As Long As It Takes
XXVI
“Papeles.”
Elizabeth put into his hand the only thing they owned that answered to the word. The salvoconducto, the marriage document, and some coin to buy a clerk’s patience — everything that might prove them travellers of the respectable kind.
It had taken two full days and part of a third to reach Vitoria by mule.
Darcy had bartered away the spoons taken from the Estella money changer — a quick, one-sided bit of thievery for which they had acquired the dubious ownership of three servicably sound mules.
The trade apparently did not include their saddles and gear, a catch for which Elizabeth herself supplied the answer — her own travelling trunk, which was too large to manage along with Darcy’s, in exchange for the mules’ tackle.
By the time they stood at the checkpoint outside Vitoria, Darcy’s injury from the barge had scabbed over, or at least, he had ceased permitting her to bandage it.
The blisters on her feet had begun to firm into calluses, and she had developed a rather shocking tenderness for a creature that complained in obnoxious brays whenever he determined he was fatigued.
The mule she rode was not such a bad sort, either.
She had been chuckling to herself over her private joke when the town came into view.
There was no road north or west that did not run through this gate, and there would have been no passing it at all, if she did not have the paper setting her name down beside Darcy’s.
She would have been treated with every suspicion available, the sort of trouble a garrison keeps in a back room until it decided what to do with her.
Married, she was a wife to a man with a salvoconducto, and a wife was waved through.
The lieutenant who read their papers was young for the coat and not yet easy in the authority of it, and he had a whole morning to spend.
He held it to the light, turned it, and found the place near the fold where a seal should have sat and did not.
“There is no seal.”
“The church that married us lost its roof to the war a year before we came to it. The seal went the way of the saints. A great deal was wanting in Tudela by then, but you will see that the checkpoint in Calahorra found the document satisfactory.”
His eyes went past her to Darcy. “Your husband lets you be his tongue?”
“His tongue, his wits, and occasionally, his conscience. But I cannot vouch for his temper, for that is his alone.”
His mouth twitched, and still he laid the paper on his own side of the table and squared its edges. “It will be verified before you are permitted into the gates of Vitoria.”
“By whom?”
“By the proper office.”
“Which sits where, since the French burned it? You will keep that paper in your drawer, teniente, until they find you a bishop who outlived the occupation. And until they do, you will have unmarried me at your own gate, in front of your own men. A foreign woman with no husband and no one to answer for her is a great deal more trouble to hold than to wave past, and you would be making that trouble on purpose.” She let her eyes go to the two soldiers who had drifted nearer in the yard.
“I cannot think it is the order you were left to keep.”
He glanced at his men, then slid the paper back across the table, stopping it short, so that she came the last of the way to it herself.
She took it up. “You are very good, sir.”
He waved a bored hand. “Next.”
No one had any word of Don Ibarra.
This, they were at some pains to learn. It had been almost their first order of business to discover whether the men carrying her uncle had been seen or heard from after the Encartaciones road.
There was no official channel to learn such intelligence, and they dared not make one, but their last handful of copper coins had been spent on empty shrugs and half-baked fabrications before Darcy pulled her away.
“I think you know as well as I do that if anyone does have word of Ibarra or his whereabouts, we will be the last people to be told. They are happy to take your coins, but you are wasting your breath.”
“I have to find out something! My poor aunt. Poor Uncle Gardiner! He must be worn to the bone by now, and I imagine he is hungrier than we have been. If we can learn how to reach Ibarra from here, perhaps they will at least permit us to purchase him some comforts.”
“What with? I appreciate your concern for your uncle, but be realistic, Elizabeth. Any coin you send into those mountains to Ibarra’s camp will never be spent for your uncle’s benefit.
England ought to have word soon of Vega’s demands, perhaps already.
Surely, the money will be raised quickly, and the proper negotiations will take place. ”
“And then what? Vega is nowhere near Estella, or he was not when we left that town. And when he is finally troubled with the arrival of the ransom, he is certainly not going to rush out on his personal steed to send immediate word to Ibarra that the ransom is paid. Ibarra will no doubt extort his own advantage, and it could be many more months before —”
“And, my dear wife, there is nothing you can do about any of it.”
