Coin by Coin
XII
The gaol had once been part of a merchant’s house, and still looked indecisive about its profession. The lower rooms were stone-vaulted and sooty; the upper windows retained carved lintels that were hardly even shot. Outside stood two soldiers who looked as if they had drunk their breakfast.
Darcy did not look at them. He had settled that much on the walk over — a man who looked at the guns had already given something away — and he had nothing to give this place, no consul within two hundred miles, no navy that had heard his name.
He had a coat and a card and a face he had spent nearly thirty years learning to keep shut.
He walked in as though it were a garrison.
The clerk looked up and nodded, and Darcy only stared back. His mind was already three moves ahead into the worst of it.
They would not keep him. That was not the danger. His family would pay whatever was asked, in time, and he would be got out, poorer and ridiculous.
The danger was standing on his arm. If this room decided to keep him, it kept her, too — or it turned her loose alone into the town where yesterday morning had happened, which was worse.
The best possible scenario of the two meant that there would be, someday, in some drawing room in England, the story of Darcy of Pemberley ransomed out of a Spanish prison with a wife no one had ever heard him name.
He could see Georgiana’s face while somebody told it to her.
He set his teeth against the faint tremor in his jaw, and gave the clerk his attention as though the man were slightly in his way.
Elizabeth had let go of his arm. Both gloved hands were now on the table, leaning in, her Spanish low and fast, and the clerk’s smile came down a degree.
“He says we must wait.”
“We will not wait. Advise him of my name.”
“I have told him. He would like to know whether Pemberley is a rank, a regiment, or a disease.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“That it is a house in Derbyshire larger than his village, and that you own the village too, which is not true — is it? But he will not go to Derbyshire to check.”
She turned back to the clerk, repeated the name “Darcy,” and then the clerk pointed at him and said the word.
“Esposo?”
His pulse missed a beat. The clerk was looking at Elizabeth, not at him, and she did not look at Darcy at all.
“Sí.”
Plain as the table between them, and on to the next thing before he could feel the floor of it.
He had almost got himself level again when the man leaned back, well pleased with himself, and said something that widened his own smile. Elizabeth answered him rather sharply — a single dry line that took the smile clean off. Whatever it was, the clerk did not try again.
“What did he say?”
“He asked whether English newlyweds commonly spend the morning in a gaol rather than in bed. I told him my husband had already seen to that, twice, and thoroughly enough for his wife’s satisfaction, and still had energy to spare for my uncle besides. He seems chastened.”
It took Darcy a moment to be certain he had heard her correctly.
“You told him what?”
“He was impertinent. I was worse. It is the only currency these men respect, and I find I have a great deal of it this morning. You have gone a very interesting colour, Mr Darcy.”
He had. He could feel it, which was worse than being told. He had faced down a raided inn and a leering guard without a flicker, and Elizabeth had put him to rout with a single sentence he had not even been permitted to understand until it was already spoken — to a stranger — on his behalf.
“I will thank you,” he said, with what remained of his dignity, “to defend my honour in future without quite so much detail.”
“You have no notion that is truly what I said. I might have been modesty itself.”
“I have every notion. I watched the clerk’s face turn redder than my own.”
“Then you must comfort yourself that he believed it. What would you have me tell him now?”
“Tell him my name is in the parish register at the Magdalena since last night, in the alcalde’s ledger yesterday, and in a dozen letters which are even now in the hands of the royal treasury, with whom I have business.
Tell him that no fewer than three offices in this kingdom can now say where I was on the fifteenth of June, and whose door I came to.
Tell him I have come for my wife’s uncle, and that I mean to come back tomorrow, and the day after, and to pay for the privilege each time.
He may charge me a fair sum for his trouble, or I will exact an unfair one for mine.
But he had better understand that I am a great deal more use to him standing here than I should ever be in one of his cells — where I should be nothing but an expense, a great deal of trouble to guard, and eventually a letter somebody has to answer. ”
She told him. It ran longer in Spanish than in English, and Darcy — who could not follow a word — had the strong impression his remarks were being improved upon. Whatever she put into them, the smile went out.
The clerk took up the card. He could no more read the English than Darcy the ledger, but the engraving had a language of its own. He asked something, and his eyes went from Elizabeth to Darcy and back.
