XLIII
Trappings
He got out of the room as quickly as decency allowed.
Darcy did not trouble to dress that shameful truth up as he went down the stair and out into the afternoon: he was fleeing his own wife.
It was more than he could command of himself, standing in those sumptuous rooms with her, seeing the soft bed behind her, the salt already drying in the corners of her eyes that she would have denied with her dying breath.
Any decent and proper husband would have found a way to get his wife in his arms and kiss those tear stains away.
Found a way to show her that the fear, the privation, the hardships were behind them, and yet they were the same two people, now able to enjoy the desserts of survival.
But there had been something in her eyes from the moment she took in that hotel that terrified him.
A staring, an incredulous tremble, a sidestep away from anyone who cast a glance her way as if she were afraid she would soil them by breathing the same air.
And that was not the Elizabeth he had married. Not the clear-eyed woman who took charge of him in a ruined church and seized his name by her boldness. Not even the quick, laughing creature who had bewitched him in Hertfordshire… God, was it nearly three years ago, now? A lifetime.
So, he had fled. He had invented the errand of the tides half out of genuine need and half to have somewhere to be that was not there, and she had agreed too readily, which told him she wanted him gone as much as he wanted to go.
The harbour, at least, did not require anything of him but to walk about it and ask questions.
He asked them badly, in the handful of Spanish words he knew, mingled with some Portuguese he had picked up from Elizabeth — half of it not decent for respectable conversation — and the French he had learnt as a boy.
He was directed from one man to another down the length of the quays — to a ship's agent, to a chandler, to a weathered master mending net who spat and shook his head.
The answers, once he assembled them, were not what he wanted.
There was no good passage to be had, not soon.
The English-bound ships in the harbour were half of them not sailing this fortnight — loading still, or waiting on cargo, or waiting on a crew, or waiting, as one man put it with a jerk of his chin at the grey chop beyond the mole, on the wind, which had been sitting foul in the west for three days and showed no sign of shifting.
A gentleman wanting a decent passage for himself and his lady, and not a berth on a filthy coaster among the hides and the bilge, might wait a week.
Might wait two. The sea kept its own calendar, and no Englishman's need for haste would move it.
Darcy stood on the quay with the old helpless fury rising in him — the same fury he had stood in on a Portsmouth dock in the spring, a lifetime ago, waiting on a wind to carry him to a Spain he had not yet learned to dread.
Since then, he had crossed a country twice and buried himself half in the ground and clawed back out, and here at the end of it was the same grey water and the same foul wind and the same unsatisfactory news: wait.
He was still simmering in his frustration, biting it back before it turned to wrath, when a voice said, at his shoulder —
“I know that face. Don't tell me. I know it —” The voice grew incredulous. “— Good God. Darcy? Darcy, of Pemberley?”
He turned. The man was near his own age, prosperously dressed, florid, expensively hatted, staring at Darcy with his mouth beginning to open on a laugh of pure astonishment.
It took Darcy a moment — the years, and the setting, and his own scattered wits — and then the name came up out of some cupboard of his schooldays.
Harcourt. Harcourt, who had been two years above him, acquainted but never close enough to call a friend — a loud, connected, well-larded fellow even then, gone on, plainly, to prosper.
“By God, it is you!” Harcourt was seizing his hand, pumping it, and holding him at arm's length to look.
“Darcy of Pemberley, on the Santander quay, looking like — forgive me, man, but you look frightful. You look like something the tide brought in. What in the name of heaven has happened to you? The last I heard of you, you were the richest dull dog in Derbyshire, and here you stand with worn out boots and a black eye and a coat I would not give my groom. Have you been shipwrecked? Taken by pirates? Tell me everything, I insist upon it.”
Under other circumstances, the man's noise would have been intolerable.
Just now, Darcy found he could have wept at the sound of easy careless English in his own ear, at being known, at being — after months of being a marked foreigner, a problem, a mouth to be fed or a body to be robbed — recognised as himself.
“It is a long history,” he said, “and not a pretty one. Good to see you, Harcourt. It has been a great many years.”
