Do Not Ask It
XXV
The crossing was worse than the bank had promised.
The bales went first, and the two of them after, crammed into what room the wool had left.
The flat barge went out onto the rolling sludge on a rope strung bank to bank and bucked the whole way over.
Twice, the river shouldered it hard enough that he put out a hand — to the gunwale, to a bale, once to her arm, which he let go the instant the barge righted.
Then Azcárate put them off against the far mud, and that was the last of him.
They stood on the far side with the flood between him and the men who saw his watch, the men who saw Elizabeth’s riot of the day before, and the terror he had held off until now came due all at once.
They had been a few minutes from it — a hand on his arm, a walk up the bank he would not have come back down, and she being passed about for the entertainment of brigands.
The tremors took his breath until he had to fist a hand to his teeth and close his eyes.
The only thing that recalled him at length was her hand on his shoulder.
He sucked in one last gulp of air, then forced his lungs to release it in even, slow draws, before he turned to her. “You really were rather remarkable back there. I never heard so many falsehoods in my life, but that was clever thinking.”
“I just enjoyed calling you a thief. Have you any idea what I would have given in Meryton to make such a spectacle of the proud Fitzwilliam Darcy of Derbyshire?”
He tried to laugh, found he had little heart for it, and only shook his head instead. “I believe I have an inkling.”
She took the watch from her bodice and held it out. It was still warm from her, and he put it away without a word.
“You were better than I looked for, if it is any comfort,” she added. “Eyes down and mouth shut? I had not known you could do both at once.”
The watch had to come off him. He would have sold it at the money changer’s, but after yesterday’s debacle, he did not dare even try to haggle it away on the northern shore of Estella.
No village short of a real town would be large enough to swallow the sale of a gold watch from a ragged Englishman, and the silver at his wrists and knees was a question he could not afford to have asked aloud.
There would be nothing until Vitoria, and until then, he was a walking target.
“I ought not to have called it stolen.”
She had not spoken in the better part of an hour, and she said it nearly to herself rather than to him. An apology from Elizabeth was rare enough to be worth searching for the trap in it.
“I do not see why you should regret that,” he ventured. “What does it matter now?”
“Well, it is a fine-looking thing, and I might have risked it being taken by the authorities.”
“Still, I fail to see the problem. It was not taken, and neither was I, which, I hope, would have troubled you a little more greatly than a stolen watch.”
“Oh, it is not that. I would hate to be the reason you lost your father’s watch. Something dear and sentimental like that? It was a near thing, I daresay.”
She thought it was his father’s watch? Only a fool would carry something both precious and valuable into a country so lately torn apart.
Which, of course, did make him a fool — he still wore his signet ring, but he had at least some foresight.
He could have ended her misapprehension in a sentence.
It was only a cheap watch, barely fine enough to call itself a timepiece.
It was silly, perhaps, but he rather enjoyed the notion that he did have one secret from her. “Think nothing of it,” he said at last. “I shall have to sell it anyway, of course. It is a greater liability than I had accounted for.”
“That is a shame. You are quite right, but I shall count it Spain’s greatest injustice, taking such a treasured memento from you when you cannot even be assured you will have a home to return to when it is all done.”
“Your sympathy is touching.”
“I will have more of it to dispense when it comes to the moment of sacrifice. I might even shed an honest tear for you.”
He smiled a little to himself. “Do not strain yourself overmuch in the exercise.”
The man who kept the venta had been pricing her since they walked in.
Elizabeth felt his eyes on her the moment they sat at the broad table in the common room, and Darcy was watching him with a suspicion bordering on hostility.
But the man possessed nothing threatening in his manner.
Rather, after some while, he approached the table with a smile and an extra pot of something hot they had neither called nor paid for.
His eyes spoke eloquently enough of his intentions — down from her face to her bodice and up again, arriving at a notion that plainly pleased him. She had been looked at before in her life; she had not, until recently, been totted up like a cask behind a counter and assigned a price.
“A woman like you,” he said, as though laying a gift before her, “is wasted on the road.”
He said he had need of hands behind his counter of an evening.
Good wine, good custom, good coin. She had only to pour it and to smile while she poured; a face like hers would fetch the muleteers down out of three valleys, and he knew how to be generous with those who brought him trade.
Four reales the night, he said — twice what he would give a Spanish girl, and he wished her to know it, because an English girl was an exotic accent and face behind his counter.
He would give her her board, too, and whatever the drinkers left on the counter when the wine was in them.
Four reales the night was not much, but after a few weeks… Elizabeth tallied the numbers in her head, and they were not entirely unfavourable for two travellers who were bleeding money with every mile.
Darcy had not followed half of it. His Spanish ran to bread and money and the names of the saints, and the innkeeper had spoken low and fast and very largely to her bodice; but he had read the innkeeper’s manner, for which he had needed no language on earth to comprehend.
