole, with a truckle for a servant rolled beneath the window and one larger bed set under a faded coverlet that might once have been crimson and had now subsided into the colour of exhausted roses.
“One room,” Elizabeth murmured.
One room. One bed. Married people.
What had they imagined? Separate wings of a palace? A constitutional amendment in their favour?
Elizabeth removed her cloak very carefully and hung it upon the chair.
Darcy set down the candle with equal care.
He could not look at the bed. But he could also look nowhere else. This, then, was the first practical consequence of usefulness.
Mrs Darcy.
His wife.
Across the room, Elizabeth put one hand upon the bedpost, as if to assure herself it had not been imagined into being by fatigue. Then she turned and met his eyes.
For a long instant, neither of them spoke.
At last she said, with a frankness almost heroic in its insufficiency, “Well.”
He had never heard helplessness in her before.
And because it was helpless, because the room was shut, because the priest had spoken and the landlady had named, and there remained now no road at all except through this, the answer rose to Darcy’s lips before caution could intercept it.
“Yes,” he said. “I believe we are married enough for the evening.”