“Your relation to Mr Gardiner,” she said. “Not mine, yours is what he wants to know.”
Darcy sighed. “Tell him whatever you like that sounds imposing. He may have it in writing for the ledger if he likes.”
She spoke, and the clerk shrugged — kinship by marriage was a nuisance, but one the law recognised. He dipped his pen, made his note, and raised a hand with finger and thumb held delicately apart.
“He wants paying again.”
Now the silver, and the man swept it off the table quickly enough to shame an honest one.
A guard came in. The clerk spoke to him, then turned back civil, a civility bought coin by coin.
“Five minutes. If my uncle weeps, we take the blame for disturbing the peace and go.”
The guard’s eyes went over Elizabeth’s face. His gaze turned to a faint smirk, admiring and familiar, as though he had leave.
And there it was — the thing Darcy had been holding down since the door, up through his chest before he could stop it, because that look was what she became the moment he was not beside her. He stepped to place his shoulder in front of her.
“He will address my wife through me.”
Elizabeth looked at him a moment. Then she said it in Spanish, and whatever she said took the good humour out of the guard’s face, and he tipped his head toward the inner passage.
“Come,” she said. And then, she murmured, only for him, “That was very well done. I told him your boxing has a fearful reputation at Gentleman Jackson’s.”
“You have told people a great many things this morning I was not consulted on.”
“I have,” she said, and did not look sorry.
Her uncle stood at the grated hole that passed for a window, turning an empty cup in his hands. He was pale, unshaven, his coat past saving and his temper with it, but upright, and whole. She was across the cell before the guard could reconsider his charity.
“Uncle!”
He turned. The cup slipped out of his fingers and rang away across the stones, and he never looked after it. “Lizzy?”
Then his arms were round her hard enough to hurt, the cold of the cell still in his coat, and everything she had carried so carefully since the soldiers came loose all at once against his shoulder. He held her off to look at her face and pulled her back before he had finished looking.
“Are you hurt? Tell me you are not hurt. Where have they had you? Did anyone lay a hand on you? I had no word of you, child, none — I was afraid to ask, lest they know to look for you, but I made what demands I could, and then heard nothing, for hours —”
“I am well.” She braced a hand against his chest, half to hold him, half to hold herself up. “Look at me. Not a mark on me. I promise you.”
“Then we shall do,” he said. “Then we shall do. You took a grave risk in coming here, Lizzy, and I’ll not…”
His eyes caught on something past her shoulder, and the warmth drained from his face. Darcy had come through the low door behind her.
Her uncle’s glance went from Darcy, to the guard still in the doorway, to her, and back to Darcy.
“They do not open a prison door for a merchant’s niece. How are you standing in this cell, Lizzy?”
“Respectably. I am not a captive, Uncle.”
He grabbed her shoulders. “What have you done, child?”
She had meant to lead him to it gently. There was no gentle way through a locked door in five minutes. “I married Mr Darcy last night.”
His gaze went to the man bent under the low ceiling — the gentleman from the square, the rich one, the one she had waved off yesterday as barely an acquaintance — standing loose and unwatched in a cell where her uncle was chained to a wall by nothing but the price of his own skin.
“No! Tell me you have not.”
“There was no time for —”
“Good God.” He drew her in by the wrist, close, his back half to the door, and when he spoke it was almost under his breath — a man who had done business in rooms where the walls listened.
“Lower your voice, and answer me plainly. Is it done? Truly done, before a priest, in a register, so that it holds?”
“It holds.”
“And he knows what it is? What you meant by it, and what you did not?” His eyes went past her to Darcy for half a second and came back. “Is it meant to hold, Lizzy, once you are clear of this country? Or to be undone the moment it has served?”
“Undone. The moment you are free and we are safe, it is undone, and no one in England the wiser. We were clear with each other. Entirely clear.”
Something in him eased, and grieved, both at once. “Undone.”
“Yes.”
“A marriage you mean to walk out of before the ink is dry. And he agreed to that? A man of his name and station agreed to be married and unmarried at your convenience?”
