Esposa
XV
By the time the light came down, the driver had deposited them at a posting-house — not much to look at, he allowed, but harder for thieves to reach than the open road.
The posting-house possessed a stable, a kitchen, two rough bedchambers, and pricing scheme far above its weathered beams and creaking doors.
Darcy paid for broth, bread, and a room so narrow that they would have been more comfortable in the open air where they were not living on each other’s breath. The woman at the hearth showed them up with the frank assumption that a married couple would know what to do with it.
Darcy thanked her in the six words of Spanish he trusted. She left them alone, the door shut, and the room became a problem.
It held a bed, which he did not look at directly, as though it were an indelicacy in the corner.
It also held a horsehair chair of great age and greater aroma, a joint stool, a washstand, and a candle that had clearly been apportioned on the understanding that guests at such an hour had no further use for their eyes.
“You will take the bed,” he said.
“I had assumed a new phrasing for the same argument this evening, Mr Darcy. You disappoint me.”
“I am too tired to contest anything of greater consequence than my own name.”
“Then we are agreed, which I find came alarmingly easy.” She set her reticule on the washstand and stood looking at the chair. “And I assume you mean to take the chair, just as you took the truckle, but I daresay the offering is far worse this time.”
He had removed his waistcoat, and was already slipping off his braces, daring her to look at him in his simple linen shirt. “That will do as well as another.”
“It is made of decay and one dead animal.”
“Two, I should think, by the smell of it.” He drew the joint stool round to the front of the chair with his boot. “I shall put my feet up and be a monument to gentlemanly restraint, and in the morning, you may tell the woman at the door I snored like a contented man.”
There followed a quarter hour of the most elaborate courtesy either of them had shown all day, conducted entirely around the furniture.
She required the washstand; he found urgent occupation at the window until she had done.
He desired to wash his forearms and neck; she developed a sudden fascination with the contents of her reticule.
She lay down at last under the coverlet, still half dressed, her back to the room. He took the chair, and the stool. The candle, he pinched out between finger and thumb because blowing it felt too much like a thing a man did in his own bedchamber.
“Mr Darcy?”
He opened his eyes into the darkness. “Yes?”
She was quiet for a few seconds. “Nothing. Only I find I cannot say goodnight to a husband and mean an acquaintance by it, and I have not worked out the word for what you are.”
“When you have worked it out, you might tell me. I have been at the same problem since Tudela.”
Elizabeth woke with her cheek on folded linen, her neck bent nearly sideways, and the conviction that dawn had come too soon.
For one confused instant, she did not know where she was. Then the candle-stump, a man’s valise on the chair, the shawl that had not been about her shoulders when she went to sleep, and the smell of horse and smoke restored the world in proper order.
Mr Darcy had gone.
Not far, however. The papers had been stacked out of danger. Her reticule had been set on the stool instead of left under her elbow. A chipped cup stood within reach, and though the coffee looked capable of removing varnish, it was still warm.
She eyed it with suspicion.
There were certain gestures that must inspire open gratitude. There were others — small things, like a straightened shawl, a cup left within reach, bread wrapped in a napkin because somebody had observed that she ate almost nothing yesterday — which were altogether more troublesome.
The door opened and Darcy entered with the morning at his back, hat in hand, coat powdered with dust. “You are awake.”
“I had not meant to die in this bed.”
“That is as well.” He set down a folded scrap of paper. “An ostler set a loose shoe for a group of soldiers last night. He spoke a little French, which was a piece of luck, so I was able to get some intelligence of him.”
Elizabeth had been twisting her hair up, so she only cast her eyes on the note and did not yet pick it up. “What did you learn?”
“They had with them certain captives. One was a foreigner, middle-aged, well dressed when they brought him in, and loud about it. Under a captain’s guard — Llorente, the man thought, though he would not swear to it. They fed and watered their horses and went on west before the light.”
She pushed the last pin in her hair and took up the note. There were only a few words in Darcy’s quick, severe hand:
Llorente, perhaps. English prisoner, well-dressed, loud. West, before dawn. Calahorra by midday if the road holds.
“If the road holds?”
“The bridge west of here is being watched. Militia, customs, patriots, thieves — one cannot always distinguish among them at first view. We may be delayed.”
“But not turned back?”
“I do not mean to permit it.”
Elizabeth drank the coffee because he stood there watching, and she required something to do with her hands and mouth.
“So, we chase Captain Llorente to Calahorra,” she said, “learn what he has done with my uncle, and continue until Spain repents having admitted English people.”
“That is the outline.”
“And the details?”
“The details depend upon whether there exists on that road anyone who can answer to my own concerns. In that case, I am in hopes that your Portuguese will serve as well or better than Jennings’ Spanish.”
“I had thought that one of my principal domestic duties.”
A quick knock echoed at the door. When Darcy opened it, the landlady’s daughter entered with a jug balanced on her hip and, after a bob of apology toward the newly married English, delivered in rapid Spanish the morning’s gossip. Elizabeth listened, asked one question, and translated.
