XLVII
Prudence
The Prudence cleared the mole a little after noon, and Elizabeth stood at the bow rail and watched Spain begin to let go of them.
It went reluctantly — the harbour sliding back, the town diminishing, Santander folding down into the green hills behind it.
Beyond them, faint and blue and enormous, she could see the mountains they had crossed, the ones that had so nearly kept them.
She watched the coast draw down to a line and the line begin to blur.
Ahead of the ship, the water of the Bay opened murky blue and vast toward the open sea and, somewhere past all of it, England.
She had wanted this. For months, she had wanted nothing so much as this — the sea under her, the coast falling away, her face pointed home.
And now it was here, and she stood in it and could not, quite, make herself only glad.
Darcy came and stood behind her.
He did not stand beside her, decently, at a proper distance, the way a gentleman ought to stand beside his wife at a ship's rail in view of the master and the crew and the handful of other passengers taking the air on the deck.
He stood close behind, his chest against her back, and his arms came around her on either side to rest his hands on the rail beside hers, so that she stood encircled, held, in a posture no man of his rank and breeding had any business assuming in public, where anyone might see.
And then he lowered his head and set his chin on her shoulder, his cheek near hers, and looked out at the same water she was looking at, and did not seem to care in the slightest who saw him do it.
“You will scandalise the master,” she murmured.
“The master may look elsewhere.” His breath was warm at her ear.
The faint roughness of his jaw — he had been quick to answer her request, and the week had already raised it back to a shadow — dragged just slightly against her cheek when he turned his head.
“I have spent three months aching to touch you whenever I pleased.
I find I have used up my whole life's supply of discretion and have none left over for a Bristol sea-captain's opinion of me.”
She should have laughed. She wanted to. Instead, she leaned back into him and let his arms hold her up. Her face rocked against his as she looked out at the sea and tried with everything in her to push the rest of it down.
Because she wanted this — she wanted him, exactly like this, wanted to lean back into a man who put his chin on her shoulder in front of a whole ship's company because he could not help himself, wanted to let this loving, ridiculous, wonderful man take care of her and wipe her tears and hand her joy across a breakfast table every morning for the rest of a long life.
She had spent months building walls against wanting him, and all that was left was the wanting, plain and enormous and, frankly, terrifying.
To want a thing so much was to give the world a place to strike.
And the world would. That was the fear she could not push all the way down, the one that surfaced now, here, with his arms around her and the coast dissolving behind them.
Things would be different in London. They could not help but be different.
England had rules, and ranks, and drawing rooms full of people who knew precisely what she was.
She was about to be carried into a world that would look at Mrs Darcy of Grosvenor Street and see, forever, a daughter whose father had left her no dowry to speak of, a tradesman's niece, a nobody who had somehow forced a rich man to marry her in a foreign country where no one could advise him against it.
They would never believe he had wanted her.
Why should they? She scarcely believed it herself, and she had heard him say it with his own mouth.
They would say she had trapped him — seduced him, or shamed him, or married him under some duress of war — and they would go on saying it, and there would be no answer she could ever give that would change a single mind, because the truth was less believable than the lie.
And that was only the half of it. That was the half she could bear.
The other half was the money, and the money frightened her more, because she understood money.
She knew the shape of ruin when it stood in a doorway.
It was standing in this one, and Darcy would not look at it.
They had spoken of his affairs so little — he turned every such conversation, gently, into talk of what he meant to give her, the house and the gowns and the carriage and the mistress's chambers done over in green — and she had let him, because it was easier, and because pressing him got her only more promises and no figures.
But she could do the figures herself. She had been doing them in the dark when he slept.
Pemberley's rents were what funded the Darcy life; she was not so green as to imagine a great estate ran on nothing, and rents were land, and the land was mortgaged up to more than half its worth.
If the claim never paid — and claims against a bankrupt crown, pressed through a reluctant government, did not pay fully, or paid in ten years, or paid never — then Pemberley would be sold to answer the loan.
After the loan was answered, there would be whatever equity remained, a sum she could not guess, but could not believe was large enough to do what he imagined it might.
That was all. That was what a house in Grosvenor Square and a modiste and a carriage and a wife in green silk would have to be fed out of, year on year, a dwindling principal with no income under it, and she did not need a scope for the exact figures to know how that sum ended.
She had watched enough of her uncle's friends arrive at that ending.
It ended slowly, taking long enough to fool people into thinking they could make it, and then it went all at once.
He did not have good answers. Not because he was a fool — he was the furthest thing from a fool — but because good answers did not exist, and a clever man with no good answers talked instead about what he could manage, and tried to please his wife, and carried on with that same stubborn intent to make do until nothing remained to be made from.
“You have gone very quiet,” he said against her ear.
“I am watching Spain leave.” It was even partly true. “I find I do not know how I feel about it. I hated every mile of that country. And I would not undo a day of it, because every day of it was… was you.”
His arms tightened around her, just slightly. “No,” he agreed. “Nor would I. Not one day.”
She let herself lean her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
The ship lifted and fell under her on the first of the open swell, carrying them both toward England and everything that waited there, and she gave up, for the moment, trying to push the fear all the way down.
It would not go all the way down. It never quite did.
So she only stood in the circle of his arms with her eyes shut and the salt wind on her face, and let him hold her up, and tried — just for the length of this one swell, and then the next, and then the next — to keep breathing.
They were four days out of Santander, and the Bay had, so far, spared them.
Darcy had braced for the worst of it. Every man he had spoken to in the harbour had shaken his head over the crossing — the Bay of Biscay in a temper was a thing sailors spoke of the way the muleteers spoke of the roads, with a fatalism that assumed the worst and was seldom disappointed.
He had boarded the Prudence half expecting to spend the passage with his head in a bucket and Elizabeth green beside him.
But it had not come. The wind had held fair and steady out of the south and west, filling the sails and pushing them north and a little east across a long heaving swell that never quite became a storm.
The Prudence rode it well, an honest working ship with an honest working master.
Darcy would have to write and tell Harcourt, likely to the man's insufferable satisfaction, that he had not steered them wrong.
Four days, and no gale. The master reckoned five or six more to soundings if the weather kept its temper, and a day or two beyond that up the Channel to their landing.
That put England ten days off, perhaps eight if they were fortunate.
He came below at the end of the second dogwatch, ducking the low beam at the head of the companion that he had cracked his skull on twice the first day.
The cabin they had of the Prudence was small, as all such cabins were, but it was theirs, and dry.
A berth was built into the ship's side, wide enough for two if the two were willing — and they were, God knew, more than willing — with a rail along it against the ship's motion and a curtain that could be drawn for a privacy that was more courtesy than fact.
A small table clamped to the deck beneath the swinging lamp, its brass gone soft gold in the light.
Two chairs, one of them the folding sort.
He had bought a sea-chest for the new clothes they had purchased in Santander, and it was stowed beneath the berth.
There was a washstand with a basin in a gimballed ring that kept it level while the ship tilted, which he had watched with a kind of stupid fascination the first evening until Elizabeth had laughed at him for it.
At the far side stood a stern window, or the ship's equivalent, a small thick square of glass through which the wake unrolled frothing and endless behind them, and beyond which, just now, the last of the light was going out of a bruised and cloud-heaped western sky.
It was, he had discovered, a good place to be alive with her, this small, clean, swaying box that required nothing of either of them but to thrive in close quarters together.