“He needed someone to speak for him as much as I needed the safety of his name. It is a fair bargain, Uncle. It is the only fair thing in the whole of this morning.”
“Lizzy, have you also thought of…” Her uncle’s eyes went back to Darcy, then he lowered his voice still more, as if he meant for even Darcy not to hear.
“There is more to a marriage than a piece of paper. If you mean to be free, then does he… will he regard certain… liberties as beyond the bounds of —”
“We were entirely clear,” she repeated. “We, neither of us, are much good for one another back in England, but so long as we are here, I would rather trust my safety to a man whose dignity and reputation is his chief source of pride than some random soldado with a grudge.”
He shut his eyes. When he opened them, the fear was still there, only banked now, made usable. “Then it was well thought of, and quickly, but I would to God you had never had to think of it at all.”
He nodded faintly towards Darcy, then turned back and took her hands. “Lizzy, you should not have come here. I hid you so you would be no one to them. Nothing worth the asking. And you have walked your face into the one room in this town where every man wants paying —”
“I had to know you were living.”
“I am worth a great deal more to them living, and they know it better than you do. When they took me, they said it plainly — I am to write to the house in London and tell them where to send the money, and until it comes, I am kept sound, because a corpse fetches nothing.”
“Where are they sending it?”
“Estella.” He said it low, close to her ear, his back to the guard. “Do not ask me why there, for I cannot tell you — they named it, and gave me the pen, and I wrote what I was told. The house in London, the sum, the money to Estella. Nothing of where they take me. Nothing of when. Only that.”
“Estella is on the north road.”
“Is it? Then you know more of the geography than I was granted. Whoever holds me has something there, or wants something there. That is the whole of my understanding.”
“Then we go to Estella. Mr Darcy has letters of credit —”
“No! You will do nothing of the kind.” It came out sharp, and he pulled it back with a glance at the door.
“Hear me, Lizzy, for you are not a merchant who will fetch a price. You are a handsome woman, and marriage, even marriage to a fellow as imposing as that one there, may not save if you make too much trouble of yourself. They have set my price at four thousand pounds, because that is what they believe a Cheapside merchant can be squeezed to raise. Four thousand. If a gentleman of ten thousand a year is seen chasing after me with my niece and a purse — asking, paying, letters of credit in his hand — they will conclude in a day that I am worth a great deal more than they asked, and the price will not stay at four thousand. And they will look at the man who paid it, and see a second Englishman, richer than the first, standing loose in their country with no one to protect him. You would not be rescuing me. You would be raising my ransom and handing them the next one in the same hour.”
“Mr Darcy has made himself a rather troublesome man to hold, Uncle. And if he can vouch for you —”
“Put any such ideas out of your head, for they will help no one. The money will be paid from London, by men who have done it before, through banks and papers, and never a face shown. That is how a thing like this is survived. Not by the two of you carrying gold up the north road like a lamp in the dark. You will not go to Estella. You will go to the coast, and you will go quietly, a plain married couple of no particular fortune. Every hour you are in Spain, you are a second Englishman with money, and a woman beside him worth taking to reach him. If they lay hands on him, they have you, and then there is no name and no priest and no God that helps you. Do you hear me?”
Her cheeks were hot with fear and shame, but she nodded. “I hear you.”
“That is not the same as promising me.”
“And leave you?”
The guard’s knuckle struck the door. One minute.
Her uncle did not let go of her hands. He looked at Darcy over her head.
“I cannot undo what a priest has done, and I have no hours left to learn your character. So, you will answer me one thing, and I will watch you say it. When it costs you — your purse, your business here, your neck — will you keep her safe?”
“With my life,” Darcy said. “It is a stranger’s word, and I know what that is worth to you. I have nothing better to give, or I would give you that instead.”
Her uncle looked at him for a long moment. Then he shut his eyes, and when he opened them, the necessity had won out over the doubt, because it had no choice.
“Go, then. Both of you, and quickly.” He crushed her hands once and let them fall. “And Mrs Darcy —”
Of every mouth that had shaped it since the church, his was the one that reached her. She stopped.
“Tell your aunt I am well. I want a letter in your own hand from England, written from my own parlour, when the ransom is paid.”
She did not have time to answer before the door came shut between them.