Priorities #2
She glanced round once. He was sitting up in the bed watching her, and at first, his face was only confused. And then she watched it change, watched him understand. Then his expression fell, and what came into his face then was not confusion at all.
It was disappointment.
Plain, and unguarded, and gone almost as soon as it came.
He mastered it, he was too good not to, but she had seen it.
She had seen it clearly. And she had time, in the middle of her scrambling, to think, There.
There it is. That is the first of it. I told myself I would see it one day, and I have seen it already, on the very first morning, before Spain has faded at all.
Then his hands were on her shoulders. She had not heard him rise. “Let me help you.”
“There is nothing you… I can manage.”
“Elizabeth.” He turned her gently by the shoulders, the petticoat clutched uselessly against her.
“You have nothing to hide from me. Nothing. There is not one part of you or one office of your body that would make me flinch. You will not stand here bleeding and ashamed in front of the man who owes you his life. Tell me what you need. What can I do?”
She stopped trying to cover herself. There was no point, and she was too tired, suddenly, and too sad, to keep up the pretense of a modesty that sickness and lovemaking had burned out of both of them.
She looked up at him, hoping he would not think her entirely wretched. “Water. Perhaps. If you would.”
He touched her cheek and pressed a kiss to her forehead. Then he nodded and turned and went to fetch her water. There, with the mercy of his back turned, she fumbled with her clothes and did what had to be done.
There would be no child.
No child, and so no permanent necessity, no fact of nature to make the marriage hold whatever they willed.
They were exactly where they had stood the morning after Vitoria, only deeper in — with the same bare choice in front of them and nothing to decide it but their own two hearts: to leave what had happened in Spain in Spain, and part when England took them back, and let this whole burning summer close over like water; or to force a marriage on against every reason of sense and fortune and inclination, and wait to see how long it took the loving to go sour.
He came back with the water. She thanked him, and he turned, mercifully, and let her be. She finished dressing with her back to him and did up her own buttons and laces.
There would be time to tell him how misguided this has been. There would be, God help her, the whole long road to Santander for that.
The mules were saddled by mid-morning, the pack beast loaded with what little they had and a good deal the padre had pressed on them that they had not the heart to refuse — a sack of hard bread, a skin of oil, a twist of the bitter herb-tea that was not the bark but he swore it would help with the last dregs of the fever.
Darcy got himself into the saddle on the second attempt and pretended it had taken only the one, and Elizabeth, mounting beside him, was kind enough to look elsewhere while he did it.
They did not go far before they turned to look back.
At the end of the street, where it bent toward the northern road, Darcy drew up, Elizabeth with him, and they both looked back the way they had come.
There, as they had somehow known he would be, was Padre Ignacio, standing in the door of his house with the war-scarred church rising behind him, watching them go.
When he saw them turn, he lifted one hand.
Darcy raised his own, and held it up a long moment.
There was a great deal he wanted to put into the gesture and no adequate way to do it across the length of a street in a language of hands.
Ignacio had given Elizabeth back to him.
Had saved his own life, from a flesh burnt almost beyond saving.
He had come to the man’s door with a dying wife, and the padre had nursed them both through hell with his own hands, and now they rode away like his home had been a common venta.
“We will thank him,” Elizabeth said beside him. Her hand had come to rest on his forearm. “Properly. When we are able.”
“We will.” He had said it before — three times at least, in the last days, as though the repetition could bind it — and he said it again now because saying it was the only payment currently within his means.
“There will be a way to reach him, if I have anything at all to give. And if I have nothing, I shall find something. That debt, I mean to pay whether the Spanish crown pays theirs or not.”
Ignacio's hand was still raised. They lifted theirs once more, together, and then Darcy turned his mule's head north.
The land let them go gently, at least. That much the padre had promised, and he had been right.
This was the kind way north, the graded way, the way that climbed by long slow degrees a convalescent could sit without being shaken to pieces; but it climbed.
It did not yet fall toward the sea he longed for.
It rose, mile by patient mile, up out of Burgos and onto the high bare tableland of the Páramo, where the last and hardest of Castile lay open under that same enormous white sky, treeless and scoured by a wind that came from nowhere and went nowhere and never for a moment ceased.
The meseta that had tried so hard to kill them gathered itself for one final crossing, higher and emptier than Burgos had been, stone and stubble and pale grass bent flat.
The sea was a rumour still, walled off entire behind mountains he could not yet even see.
His body let him know, mile by mile, that it had not forgiven him — the ache still deep in the long bones, the light a thready threat at the edge of things if he moved too fast, the way an hour in the saddle depleted him as much as an afternoon would once have done.
But he was upright. He was on a mule and moving north with his wife beside him.
He was glad of the mule. He was absurdly, specifically glad of the mule.
Ignacio had refused, flatly and finally, to take the beasts in payment — had refused the last of the silver too, taking only what Darcy pressed on him for the parish and calling even that too much.
Darcy had not, at the time, been well enough to understand what a mercy the refusal was.
He understood it now, with every mile the animal carried him that he could not possibly have walked.
He could not have gone half a league on his own feet.
Beside him, Elizabeth rode easy, or at least she looked like she was at ease — her face turned up to catch the changing air, her eyes closed as a look of pure contentment washed over her.
Every so often, her mule and his drew close enough that their hands found each other for a moment across the gap — not holding, only touching, a brush of fingers and then apart again as the beasts wandered.
The pack beast plodded behind them with its ears at half-mast. The sun was warm, and the wind was cool, and for a stretch of miles there was nothing to do but ride north beside her and be, improbably, alive.
Three days, perhaps four to Reinosa, at the pace a convalescent could manage, up the long climb toward the pass where the Arlanzón gave out, and the country tilted at last down the other side toward the coast. Then the descent, the greener, wetter northern slope, down toward Torrelavega and the sea plain.
Then Santander — another two days, three if the road or his own body played them false.
Call it a week to the coast, if they were fortunate, and no one on the road took an interest in two foreigners and three mules.
And then there would be Santander itself, and the wait — for a ship, for a berth, for a wind, for a captain willing to carry them.
That could be days, or it could be a fortnight, there was no knowing it from here.
Then anywhere from a week to a fortnight for the passage itself.
The better part of a month, possibly, before he could set Elizabeth Darcy down on English ground and begin, at last, the work of trying to keep her and Pemberley and all the rest.
It was not soon enough. Nothing would have been soon enough.
Every night on this road was a night the debt-clock ran on toward Michaelmas without him; every day was a day his uncle and Elizabeth’s aunt sat in England thinking them dead or worse.
He wanted to be home. He wanted it with an intensity that had nothing to do with Pemberley and everything to do with the woman riding at his side, because home was where he could make her safe at last, where he could start his life with her, whatever that might look like.
Her hand brushed his again. He caught it, this time, and held it the length of a few strides before the mules pulled them apart.
Not soon enough. But nearer, with every step, than they had been.