Amassing Ruin
XIII
The sun outside the gaol had the gross indecency to be cheerful.
Elizabeth came back into it with her uncle’s last pressure still burning in her hands and the title Mrs Darcy sounding in her ears with a greater intimacy than the priest had managed to give it.
The street was alive with carts, women at doorways, and a mule which looked long resigned to suffering another day in the hot sun.
That common life, continuing in sight of prison walls, appeared to her almost insulting.
Darcy fell into step beside her without speaking. They walked a little way like people not yet fit for the public air. At length, he asked, “How do you come by the language?”
She blinked at him, her mind not yet drawn from the gaol cell. “What?”
“Spanish. Portuguese. Whatever alchemy has enabled you to make threats sound respectable to clerks.”
“Oh.” Her gaze fell to the pavers again, and she crossed her arms over her stomach.
“Portuguese. I learned it on the back stairs at Longbourn. My mother took on a maid the year I was fourteen — Rosa Maria da Conceic?o, though Mama had her down to plain Rosa before the first evening was out. She had been a gentleman’s daughter once, in the Minho, with land and a name and a marriage arranged for her, until the French came through in ‘seven and left her none of the three.
“By the time she washed up in Hertfordshire, she had lost her country, her people, and any patience she had ever had for England, so she avenged herself on the whole of it by teaching me verbs. I followed her like a duckling; she talked to keep from weeping, I think, and I was generally the only thing in the way of it. So, I learned the language, and with it a country I had never seen — roads, river-towns, a convent where she had been a girl — a whole map made of her homesickness, which I have never had cause to doubt. My uncle traded with Lisbon, so he made some use of me when I had few other diversions. By the time I reached Spain, I had enough of one language to be cheated in another.”
“So that is why your uncle brought you? You had been helping him?”
“For that, and because I was there to be brought.” They turned down the narrower street toward the lodging-house.
“My father had died. My uncle had letters to answer and business he meant to grow, and the kindness to pretend I might be of use in both. I had no wish to sit in Gracechurch Street cultivating resignation while other people were busy.”
He was quiet so long she thought he had let it go. Then he said, “I am very sorry for your father. I ought to have said so before. I had no proper occasion.”
She felt, absurdly, as if somebody had touched a bruise she had almost forgot to protect. “There has been a general want of proper occasions.”
“I do not mean it formally.”
“No.” She kept her eyes on the street before them. “That is why it signifies.”
They walked on. A woman under a striped awning shouted after them in Spanish that the English bride had chosen herself a handsome husband. Elizabeth did not translate. She had translated enough this morning.
After a little while, Darcy asked, “And your next younger sister?”
She glanced up. “Mary?”
“You told me in the inn that she had married Collins. I am still trying to reconcile the fact to the gentleman. I do not know him personally, but I cannot suppose him to be a sensible man.”
Elizabeth gave a short laugh. “You may spare yourself the effort of making him agreeable. Mary has done the work already. Mr Collins had Longbourn, a living in Kent, and a general fondness for admiration. My sister had fortitude, piety, and a taste for improving books. Between them, providence contrived a harmony I should never have predicted and cannot sincerely regret.”
“I cannot account for why I assumed. I am only surprised to hear it was Miss Mary.” He said it to the road ahead, not to her.
She squinted up at him, shading her eyes from the sun. “Two years is a long while to be wrong about something so important as the name of another man’s wife, and you do not strike me as a man with much practice at it.”
“I begin to suspect Lady Catherine has much to answer for.”
“Only now?”
That almost drew the shadow of a smile from him.
It vanished as they turned into the yard of the lodging-house and found the landlady waving with a dishcloth in one hand and a rooster under the other arm.
A carter with a mule flicking flies stood under the eaves, and Pilar was arguing with a driver in Spanish.
The landlady saw them and cried out in triumph that a cart was found, and would not grow cheaper by being admired.
Elizabeth translated for Darcy’s benefit. “The landlady has found us a cart that will carry us out of Tudela within the hour, if we can agree on where it is to take us.”
“You have already decided where it is to take us.”
“Have I?”
“You have had it decided since your uncle told you not to.” He had turned from the cart, and was now looking at her. “You do not intend to go to the coast.”
“Do you?”
He swallowed, and his gaze grew unfocused.
“There will be a ship at Santander,” she went on, before he thought of whatever protest he had behind his tongue, “with room enough for two English travellers who have had the good sense to give Spain up as a bad business. My uncle told me very clearly what I ought to do — take the passage, and leave his affairs to London agents who have done this before. It is the sensible thing. It may even be the right thing. And you have not once, in the last quarter hour, told me we ought to do it.”
“Neither have you.”
“I asked you first.”
He was quiet for a moment. “If I take ship at Santander,” he said at last, “I go home to England with a bond I cannot enforce and a mortgage I cannot pay, and I am ruined before the leaves turn. Everything I came eight hundred miles for is inland, behind us, up that road. The coast is the one direction I cannot afford.”
