Page 111 of Homeless

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.

He did not know how to do this. He had, in nine-and-twenty years, never once bought a woman a gown. His sister's things came to Pemberley by processes he had never inquired into, arranged by Lady Matlock and housekeepers and modistes. He had signed the accounts without reading them. He knew a great deal about a great many things and nothing whatever about this, and he had not even Elizabeth’s measurements as a guide. He was utterly at the mercy of the memory of her body in his hands and the cleverness of strangers.

The woman who kept the shop had some English and more French, so he was able to make known his wants. A gown, ready-made or nearly, in soft colours and gentle materials for his wife. No, he had to tell her twice that he did not know Elizabeth’s measurements. He heard how it sounded, a husband who did not know the size of his own wife, and did not try to explain. Small, was all he could say. Her bust was… more ample than a woman of her frame had any right to, but the rest of her had grown — he found the words difficult — she had grown very thin. Yes, he knew that would be difficult to fit, but if the gown fell just so, it would highlight the colour she had earned in Spain and set off her figure in a way that would make her feel as beautiful as she was. About so, he said, and held his hands in the air in an approximation that his arms could describe better by feel than his mouth could by numbers.

The woman was kind about it, for she had probably seen every sort of fool come through her door. She brought out what she had. He had her show one after another to him, and found that he did not want any of the fashionable ones.

There were smart things, town things, the sort of gown a lady wore to be seen in — and they were wrong, all of them, and it took him a moment to understand why. They were not her.

Or rather, they were not the her he wanted to see. The Elizabeth of three months' nightmare — the stranded woman, the fever-nurse, the creature who had faced down three armed men on a mountain — that Elizabeth deserved silk and jewellery and every fine thing his money could buy for as long as he had it, and he meant to give it to her, all of it, for the rest of their lives if she would let him. But the Elizabeth his hand reached toward, among the gowns, was an older one. A girl in a country assembly room in Hertfordshire, laughing at something — probably at him — her eyes bright and her steps lively, in a simple soft muslin the colour of new leaves. A girl he had stood against the wall and watched and told himself he did not admire. He had lied, and had gone on lying until the lie had sickened him with regret.

It was a soft thing, a pale green like the first of the willows, sprigged and simple, with a little lace at the sleeve — not a grand gown, not a town gown, but a country gentlewoman's gown, the kind of thing a girl might wear to walk three miles across muddy fields to nurse a sister and arrive with her hem six inches deep in mud and her eyes shining and not care a whit for what anybody thought of it.

“That one.”

The shopwoman turned it in her hands, trying to talk him out of it — it was not her finest; there were richer things, more à la mode, and she had a very great interest in earning as much of his custom as he would give — but Darcy shook his head. That one.

It might want taking in at the waist, she warned; it was cut for a fuller figure than the señor described. He knew. So long as it fitted at the bosom, where it still might, let the rest hang loose. She would fill it out again. He would see to it that she filled it out again, that she never again in her life went so thin that her gown swam on her. In the meantime, she would have something that was not the beggar's rag she had worn off the mountain.

He paid for the gown, and a shawl and slippers and new stockings and undergarments to go with it. He had them all wrapped, and refused the help of a boy to deliver it all, so he carried it back through the streets himself.

She was asleep when he came in.