She gritted her teeth and put on her most thunderous glare. “I think I preferred it when you called me ‘Mrs Darcy.’”
“I can certainly do that. As you said yourself, you are far safer if everyone thinks you the property of a jealous husband. Did you wish to try that public kiss again, just to convince the masses that you are respectable?”
Elizabeth narrowed her eyes. “Do you not have a watch to sell, husband of mine?”
The goldsmith pushed three coins across the counter with one finger and sat back. He was bargaining with Elizabeth, but his eyes kept sliding to Darcy with a smugness that approached insolence.
Elizabeth did not touch the coins. “He offers a third of what the gold in the watch is worth,” she said, her eyes on the man. “He has either decided I am a woman who does not know what gold weighs, or he has judged rightly by the state of your coat that the road has not treated us kindly.”
“I would make a counteroffer, but I imagine you will have better success on your own. Do as you like.”
Elizabeth smiled sweetly and named a figure. The goldsmith laughed and named a smaller one.
She went back at the man. Darcy had the general impression — the figure climbing, the goldsmith beginning to work for it rather than to play his game. The figure climbed, and it stopped. Elizabeth’s mouth went to the flat line that told Darcy the easy ground was behind her.
He put his hand on the watch.
“Tell him it was worth more to the man who carried it before me,” he said, “than it will ever be worth to him.”
She turned her eyes full on him then, with a hint of pity. “Yes, of course.”
Then she gave the goldsmith the sentence, with some sentiment of her own laid under it.
The goldsmith stared at the watch for a few seconds longer.
Then he excused himself behind a curtain, and they heard the sounds of a strongbox being opened.
When he returned, more coins were laid on the counter beside the watch.
Darcy nodded curtly and accepted the deal.
Elizabeth swept up the coins and pressed them into Darcy’s hand, so that her fingers lay along his palm for the span of a heartbeat, and then they left together.
“He would not have gone to half that,” she said, on the step outside. “The moment you spoke.”
“I said very little.”
“You said exactly the right amount. He thought you were an ogre prepared to flog his poor wife for making a bad trade over a sentimental watch. You would have ruined the impression altogether if you had tried haggling yourself.”
Darcy’s face winced. “I am glad to see I continue as a useful brute for your purposes.”
“It is inconvenient how often you are useful and how seldom you are a fool.”
“I shall have that written on my epitaph.”
She looked up then, and the sun slanted under her wilting bonnet to highlight the gold rings at the centres of her eyes. “I am truly sorry about your watch.”
Darcy stopped, and for a few seconds, permitted himself to stare and let her think it was because he was confused. “The watch?”
“A thing like that, older than you and warmed by many hands — I truly hope it was not your most cherished memento of your father.”
He could not help it. The grin started, then grew into a chuckle and then a full-throated laugh.
Elizabeth’s face fell, and gone was the gold ring about her eyes as they darkened with suspicion. “What are you not telling me?”
“That was not my father’s watch. I purchased it for eight pounds two summers ago, after I cracked the crystal on my own watch and could not be without the time while it was being repaired.”
Her mouth dropped open, and she swatted his shoulder, driving his elbow unhappily into his still-tender ribs. “You fiend, you! You let me tell that man that you were parting with a family treasure!”
“Perhaps it was, once, but not my family’s. And before you bruise me in public again, I say we should find a place to stay for the night for ourselves and three mules with our newfound fortune.”
The office they were sent to was neither the first nor the second they tried that day.
The Diputación had burned; what remained of the province's business had been parcelled out among whatever buildings still had roofs, and this one — a former grain factor's house behind the cathedral — held the records the French had left behind when they ran.
Darcy understood the last part only because Elizabeth stopped in the doorway and did not go in.
“What is it?”
“He said the ledgers are here.” She was looking at the room beyond the clerk's table, and Darcy followed her eyes to it: a chamber stacked to the beams with boxes, bound registers, loose paper roped in bundles and stacked without order, a decade of a province's accounts heaped like firewood.
“Most of it, anyway. Whatever the French carried off from half the towns of Navarre pand could not carry home.”