“It has, it has. But see here. You were asking after a passage just now — I heard you at the agent's, that's what turned my head.
I'll tell you plainly, you'll get no joy of it this week, not with the wind dead on the Bay.
The summer has gone rather hard that way.
I know every master in this harbour, and half the cargoes.
If anyone's to get you home, it's I who'll arrange it.”
“Indeed?” Darcy could almost feel his frame growing fuller again with interest. “Time is rather of the essence. I would be greatly obliged to you for your help.”
“Least I could do for a fellow Cantabrigian.
You're stopping in town? Of course you are, there's nowhere else.
Then you'll dine with us — not tonight, you look as though you need a bed and a tailor more than a dinner, and Mrs Harcourt would want notice besides.
But tomorrow evening? We keep a good table, better than you'd think this far from home, and you shall tell me the whole dreadful tale, and I shall see what's to be done about your passage.”
Darcy had no patience for a formal dinner just now. He had often loathed such gatherings, where finery and vice were trotted out on display and drunken posturing took the place of rational conversation.
But Harcourt was exactly the man he needed and had despaired of finding.
A man established here, connected, with the ear of masters and agents and — Darcy remembered it now, half a rumour from years back — with some place or interest in the government's foreign business, a man who had gone into that world and done well in it.
Darcy had spent three months learning, at terrible cost, that he did not understand how the machinery worked — how a claim was truly pressed, how a captive was truly freed, what happened to papers once they vanished into a channel toward London.
He had been fighting blind. And here, on a quay, at the end of everything, was a loud, connected fool who might know precisely the things Darcy did not — who moved in the very world where Gardiner's ransom and the whole fate of the claim would be decided.
It was too much to pass by. Whatever it cost him in an evening of Harcourt's noise, the man's knowledge of the Foreign Office alone was worth ten dinners, and the passage help was worth ten more.
“We should be glad to,” he said. “My wife and I.”
“Your wife! Darcy, you sly creature, you've married? Dragged the poor woman through whatever shipwreck you just survived, I shouldn’t wonder.
Well, well! Then you must both come, of course, and Mrs Harcourt shall have someone to talk to besides me, which she complains of nightly.
Tomorrow, then. Seven. I'll send a boy round with the direction — you're at which house?” Darcy told him.
“Good. Good! Tomorrow.” He pumped Darcy's hand again, delighted with the whole encounter, delighted with himself.
“Darcy of Pemberley, married! And looking like a drowned brigand. There is a tale here, I can smell it. Until tomorrow, Darcy.”
And he went off along the quay, whistling to himself, swinging his walking stick, and full of his own good nature.
It was not until he had turned back for the fonda that Darcy began to doubt the wisdom of accepting Harcourt’s invitation.
He had not consulted Elizabeth, but had pledged her attendance.
A day or two ago, he would have been confident of her agreement — would probably have been dragged there by her, if he had proved too reclusive for her taste.
That was how he had begun to imagine his life with her in the time after Spain.
A life of peace and leisure, of arguing over their favourite books and lovemaking in the afternoons, all punctuated by episodes of her declaring they would go to such and such party, or host dinners and balls when she deemed it appealing, and he would wear his sociable face or she would make him suffer for it later by the most delectable means possible.
It had been a life worth dreaming of.
Now, he could not think why she would permit him to trot her out before an old Cambridge friend as his wife, if she meant to give him up. Harcourt would talk, someone would write a letter, someone else would hear of the Mrs Darcy who had been got up in Spain, and everyone would want to meet her.
But he would still put the thing to her.
Harcourt might be able to answer questions that he had not yet even thought of asking, and Elizabeth would want those answers.
She would be frustrated with waiting on him, and irritated that whatever he could tell her had to come second-hand, so perhaps she might want to be there for herself.
And if she said yes, she deserved to look the part.
The shop was three streets back from the water, a modest establishment with a French name over the door and a window of made-up goods. Darcy went into it with more trepidation than he had felt facing the bandits.