Married Enough
XI
The truckle would not come out.
Darcy discovered that the first domestic trial of matrimony lay not in sentiment but in carpentry.
He had one hand under the frame and the other upon the floorboards, applying to the recalcitrant thing a degree of force which, in a better-regulated world, would have been reserved for an honest fight.
Elizabeth was leaning over, watching him. “If Spain means to preserve my reputation by furniture, I should be obliged if it would do so with less noise.”
The truckle gave at last with a shriek of wood and iron and shot out so abruptly that he was obliged to catch it with his knee. A slat immediately dropped from underneath and clattered to the floor.
“Ah,” she said. “An interesting method. Injury as a chaperon.”
He straightened, rubbing his knee. The room seemed to have shrunk in the last four minutes. There was the bed, the truckle, the chair, and Mrs Darcy nowhere to be put except among them.
The candle on the washstand put a mild, merciless light upon her face. Fatigue had thinned it. The hours since sunset had left their shadow beneath her eyes; yet no fatigue had softened the line of her mouth. She was looking at the truckle with a severe sort of resignation.
“It will do for me.”
“It will not. You will take the bed.”
“I will take the truckle, and you will leave off moving me about the room like a chair that has displeased you.”
“You have been on your feet for hours.”
“So have you. And I notice no one proposing to spare you the mattress on those grounds. It is always different when it is a man, and never, by some miracle of consistency, different when it is a lady.”
He opened his mouth, shut it, and tried again. “You will take the bed.”
“You have said that twice now. Saying it again is not an argument. It is only a louder way of being wrong. You cannot fit on the truckle.”
He had expected an argument. He had not expected how fast they fell into the way of it — the interrupting, the going round, neither one letting the other finish, as though they had been married for years and only wanted a bed to fight over.
The truth, which he did not say, was that the bed was not the quarrel at all.
It was the one disaster of the day small enough to win, and they both meant to win something before the day was done with them.
“You cannot mean to sleep on that contrivance,” he said.
“I can mean a great many things when tired. I have been robbed, married, and rendered homeless since breakfast. The mattress is the smallest indignity of the three.”
He lowered his face near hers and tried to adopt a manner she could not refute. “You are not spending your wedding night on a broken servant’s trundle.”
She lifted her brows. “It grows more affecting every moment. Another quarter of an hour, and I shall begin to suspect honest sentiment.”
“I am speaking of common sense.”
“So am I. You are at least six inches too long for it.”
“That is the truckle’s misfortune.”
“You propose to make it yours. And, if I am kept awake by your martyrdom, mine.”
“That bed,” he said, pointing, “is yours! I have survived worse accommodations.”
“You will forgive me if I find that somewhat incredible.” Elizabeth crossed to the truckle, stooped, and tested it with one hand. It rocked, objected, then held.
“It is ugly,” she said, “but not impossible.”
He wished, with wholly unreasonable force, that she would cease leaning over the truckle in candlelight. Particularly with her hair pulling loose from its pins and her fichu sagging.
She straightened. “Very well. I take the bed, you take the relic, and we both agree never to praise necessity again while we live.”
“That is a vow I can make with uncommon sincerity.”
He had got the truckle to stand more or less level, and, the matter of the bed concluded, attempted the courtesy the whole disastrous day had denied them. “Then we are settled, Mrs Darcy, and I —”
“Do not call me that.”
He straightened. “I beg your pardon?”
“Mrs Darcy.” She said the name as though it had come to her still wet.
“I will not spend the next fortnight teaching myself to answer to a name I mean to put off again the moment we pass the Dover cliffs. It is hard enough to grow used to a name one means to keep. I do not propose to give you the entertainment of watching me struggle with that one.”
“Then what I am to call you? Miss Bennet? A man who calls his wife Miss Bennet across a public table announces her unmarried to every ear in the room.”
“Just so. Whereas I may go on calling you Mr Darcy ‘til Judgment and trouble no one — a piece of luck I have done nothing to earn, and shall enjoy without apology. You are left with the only name that hangs nobody. You should try it before your nerve goes.”
He held her eyes as his mouth shaped the word for the first time. “Elizabeth.”