“So, you mean to go north?”
He slanted her a knowing look. “So, I expect, do you.”
“Well, then, we are a sorry, defiant, and possibly ignorant pair. We want the same road for reasons that have nothing to do with one another, and both of us are about to disoblige the only man who gave us sensible advice all day.”
Darcy looked at the tired carter, the open trunks, the whole shabby apparatus of their going on. “I think your uncle entirely right, Miss Bennet. And I mean to disregard him completely.”
“Then we are agreed,” said Elizabeth, “which alarms me more than the alternative did.”
The room still held very nearly everything they owned in the world scattered across its surfaces.
Darcy had allowed himself, that morning, the fond delusion that packing would be a matter of minutes.
He had not yet accounted for the fact that he would be doing it in a space eleven feet square, in company with a woman who moved through it on a different set of orbits entirely, so that the two of them spent the first of those minutes performing something between a country dance and a collision.
He reached for the valise. She had reached for it at the same instant, and their hands arrived together on the strap, and both withdrew as though it had grown hot.
“Take it,” he said.
“I had every intention.” She reached quickly and snatched it out of his way as if she thought he might bite.
He turned to the washstand for his razor and shaving things, and found her already there, sweeping his brushes into a roll.
He moved to the left to give her room. She stepped aside at the same moment for the same reason, into him.
He put out a hand to steady her and got a fistful of shawl, and they disentangled with as much speed as horror.
“Be my guest. I will collect the papers,” he said, retreating to the table, which at least could be relied upon to hold still.
He went down on one knee to gather the inventory that had slid beneath it — Jennings’s hand, mercifully legible, itemising everything now in a cart bound the wrong way up the country — and was in that undignified posture, half under the table with his coat rucked to his ears, when he became aware that she had stopped to observe him.
“Pray do not let me hurry you,” she said. “I find the view instructive. I had wondered how a gentleman of your consequence contrived to bend at all.”
“With difficulty, and without an audience, by preference.”
“Then I shall deprive myself of it.” She did not move an inch.
He came up with the inventory, his colour higher than the exertion accounted for, and put the table between them again, because the table was the only ally he had left in Navarre.
The thing acquired a rhythm at last, a wary choreography of reach-and-yield, until between them, the room had emptied into the valise and the two trunks, and there remained only the London memorandum still left on the table.
She picked it up to pack it.
He should have taken it from her. He was a half second too slow, and a half second was all the woman ever seemed to require, for by the time his hand moved, she had turned it over and her eyes had gone to the foot of the page, where his solicitor, in a clerk’s tidy indifferent hand, had set down the sum.
The whole momentum of her stopped, like a mill when the race is shut.
“That is the figure?” She read it aloud herself, quietly, as if to be certain the paper had not misled her. “One hundred thousand pounds?”
“The principal,” he said. “Yes.”
Her head came up.
He knew what was coming, and could no more have stopped it than stopped the tide.
She had the counting sickness worse than any clerk he had ever employed, and the sum had already gone into her like a key into a lock.
She stared at him for a handful of seconds, then her eyes dropped to the page again.
“Lent in the year nine. At interest. Under seal, you told me, upon security. Five years of interest, then, running the whole while and never once paid.”
Her eyes widened as her lips moved faintly. “Then they do not owe you one hundred thousand pounds at all, Mr Darcy. They owe you a very great deal more than that.”
He reached to take the paper from her hand, but she turned slightly, pulling it back as her expression changed from awe to disbelief.
He sighed. “The interest earnings alone should tally to something above seventy thousand pounds, which would have been a handsome return on only five years’ investment. If I ever see them.”
She sobered, and at last, she returned the page to him. “Little wonder that you came all this way yourself. I now forgive you for seeming the least bit cross in the square.”
He folded the paper and put it with the others. “What do you mean, cross?”
She laughed shortly. “Only that your face two days ago when you were refused was that of a man who looked prepared to burn down the clerk’s desk.
No, Mr Darcy, I do not blame you, with a mortgage in England eating the estate from underneath you while you chase a man who is always in the next town but one. ”
“You have a great gift for putting a thing at its worst.”
“I have a great gift for telling the truth. One hundred thousand pounds? My uncle would have called that a hanging figure.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning a sum large enough that a man will do very foolish things sooner than let go of it. Your father, for one, who set the whole of his son’s inheritance against a war. And you, for another, who has crossed a kingdom and married a stranger sooner than write it off.”
He buckled the straps on his valise and refused to look up at her. “You are hardly a stranger.”
“I am the nearest thing to it, or I was yesterday. I suppose a night hearing each other snore has already torn down any pretence of calling one another slight acquaintances.”
The landlady’s fist descended upon the door, and her voice came through it announcing that the driver was entertaining other offers on his mule and his cart, and if they still wanted his services, the price was going up by the minute.
“We are coming,” Elizabeth called in Spanish. “Come, husband. Your ruin will travel faster if we carry it between us.”