Taking Instruction
XXIII
Azcárate would not cross the river as dusk fell.
The last of the grain sacks were loaded just before the sun shot red-gold over the valley, which left enough time, in Elizabeth’s estimation, for them to push off and find some lodging on the north side of the river before night fell.
But the bargeman said it was impossible.
Too dangerous, he said, with the light low.
They would have to cross in the morning.
And so, there was nothing for it but for Darcy and Elizabeth to return to the same room they had hired the night before, and hope no one watched their return just after dark.
Supper was bread and a broth with the rumour of a fowl somewhere far upstream of it, and they ate slowly because slowly made it last. It did not make it enough.
The hunger that stayed behind when the bowl was empty was a feeling she was coming to know too well — not the sharp want of a missed meal, but the kind that meant to keep them company now the whole way to the sea.
He had washed the scrape as she ordered, in water that had cost more than the broth, and sat now on the edge of the bed with his shirt drawn off the one shoulder and held to his far side, baring his ribs.
She knelt behind him with a strip torn from the tail of her spare shift, which was the cleanest cloth they owned and a poor character for the rest.
“Lift your arm.”
“You are uncommonly free with your orders tonight.”
“I am uncommonly free with them every night. You usually ignore them, anyway. Lift your arm, Mr Darcy, or bleed through 'til morning and account for yourself to Azcárate, who will find some way to charge us for the inconvenience. I am indifferent which.”
He lifted his arm.
She passed the cloth around him, and the backs of her fingers went along the warm skin of his side. “You flinched.”
“I did not. That was you.”
“I am not the one who is injured. You flinched, and then you blamed it on me. Should we summon a surgeon? Is there any damage to the bones?” She pressed lower, below the cut where a bruise was already starting to stare purple through the flesh.
He shot from under her hand. “By God!” And then he winced again from the sudden movement, his own hand hovering over his ribs as he tried to brace himself against the pain and found nothing would serve. Instead, his teeth sank into his lower lip, and his eyes clenched.
“Oh. Yes, indeed, the rib may be —”
“It is not my damned rib, it is just a bruise, and you thumping on it will do no good whatsoever!”
“Well, there is no sense in swearing at me! I am only trying to… Hold still.” She wrapped her arms around him again and drew the strip snug against the cut, drawing another hiss and muffled curse from him.
“One thing I shall be bloody glad of… blast! Not so hard!” His teeth bared, and tears started at the corners of his eyes.
Elizabeth soothed the cloth over the wound before she put her arms around him again to make a second pass. “Yes, go on. What will you be glad of?”
“In a few more weeks, we can both of us pretend this never happened,” he growled. “I do not relish the eternal humiliation of you casting this up to me whenever you fancied for the next forty years.”
“Oh, well struck.” She finished the second pass and began a third. “You will be glad to hear I resent it precisely as much as you imagine. I had no ambition this morning, when I rose, to spend my evening as your surgeon.”
“We are agreed, then, and may proceed in honest ill humour and waste no more breath on civility.”
“Honest ill humour.” She drew the cloth round again. “I could not have described this marriage better had I a lifetime to do it.”
That surprised something out of him, a low grunt. In anyone less determined to be wretched, it might have grown into a laugh. The small motion of it shifted the shirt at his shoulder, and there, where she had been at such pains not to look, was the scar.
She had resolved once not to be curious about it, not to ask, but now, it seemed the least of all intimacies.
“This is old.” Her thumb had stopped beside the silver line in his skin, not upon it. “How did you come by it?”
For a while, he said nothing, and she had begun to think the silence was to be his whole answer, when he gave her another.
“I was two-and-twenty,” he said, “and very sure of myself.”
“You? I cannot credit it.”
He snorted. “A fair hit. One of the things I was surest of turned out to be the wrong end of another man’s quarrel. I came away with this. The other gentleman came away a good deal worse. I have not, since, been certain of much with the same freedom.”
“It looks like a sword cut. Or what I imagine a sword cut would look like.”
“Just so. It is the only wound I ever earned that has had the decency to stop aching.”
She had learned enough of him to hear the closed door standing just behind the open one, and she had no intention of knocking on it. “I am sorry for… well, for whatever does still ache,” she said instead.
“Do not be. I have no earthly use for your sympathy, and you would resent the spending of it inside the hour.”
