XLI
Resentment and Ruin
The country had turned green now, wholly green, lush past anything Elizabeth had seen since England — steep wet valleys thick with oak and chestnut, ferns to the knee, water everywhere, running in the ditches and dripping from the leaves and hanging in the air as a fine cool mist that beaded on what was left of her fine silk-merino travelling gown.
Somewhere ahead, not far now, was the sea.
She could nearly smell it. After the meseta, it should have moved her to tears of gratitude, and instead she walked through it hollow-eyed and short-tempered and hating it a little.
It was a particular cruelty to be starving in a garden, to be footsore and filthy and frightened in the loveliest country God ever made, and to have no strength left over to feel the beauty with.
They had not eaten since the bread at dawn, and that had been little.
The farm's charity was three days behind them, and the last few nights had gone hard — a wet clearing, a shepherd's empty hut, and once under a tree, with no fire at any of them.
Darcy was flagging; she could see it and would not say it, because saying it started a quarrel about who should ride, and she had not the strength for that quarrel today.
So they took the mule in turns, and every mile felt like three.
“You should ride,” he said, for the third time since noon.
“I rode this morning.”
“You are white as a sheet.”
“So are you, and you were half dead a fortnight since, so if we are ranking claims to the animal, yours is the better one and I am tired of arguing it. Walk or ride, Fitzwilliam, but for the love of heaven stop offering.”
“Then ride with me.”
She stopped and stared up at him. “The mule cannot manage it.”
“He can. The road is smooth, running downhill, and he had a good bait at noon, with all that fresh grass by the road. I daresay, he is eating the best of any of us just now.”
She kept walking, looking ahead now. “We are too much for him.”
“Not in the shape we are in. We cannot weigh more than twenty stone between us, and the pack mules out of Calahorra were carrying more than twenty-five for days, up hill. Besides, we will be in Santander tomorrow, provided we can all stay on our feet. I have no confidence that either of us can.”
She stopped and turned back. He had the right of it. The mule was walking easily, and had been all the while. And they could cover ground twice as fast if they did not have to wait on one stumbling person. “Oh, very well. For an hour.”
“Two will see us to dusk, and hopefully a place to sleep.”
She swallowed at that word, but gave Darcy her hand. He took his foot from the stirrup so she could put hers in it, and he pulled her up into his arms.
There could be no sitting modestly, with both of them in the saddle.
Before, she had found a way to rest her right knee on the pommel, though it was not a proper lady’s saddle.
But now, she had to swing her leg over the side, her backside wedged against the front of him, her skirt bunched up above her knees, and her dignity lying beside the road.
“I should not have let you talk me into this.”
“Are you cold?” One hand was on her hip, but it had began the slide down over her thigh, as if he could warm her leg with his palm.
“No.” She straightened.
His hand came back up to her hip. “There is no one to see. If anyone should approach, we will have time for me to set down and you may order your skirts.”
She sat a little taller still, and said nothing. One of his arms was wrapped about her waist, his hand reaching forward to hold the reins, but the other… the other fell from her hip and rested on his own thigh.
They stopped at dusk in the lee of a broken wall, because there was nowhere better and it was too dark to go further.
No fire — the wood was all wet, and Darcy's hands, when he tried the flint, were shaking too badly to raise a spark.
He failed at it three times, and then he flung the flint down with an oath she had never heard him use and put his face in his hands.
That made her watch him. There was something grown brittle in the last few days, something set to snap that she had never seen so close to the surface of him. And she had no right to ask what it was, but she had a fair guess.
They shared the last of the bread. It was not enough for one person, let alone two.
And afterwards, in the wet blue dark, with the one blanket around them because there was no choosing otherwise, he reached for her.
He had no temper tonight for any gentle seduction.
This was something wearier and more desperate as he came down beside her and over her, his mouth finding hers in the dark, his hands sweeping and claiming her.
He was not forcing, not taking what she had no mind to offer, but neither was he waiting and coaxing like he had done before.
This was more like that first night, drowning in his drunken need for her as if a few moments of spent physical strength might give back enough to make tomorrow bearable.
And she wanted it. That was the miserable truth of it, she wanted it as badly as he did, wanted to be held and warmed and taken out of herself, wanted to stop being cold and frightened and stop thinking for one blessed stretch of dark — and it was precisely because she wanted it so much that she put her hands on his chest and pushed him back.
