Page 154 of Homeless

She grabbed his hand. “Do not tease me! Is it...”

“A merchantman came in from Santander this morning. I had the note two hours ago, and I have been standing at that door ever since waiting for you, because I knew you would not forgive me if I let you hear it any way but this, or kept you from him one minute longer than I had to.” His thumb moved over her knuckles.

“Your uncle is home, Elizabeth.”

“He is here, Lizzy!” Mrs Gardiner got out as Elizabeth swept into her arms at the door. They twirled a minute, both bouncing like little girls. “He is here, he is home! Oh, come and see! He is half dead on his feet, the poor man, but he has not stopped smiling since… oh, but come and see him!”

He was in the parlour, in his own chair by his own fire, with a rug over his knees and his children swarming him — Marianne pressed against his side, Edward astride one knee despite having certainly been told a dozen times to have a care, the baby Thomas asleep against his shoulder in the crook of an arm that Elizabeth could see, even across the room, had gone thin as a rail. He was dreadfully thin, shrunken and older by ten years than the man who had sailed in the spring, his good broad frame fallen in on itself, his hand where it lay on Marianne's hair was veined and bony. But he was him.

He looked up and saw her in the doorway. His whole ravaged face broke open into a wide grin, and held out his free arm. “Lizzy! There you are, my girl!”

She rushed into it, careful of the sleeping baby, knelt by his chair and put her arms around as much of him as she could reach. “Let me look at you!” he said at last, and held her off. “You are well? Truly well? No word ever reached back to Vitoria — at least, not before I left. I prayed you were home, that you were safe. Ferrers assured me you would be by now, but I have learnt not to believe a thing until I can see it. And here you are, and you look —” his eyes went over her. “You look well, Lizzy! You look better than well. You look happier than I have ever seen, and I cannot think I was responsible for that.”

“I am happy, Uncle.” She kissed his cheek. “I am so happy, and so much of it is that you are home, that I hardly know how to hold it all at once!”

“So much of it,” he repeated. “But not all of it.” He looked past her, over her shoulder, to where Darcy stood in the parlour doorway, hanging back.

“You had better come in, sir,” he said. “You have been standing in my doorway looking as though you were not sure of your welcome, and I find I have a great deal to say to you, and I cannot say the half of it across a room.”

Darcy came in. Elizabeth rose, and went to his side, and her uncle watched the way they came to stand together, the unthinking ease of it, her hand finding his sleeve and his falling to the small of her back.

“Sit, both of you,” Gardiner said. “I have not the strength to crane up at you, and I mean to speak so long as I have the wind for it.”

They took the sofa opposite. Marianne was persuaded, with difficulty, to take Edward and the baby to the nursery, and the door was shut. Her uncle looked at Darcy for a long moment before he spoke.

“I have been three hours at home,” he said, “and almost immediately I arrived, I was set upon by Copeland, come directly from his offices to see me alive.”

“He was very good,” Elizabeth said. “I think no one could have done more to secure your release.”

“Indeed, indeed. He would know exactly how it was that I came to be sitting in this chair rather than in a grave in the mountains north of Pamplona, and he was some two hours in learning it all and then telling me what was done from London. He is a thorough man, my Copeland. He kept every letter and every account, and he laid the whole of it before me, because he said I had a right to know who I owed my life to.” His eyes had not left Darcy. “So, I know, sir. I know it all. I know the ransom was paid, and I know how, and I know who found the money when the demand was raised and my own house could not have covered it without ruin.”

Elizabeth stiffened… then turned to regard her husband.

“Sir…” Darcy began.

“Let me finish. I have since been given to understand that some rich Englishman had been seen making inquiries and they reckoned me a fatter goose than they'd first supposed. We spoke of this in Tudela, as you recall, Lizzy.” His mouth twisted, wry and grim.

She swallowed. “Yes, uncle. It was foolish of me to come and —”

“Steady on, Lizzy, you have not heard me out. Copeland tells me the house had already sunk everything it safely could into the first demand. And he also tells me that by the time the new figure came, there was already a letter in the strong-box — had been for weeks — from a solicitor by the name of Yates, authorising them to draw up to ten thousand pounds against any increase, the whole of it guaranteed by a private gentleman who had asked that his name be kept from my wife. They drew six thousand of it. Six thousand pounds, Lizzy —” now he turned to her — “that your husband put up for me, quietly, months ago, from a town in Spain, before he had any earthly reason to but the goodness of his own heart, and gave orders that no one was to speak of it.”

Elizabeth turned to look at Darcy, who was looking at his own hands. There was a colour rising up his cheeks above the beard, and he flicked his eyes to her once before shifting uncomfortably.

“It was nothing. It was a… a business arrangement, no more. I was well able to —”

“You were not well able.” Elizabeth had found her voice, and it came out shaking. “You were not able at all, Fitzwilliam. Everyone thought you had ten thousand a year since your father died, but I have seen all the papers. You had five a year, all this time, because the mortgage was eating half of it. You were hardly starving, but you did not have six thousand pounds clear, let alone ten, to give away without injuring yourself. When did you even authorise this?”

His boots shifted on the carpet. “In Estella, when we wrote our letters to your aunt and to Georgiana. I sent one to Yates, as well.”

“Estella! Why that was… we were hardly even on speaking terms by then. Do you mean to tell me that with your own house three months from the auctioneer, you pledged up to ten thousand pounds you could not safely spare to save the uncle of a woman you had married less than a week before to keep her out of a ditch? And you never told me! You have been beside me nearly every hour since, and you never once —”

“Because it did not signify,” Darcy said, and looked up at last, and his face was open and a little desperate. “Because you were already grieved enough, Elizabeth, and I could forward something to his interests without you ever knowing there was a hope there to bank on before it proved itself, so I did. I would not have you thank me for it because there was nothing in it to thank — I could not save him myself, I could only pay, and paying was the least of what was wanted. You did the rest, you did all the rest —”

“Now that,” said Gardiner, “is the part I find most extraordinary of all.”

They both turned to him. He was watching them with an expression that had gone past gratitude into something soft and amused and near to overflowing.

“He says you did the rest,” Gardiner said to Elizabeth. “And from what I can piece together — for the two of you are as bad as each other, and neither will give a plain account of your own doings, I can see I shall have to assemble it like a bill of lading. I have had your aunt’s report of what you did for Pemberley, Lizzy. It seems to me that the pair of you came home from Spain each secretly having saved the other's whole world. Terribly odd, that! I recall being told most clearly in Tudela, that you meant to un-marry each other the moment you landed because you could do one another no earthly good whatsoever, had you remained so. Have I got it right? Tell me I have got it right. It is the most magnificent piece of mutual foolishness I have heard in the whole of my life, and I have been in trade thirty years and heard a great deal of foolishness.”