Indignities to Spare
XXXIX
On the third morning, they left Aguilar de Campoo to start the ascent up to the Pozazal pass — a high, lonely, rocky transition ground between the meseta and the Cantabrian slope.
Tonight, with any luck, they would reach Reinosa and be able to purchase more bread, refill their water casks, and rest their mules in proper straw for the night.
Elizabeth had been humming fragments of an old tune Mary used to play on the pianoforte.
Mary had not the leisure for playing now, or so she had been told.
Just as well, for she was never as skilled as she believed herself to be.
But Elizabeth recalled hearing that Miss Darcy had a fair hand for the keys, and admirable taste as well.
Perhaps she might one day be granted the pleasure of hearing…
The thought fell where many of her thoughts had fallen of late. Towards a future she could not dare imagine, a thin wisp of possibility that logic and the inevitability of natural events could not help but throw the door closed on. The tune died in her mouth, and she glanced across at Darcy.
He was tense in the saddle, and his jaw was clenched.
His eyes were squinting and his brow creased, though when he saw her looking his way, he smiled.
He bore up with no complaints, but she could watch the strength bleeding from his limbs mile by mile.
The resting hours of the night could not entirely replace what the days leeched from his bones, but he hated it when she observed as much out loud.
So, she kept silent, smiled back, and set her eyes forward again, so he would not tire himself all the more by trying to look easy for her when he was not.
Her mule’s ears swivelled to the left. Elizabeth had learnt that the beast had excellent hearing, and was always able to note a bird or a rodent crossing their paths long before she ever could, so she glanced that direction, and something died in her chest.
A hat, and the tip of something shiny, poised above the rocks where the road pinched narrow just behind them.
No one had any proper business lurking up there, not on foot and not high above the road. And certainly not moving stealthily, their heads ducking low now and again as they passed from cover to cover.
Bandits. The thing they had been lucky to avoid for three months, come due at last.
There were three. They crossed over the high places and came down the slope on the left where the pines could hide them.
She caught only flashes, but she could swear that two of them had muskets and the third a long knife already loose in his hand.
They hopped from rock to rock, fanning out as they came so that the road was closed ahead and the slope was closed to the side, and behind was only the empty miles they had climbed.
“Fitzwilliam?”
“I see them.” He had drawn the mule up. His hand had gone across to grip her forearm, to keep her there, beside him, where he could put himself between her and the slope.
“Say nothing. Give them what they ask. None of your haggling or argument, Elizabeth. Whatever they ask, except for yourself. Do not let them take your hands, or search your person, for any reason. Run for the rocks if they try.”
She swallowed, her heart going in her head so loud she could not hear her own voice when she answered him.
But she could hear, already, the men talking to one another in Spanish as they came, not troubling to lower their voices because they already had the element of surprise. They had two unarmed travellers trapped in the rocks, and could approach as they pleased without stumbling or breaking a sweat.
“— only the two. The man is sick, look at him, he can barely sit the mule —”
“Sick or not, watch his hands.”
“Watch the woman. She might have a dagger.”
Elizabeth gasped and closed her eyes for an instant of focus. Dagger… she had no dagger. Darcy had lost his pistol in Tudela. All they had between them for their own defence was the fleetness of their mules, which was negated by the slope, and their two hard heads.
The men’s coats had been uniforms once. These were not farmers driven to burglary by one bad harvest, but soldiers, or whatever the war had left of them. Men who knew exactly how to stand so that a musket covered the most ground.
They were on them now, and they did not even trouble themselves to jump, or yell, or do any of the lurid, dramatic things that novels had taught her to expect.
They simply approached, brandishing their weapons, and one had the temerity to smile up at them.
The one with the knife took the bridle of Darcy's mule, and the two muskets came up, one on Darcy, the other swinging loosely towards her.
The one with the knife said, in thick, practical English, “Get down. Money. The bags. Everything. Down.”
Darcy got down. Slowly, as though even the act of taking his foot from the stirrup pained his head. And clumsily, like a man who had never ridden in his life, he got off from the wrong side and stumbled a little as his feet touched the ground.
She could see in a heartbeat what he was doing.
He could not command his usual strength, so he hid what strength he did have, preserving it for any opportunity to seek an advantage in the moment.
And in dismounting wrong, he had put his body between the muskets and her, so that every slow, deliberate movement he made was calculated to keep their eyes on him and away from where she still sat frozen on the mule.
He kept his hands showing as he reached for the purse at his belt to give it over.
The man with the knife grabbed at Darcy's other hand instead — at the signet, the gold catching the light — and wrenched it off his finger.
Darcy was stoic as his father's ring was dragged off his hand by a thief. He gave no reaction at all, until the one with the knife moved towards Elizabeth, reaching up to pull at her hand — for her wedding ring, or for her person, it did not matter.
He came off the mule's flank with his fist already swinging and caught the man full across the jaw. The knife-man staggered, and for one wild instant, Elizabeth's heart leapt with a savage, stupid hope… and then the other two were on him.
It took all their weight. He got another blow in, she saw his knuckles split against someone's cheekbone, saw him twist and nearly break free even weak, even spent, even a week out of his own grave — and then a musket-stock came down across his shoulders and he went to his knees in the road. Another man’s boot took him in the face and laid him full out in the dust with his lip torn open and the blood coming bright.
One of them kicked Darcy in the ribs, rolling him to his stomach.
He pressed the muzzle to the base of his skull and that was the end of it.
Elizabeth did not scream. She wanted to.
She was biting down on her hand, the tears streaming as she watched Darcy take the kicks, the beating, and at last be laid out with a gun to his head.
They would shoot him, take what they wanted — possibly even including her — and leave his body here for the vultures while she either died fighting beside him or was carried off to a fate worse than death.
“Woman! Off the mule.”
Elizabeth blinked, her chest shaking on a sob, and her eyes went to Darcy.
He had got his head up, his bleeding chin in the dirt, and his eyes were pleading with her to do nothing rash.
Or to run — kick the mule and run, and trust to wide musket shot that perhaps they would miss her head as she escaped. But they would not miss his.
Her hands shaking, she braced them on the pommel of the saddle and slid down, then backed slowly away, her hands up, nothing behind her. “Take what you want,” she told them. “Please, we will give you no trouble.”
Their English was too good for common Spanish soldiers.
These men must have ridden with Wellington.
Served with the British, defending their country from the French with British artillery, British coin, and British supplies.
Perhaps they yet had a place in their hearts for the detritus of that country.
Or, perhaps, they were merely hungry, and would take whatever they could get from whomever currently owned it.
She had thought to open up another point for them to cover. One man was already kneeling on Darcy’s back, another going for the pack mule. If the third tried to come for her, he would lose the other two mules, so perhaps…
“Back here! Beside him,” barked one of the men. He waved a musket at her, and she had no choice but to obey. A moment later, she was on her knees in the dirt beside Darcy. If she gave them no trouble, they would not have to lay hands on her. They could take what they wanted and go.
The man behind her grabbed her left hand and stripped the wedding ring off before she could even blink.
She snatched her hand back, clutching it to herself as if she could still feel the warmth of the metal against her finger, and she gave Darcy a mournful look.
His lips thinned, the blood still trickling, but he tried to smile some reassurance at her.
“Es falsa!” he laughed. He held it up to his companions, the shining pinchbeck ring she had worn since Estella, and even peered at Elizabeth through the circle of it. “I wonder if the English wench knows her husband gave her a fake ring,” he said in Spanish.
“Worthless,” one of his companions grunted. “Not worth being caught for and taken before the law for stealing a woman’s ring.”
The ring dropped into the dust before her face, but Elizabeth did not dare reach for it.