It came more readily than it had any right to.
“There. You remembered what it was, after all. I fancied for a moment that you had forgot, or confused my name with one of my sisters.”
She moved to the washstand, poured water into the basin, and washed the dust from her hands.
He turned away because decency required it and because decency, tonight of all nights, had become a profession requiring advanced skill.
By the time he ventured to look again, she had dried them and was pulling the pins from her hair with brisk, spare movements that ought, by every rule of reason, to have signified nothing whatever to him.
Instead, they struck directly at the remains of his self-command.
He went at once to his own coat, removed it, and occupied himself with folding it more carefully than any coat had ever deserved.
“You need not stand with your back to me like a clergyman in a fit,” she said. “I am only taking down my hair, not committing a mortal sin.”
“I had not accused you of either.”
“No, but you look as if you are considering it.”
“It is caution, that is all.”
“Against what?”
That question, asked so lightly, was among the least merciful things she had ever done to him.
He laid his folded coat over the chair. “Against making an already difficult situation more difficult.”
She made a sort of huff which might have been agreement and might have been amusement. “Then we are allies. I have no wish to make it uglier than it is.”
Uglier.
He had thought, half an hour before, that nothing said inside this room could strike him more sharply than wife.
Yet something in that word, and in the tired honesty with which she said it, found a place in him that wife had not.
She was frightened enough to tell the truth now. Not all of it. But enough.
When he turned at last, her hair was fully down. The candle had caught in it where the darker chestnut gave way to threads of gold bleached by the Spanish sun. She was plaiting it quickly, without looking at him.
“Is there anything else to be settled?” she asked.
He looked about the room as though hoping some forgotten piece of furniture might arise and offer instruction. There was the chair. The bed. The truckle. The jug. The washstand. A pair of married people and no precedent worth the name. “No.”
“Then let us have the courage to become silent.”
She drew back the coverlet, got into the larger bed, and lay down with her back to the room — pressed to the far edge, a careful margin of empty mattress left between herself and the side nearest the truckle, the whole of her angled away as though she expected that at some hour of the dark a hand might cross it, and meant to be beyond reach when it did.
He paused before he put out the second candle.
All evening, he had been at pains to keep his hands to himself — to teach them, by main force, to want nothing they had no right to want.
And the joke of it was that she had spent that same evening arranging her body against the very danger he had been so carefully removing.
That she should lie there braced against him, as though his restraint were the one thing in the room not to be relied upon, displeased him out of all proportion.
“Are you afraid of me?”
She twisted slightly to glance in his direction. “You flatter yourself, Mr Darcy. You are not an easy man, and you take up a great deal of any room you stand in, but you are a long way from frightening. What frightened me tonight was a good deal more impressive than you.”
It was a fair hit, well aimed, and contradicted by every inch of the way she lay. A woman unafraid did not press herself to the wall and leave half the bed empty between them. He extinguished the candle.
The room altered at once. It no longer contained bed, chair, truckle, washstand. It contained breath, nearness, and every sound a human body was not designed to hear from another human body unless life had gone peculiarly astray.
He lay down upon the truckle. It objected in three places but held, which tonight, he was prepared to call a victory. And after a quarter of an hour, he had persuaded himself that he did not need to feel both his legs to sleep.
“Thank you for coming back.”
He had thought her asleep. He lifted his head in the dark. “Coming back?”
“To the house, after the raid. For asking after Pilar in the kitchen. For not wasting time. For not asking me to be calmer than I was.”
“Would it have served?”
“No. But most men try, in any case. I find I am grateful to be married to one who did not waste the breath. And who did not run for the nearest harbour when he might have.”
His head dropped back again. “There was nowhere else to go.”
Elizabeth had slept only in brief truces negotiated with an exhausted brain and a traitorous body.
Morning was less forgiving than night. By daylight, marriage had a chair with his coat on it, a cracked basin, two cups, and Mr Darcy in shirtsleeves at the washstand.
She lay still a moment longer than she ought, watching the line of his shoulders in the pale grey light from the window. He had already shaved. How long he had already been awake, moving about the very doom she still slept in, she could not imagine.