“No.”
“Elizabeth —”
“I said no. We cannot. I have told you and told you. We cannot keep —”
“Why? And do not tell me some empty excuse, or that you must practise going without, or whatever riddle it was last time, because I have turned it over every mile since and it makes no sense, Elizabeth, it makes no sense. We are married. Truly married, in every sense. You want this — do not trouble to deny it, I can feel that you do. So tell me plainly, for once, without the wit and without the riddle. Why not?”
“Because I will not destroy you!” It tore out of her before she could stop it.
He raised up a little, his brow darkening in the moonlight. “How could you possibly — Elizabeth, you have saved me. More times than I can count, but even if you had not, why —”
“Oh, stop it, Fitzwilliam, you know exactly what I mean. You know what will happen if you return to England with an impoverished wife, no claim paid, and a mortgage you cannot answer in due time.”
He blinked and sat back a little more. “Like as not, I will have to approach the bank and request an extension, or some modification in the terms.”
“And how likely are you to get that?” She pushed her arms behind her and raised herself up to look into his face. “Particularly if you are found to have offended a very powerful man and slighted his daughter after having given her your word to return?”
“I was not formally engaged to Lady Honoria, and even if I had been, do you think I would turn my back on my wife just to save face? What do you take me for?”
She let the air out of her lungs, and she could not help it — she reached to touch his face, but he jerked it away.
“Very well, since you will have it plainly.
Every time we do this, you gamble Pemberley's whole future on my courses coming. But one day, they will not come, and then it is done, then we are chained together past any undoing, whatever either of us wants, and —”
His face was cold as glass. “Whatever either of us wants,” he repeated, slowly. “There it is again. You have said it before. On the mountain, and in the loft, and now. When the time comes that I must not. Past any undoing. You are still planning to leave me?”
She could not make her mouth form the lie that would answer it.
“You are!” He pushed back from her and raked his hand through his hair. “After everything! After Vitoria, and Burgos, after you dragged me back from the grave with your own hands, after sobbing in my arms in the pass — you are still, in your own mind, going to reach England and let me go.”
“I am going to give you the choice —”
“I do not want the choice! God in heaven, Elizabeth, how many times, in how many countries, must I say it? I do not want the choice. I have made my choice. I made it in a wine-market square in Tudela, I made it in a room in Vitoria, and I have made it every day since, and I will go on making it every day until I die, and the one person on this earth who will not let me make it is you!”
“Because you cannot afford it!” She was crying now, furious, cold, hungry, past all restraint.
“Because you would be ruined, Fitzwilliam, you would be ruined, and it is half my doing that you are still chained to the ruin, and one day, love will not be enough to feed you. One day, you will look at the wreckage of your life, what you should have been and done and had, and what Pemberley used to be, and you will hate me, and I would rather —”
“Elizabeth, no,” he breathed.
She shook her head, her face crumpling like a watershed. “I would rather let you go while you still look at me the way you do now, than keep you until you cannot bear the sight of me. That is why. Are you satisfied?”
The dark was quiet except for her own ragged breathing and the drip of the trees.
“No,” he said at last. “No, I am not satisfied, because you are wrong, and I do not know how to make you see that you are wrong. It breaks my heart that you have carried this the whole way and let me think —”
He stopped because she had buried her face in her hands and was weeping. She felt his hand reaching for her, felt the heat of his fingers near her cheek, but he never touched her.
“You have been saying goodbye to me. This entire time. Every kindness. Every affection. I thought you were coming to me by inches and you were leaving me by inches, the whole while, and letting me hold you because you meant to remember it after.”
She crumbled and wished she could vomit, but there was not enough in her stomach for that. So, she wept, her shoulders heaving, and he did not reach for her again.
“I will not touch you. Not until you ask me to, and not because I have stopped wanting you, but because I will not have you flinching from me as though every kindness were a debt you are frightened of owing. When you want me, you know where I am. I have been here since Tudela, and I am not going anywhere.”
He lay down, his back to her, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Take the blanket. I am too angry to share it tonight without saying things I would regret, so I shall be angry over here, and you may be right over there. In the morning, we will walk to the sea and not speak of it, and that will have to do.”