“I would. Bitterly.” She took up the binding again — gentler now, though she would have denied the gentleness on the rack. “I only meant… oh, bother, I do not know what I meant. It was a great deal easier when we disliked each other, Mr Darcy. I find I have a real talent for it. Let us go back.”
“By all means.”
Then she pulled the knot tight — tighter than the wound strictly wanted — and he made a hissing sound he would probably have preferred to keep behind his teeth, and the treaty lapsed on the instant.
“Sorry. Let me loosen that a bit.” Her fingers worked at her knot again, her knuckles grazing his skin a good deal more than she would have liked. “There, is that better?”
He drew an experimental breath, and her eyes followed the movement of his bared chest as it rose and fell. “Yes, I believe I shall not expire from want of air now. Have you any other torments to bestow?”
She sat back. “No.”
“Then I suppose I must thank you.” He dropped his shirt back into place, ran a hand through his hair, and began to put himself to rights. Then he glanced at her face and stopped. “What?”
“I…” Her face fell. “No, you will mock me, and that is something I refuse to endure.”
“I have never stood on so little ground from which to mock someone else. Come, out with it, or you will be making that face all the way to the coast.”
“I shall not.” She rose from where she had been sitting beside him and walked towards the small, cloudy copper plate where a lady was meant to attend her toilette. She found his reflection in it, and he had risen to his feet to stand behind her.
“I think even you would agree that I am likely the more stubborn of the two of us, though by only a very narrow margin. You may as well confess whatever it is.”
She lifted her shoulders and reached for the pitcher to pour some more water into the basin. “Yesterday, in the plaza, when you… That is, when we…”
“‘Kiss’ is not an evil word, and even if it were, I doubt that would make you shrink from saying it.”
She turned to face him. “You said I was terrible at it.”
“And you are. But that is not a character failing. All you want is a bit of practise.”
She raised her brows softly. “Practise?”
His face went blank for an instant, then swiftly closed down. “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’? I never even asked you for anything.”
“You were about to.”
“Nothing of the kind. I never liked practising my pianoforte, I loathed practising my needlework, and if ever have to practise my curtsey again so that ‘Lady Catherine would not be ashamed of me,’ I shall… I shall…”
He crossed his arms. “Go on. This was just becoming interesting.”
“I shall throw the kettle through the window, I suppose. So, no, just because I repeated a word you said does not mean anything at all.”
“Just as well.” He unfolded his arms and bent before his trunk. “I have been injured enough for one day.”
Elizabeth frowned at his back as he searched in his trunk for a fresh shirt.
When he found one that had suffered less on the walk from Calahorra than the bloody, ripped one he was wearing, he pulled the old one off over his head.
There was very little of his back to be seen now, after her bandaging job, but that one scar…
Elizabeth bit her lip and turned away to take her hair down. “However —”
He sighed. “What now?”
“Well, it is only… we are travelling as husband and wife.”
“Hence the ring.” He pulled the fresh shirt over his head and tugged the cuffs to straighten them, still facing the trunk. “Something to maintain appearances.”
“But we get on by quarrelling. We act more like a brother and a sister than a married couple.”
He snorted. “Nobody would accuse us of being siblings.”
Elizabeth frowned and began to plait her hair for bed. He was silent — she thought he was probably still looking away, because he never seemed to mind displaying his bare chest to her, but he always seemed uncomfortable with glancing her way when her hair was down.
“Why not?” she asked suddenly.
She heard the floorboards shift as he turned. “What?”
“Why would no one think we are siblings? We have nearly the same colouring. I once heard you say your sister was about my height. I hold you in no awe, and you are perfectly overbearing when it suits you, which I assume —”
“First of all, I am not overbearing to my sister, and secondly…” His eyes narrowed. “No. Forget it.”
“You are simply a fount of wisdom tonight. All I asked to begin with was why you think I am such a bad kisser, and we have gone six turns about the room without finding a single corner.”
“When I make out whatever you meant by that, perhaps I will have an answer.”
Elizabeth put her hand on her hip. “Very well, I shall put it plainly. Show me what I did wrong.”
Darcy’s face drained. His jaw slackened, and he dropped the cravat he had been holding, then bent to scoop it up. “Show you? As in… you want me to… to teach you how to kiss?”