“What does he want with you?” He had set his bread down.
“A pot-girl. Behind his counter to pour the wine and make myself agreeable to anyone who pays. He offers four reales a night — double, he was careful to tell me, what a Spanish girl would fetch, with my board, and the drinkers’ loose coin besides.
Which is more than the two of us can show between us tonight, and I am considering it. ”
“You are not.”
“I said that I am considering it.”
“Elizabeth. No.”
And there it was — the whole of his position laid bare in the one syllable.
He might forbid her in their own tongue until the candles burned out, and not a word of it would reach the innkeeper’s ear.
To refuse the man — to end the thing — he needed her mouth to do it for him.
He could forbid her and hope she chose to obey him.
That was the whole of his power here, and they both knew it.
It was the most galling position she had ever seen him put in, and she was a little ashamed of how much she enjoyed it.
“Give me one reason,” she said, and turned a sweet and social smile upon the innkeeper as she said it, “that is not your pride. You carried grain all day yesterday and wool for half of the day today. You let a boatman hire your back by the hour, and came away bleeding for it, and I held my tongue and let you, because we needed the crossing. I can pour wine without bleeding. Tell me the difference.”
“You know the difference. A muleteer does not lay hands on the back that carries his grain. Pour his wine and smile for his coin, and you will learn the difference inside a week. And then I shall have to kill a man in a country where I cannot speak the language well enough to be hanged in it.”
“I have handled muleteers.”
“Across a table, with me at your side and a door at your back. This is a counter, with a cellar behind it and me nowhere near it, because he will not hire the husband who glowers, only the wife who pours.” He leaned in.
“I will not buy our bread with your face or your body, paid to be where that man can reach across his own counter and help himself to what he is very plainly intending to take. Do not ask it of me.”
She held Darcy’s eye past the point the argument required.
Then she turned to the innkeeper and told him, in the Portuguese she had been bending into Spanish since Tudela, that he was very good, that she was sensible of the honour he did her, and that she must regretfully decline — her husband, she added, permitting herself the one small revenge, was of a jealous and ungovernable temper, and unable to spare her of an evening.
The innkeeper’s eyes shifted, taking in the size of the husband and the set of his stubborn jaw. He bowed graciously and declared that he understood the matter completely. He went to attend to his other tables.
And Elizabeth — who had not, in any corner of her heart, wished to pour wine for muleteers, who had raised the thing half to spite him and half because the figure on the table was real and they were hungry — finished the cold remains of her broth out of temper.
Not because he had forbidden her; she had, in the end, refused of her own accord.
Because when it came to it, she had refused less for her own good sense than for the look on his face when he said, “Do not ask it of me.” And that was a thing she did not care to look at too nearly.
He had got paper somewhere. She did not ask where, or what it had cost — not because she was not curious, but because she would spare him the recitation of their penury.
He set a single sheet before her, a pen that had been mended too many times, and trimmed the candle so the light fell on the page and not in her eyes.
“Estella has a post that runs when the roads allow. They could not tell me how often, and I’ve no way of knowing whether the letter or we ourselves will reach the coast first. We may as well hedge our bets. Your aunt will be counting the days.”
So, she wrote to her aunt.
The ink had half dried in the pot and wanted coaxing; the nib caught on the coarse paper and threw a spatter she took up with her thumb.
My dear Aunt,
The evening cold was in her fingers, and the letters came cramped and small, nothing like the easy hand she had spent on this same woman across a hundred idle pages, by a fire at Longbourn that had never once wanted feeding.
She told, in the mildest terms possible, what had befallen her uncle.
She was assured that the matter was only a pecuniary one, and would be settled sensibly by men in London and was probably already being brokered.
Her uncle was a valuable man, and would be kept valuable until paid for.
There was only the mild inconvenience to herself.
She promised she was well. She was in safe company, she said, having fallen in with a party who was likewise travelling towards the northern coast to return to England.
She did not elaborate on the quantity, nor the nature of that company, but she did write it in the plural, “we” and “the party” and “our”, a whole brave company conjured out of two ruined travellers.
I am coming home.
That, she wrote last, and pressed hardest, until the ink nearly bled through the back side of the paper. She folded the sheet before it was well dry and held it out to him.
“It makes no mention of you,” she said.
“I had supposed it must not. Nor did I mention you in my letter to my sister, which, naturally, will be read by my uncle and my cousin.” He took the letter and folded it away inside his breast, against the bound ribs, and got to his feet.
“Perhaps we would have done better to at least mention one another’s names in passing, so some other party might know there was another stranded subject of the crown here. ”
“I dare not. Your name is too well known to my aunt, which might lead to speculation on her part. And any mention of an inconvenienced female in your letter might lead to fancies your sister must not be taught to entertain.”
“Quite right. It was the right letter to have written, then.”
“It was.”