“She says the cart driver will not wait beyond a quarter hour, and the western road is full of uniforms. Oh, and she says that if the English husband means to dispute yesterday’s price as loudly today as he did last night, she hopes heaven will close his mouth, as a mercy to the house.”
Darcy extended a palm full of coins. “Tell her she need not invoke heaven. I will make no protests.”
The girl grinned at them both, called Elizabeth senora, and vanished again.
When the door shut, Darcy turned to her with a wry look that felt altogether too companionable.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“That means there is something, and you are only too civil to say it.”
“It means Spain appears resolved to believe us married.”
“Technically, we are. At least until Santander.”
“Yes,” he said, gathering the papers. “We must try not to disappoint it.”
The bridge west of the village had once been Roman, then Spanish, and was now chiefly military.
Darcy sat with one boot braced against the cart while the mule was checked, the driver contradicted, and himself scrutinised by a cynical guard.
A raw wind came down the river. Elizabeth sat opposite him, pale from the cold, bad coffee, and too little sleep.
She would not complain of any of those deficiencies.
She would rather, he suspected, have bitten through her own glove.
Three militia men stood before the cart. One had taken charge by virtue of a magnificent moustache and the fact that he stood half a head taller than his companions. He wanted names, business, destination, papers, and asked why the lady, and not her husband, was the one who did all the talking.
Elizabeth had already leaned forward to answer, but the officer kept gesturing for her to get out of the cart to speak to him. For what purpose, Darcy could only guess.
“My wife will not be badgered out of a cart to stand in this mud,” Darcy cut in. “Tell them they may speak to me, and if my grammar offends them, they may comfort themselves that my money will be more fluent.”
Elizabeth’s eyes flew to his face. So did the officer’s.
“Your wife,” said the man, “can answer for herself. She comes.” At least, that was what Darcy thought he said.
“No. No la senora.” He stuttered for a few seconds while the word would not come. “Ella— she remains. Aquí. En el carro. You want—dinero? Money? Yo. A mí. You speak to me.” He had run out of Spanish and finished in plain, hard English. “Whatever it is, you take it up with me.”
The soldier’s face looked blank for a second, so he glanced at Elizabeth.
She looked rather smug as she supplied a more comprehensive version of Darcy’s protest. The soldier’s moustache shifted unhappily, but he pointed at Darcy’s valise and said a word Darcy did not need to have translated. “Papeles.”
He produced the letters, the memorandum, the priest’s notation of marriage when proof was demanded that the senora was indeed the senora and not a French espionne, and finally a coin of sufficient brightness to improve his mood.
The officer examined everything, asked after their business, and clarified their destination. “Calahorra?” he said at last.
“Sí.”
He said something to Elizabeth, and she replied with numerous gestures. He heard the name Vega, then Llorente, and some reference to “prisioneros.” She turned to Darcy with the English.
“A revenue escort passed an hour ago. Two wagons, six mounted men with prisoners, one of them was a troublesome foreigner. He says, ‘If that is the man you seek, he has a temper’.”
Darcy made a grim sort of smile and pointed at Elizabeth. “Eh… tio… oncle, sí?… du… esposa.”
Esposa. He heard Elizabeth’s breath catch once, though she only nodded in agreement and clarified the assertion. “Sí, sí. é meu tío.”
The officer looked between them with renewed curiosity. He gestured to Elizabeth with the papers once more. “Tio?” And then he laughed and said something far too jesting to be encouragement.
Elizabeth retorted with something sharp-sounding, and the officer sobered and gave her a phrase that sounded more useful.
Elizabeth nodded, then turned to him. “My uncle will be entered in Calahorra before he is sent onward. He says if we have business there on his behalf, we should make it quickly. Men with papers and money to be got from them go north. Men without them disappear sideways.”
Darcy gave him another coin for that sentence, because it was worth one. The guard tipped his hat, raised the barrier, and made a motion to the carter.
They were halfway over the bridge before Elizabeth said, “You spoke very well for a man who yesterday required me to bully a clerk on his behalf.”
“I spoke three sentences and purchased the rest.”
“Yes, and badly enough that he pitied you. I almost did, too.”
“I am glad my deficiencies can still amuse you.”
“They do more than amuse me. They reconcile me to the bargain. A perfect husband would be intolerable.”
“I had known you to be severe on your own sex, but what do you hold against respectable masculinity?”
“Nothing, indeed. Only, I find that when I have to claim such a man as my own, I vastly prefer that he be flawed enough to be interesting. And what about you? You said ‘esposa’ as if the word was already frightfully comfortable to you.”
His mind, traitorous thing, supplied the image of her asleep on the cot last night, with the shawl under her chin.
“It was shorter,” he said, “than reciting the particulars of our arrangement.”
“Convenience again. I see.”
“Everything in this marriage appears to recommend itself on that ground.”
“Not everything,” she said. He had no idea what she meant by the objection, but she followed it with a quirk of her brow and a suspicious grin that he was certain was meant for nothing but his own discomfort.
Darcy looked away first. There was no use pursuing the thought unless he meant to drive the cart into the river.