Page 33 of Homeless

Darcy did not look at them. He had settled that much on the walk over — a man who looked at the guns had already given something away — and he had nothing to give this place, no consul within two hundred miles, no navy that had heard his name. He had a coat and a card and a face he had spent nearly thirty years learning to keep shut. He walked in as though it were a garrison.

The clerk looked up and nodded, and Darcy only stared back. His mind was already three moves ahead into the worst of it.

They would not keep him. That was not the danger. His family would pay whatever was asked, in time, and he would be got out, poorer and ridiculous.

The danger was standing on his arm. If this room decided to keep him, it kept her, too — or it turned her loose alone into the town where yesterday morning had happened, which was worse. The best possible scenario of the two meant that there would be, someday, in some drawing room in England, the story of Darcy of Pemberley ransomed out of a Spanish prison with a wife no one had ever heard him name. He could see Georgiana’s face while somebody told it to her. He set his teeth against the faint tremor in his jaw, and gave the clerk his attention as though the man were slightly in his way.

Elizabeth had let go of his arm. Both gloved hands were now on the table, leaning in, her Spanish low and fast, and the clerk’s smile came down a degree.

“He says we must wait.”

“We will not wait. Advise him of my name.”

“I have told him. He would like to know whether Pemberley is a rank, a regiment, or a disease.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“That it is a house in Derbyshire larger than his village, and that you own the village too, which is not true — is it? But he will not go to Derbyshire to check.”

She turned back to the clerk, repeated the name “Darcy,” and then the clerk pointed at him and said the word.

“Esposo?”

His pulse missed a beat. The clerk was looking at Elizabeth, not at him, and she did not look at Darcy at all.

“Sí.”

Plain as the table between them, and on to the next thing before he could feel the floor of it.

He had almost got himself level again when the man leaned back, well pleased with himself, and said something that widened his own smile. Elizabeth answered him rather sharply — a single dry line that took the smile clean off. Whatever it was, the clerk did not try again.

“What did he say?”

“He asked whether English newlyweds commonly spend the morning in a gaol rather than in bed. I told him my husband had already seen to that, twice, and thoroughly enough for his wife’s satisfaction, and still had energy to spare for my uncle besides. He seems chastened.”

It took Darcy a moment to be certain he had heard her correctly.

“You told him what?”

“He was impertinent. I was worse. It is the only currency these men respect, and I find I have a great deal of it this morning. You have gone a very interesting colour, Mr Darcy.”

He had. He could feel it, which was worse than being told. He had faced down a raided inn and a leering guard without a flicker, and Elizabeth had put him to rout with a single sentence he had not even been permitted to understand until it was already spoken — to a stranger — on his behalf.

“I will thank you,” he said, with what remained of his dignity, “to defend my honour in future without quite so much detail.”

“You have no notion that is truly what I said. I might have been modesty itself.”

“I have every notion. I watched the clerk’s face turn redder than my own.”

“Then you must comfort yourself that he believed it. What would you have me tell him now?”

“Tell him my name is in the parish register at the Magdalena since last night, in the alcalde’s ledger yesterday, and in a dozen letters which are even now in the hands of the royal treasury, with whom I have business. Tell him that no fewer than three offices in this kingdom can now say where I was on the fifteenth of June, and whose door I came to. Tell him I have come for my wife’s uncle, and that I mean to come back tomorrow, and the day after, and to pay for the privilege each time. He may charge me a fair sum for his trouble, or I will exact an unfair one for mine. But he had better understand that I am a great deal more use to him standing here than I should ever be in one of his cells — where I should be nothing but an expense, a great deal of trouble to guard, and eventually a letter somebody has to answer.”

She told him. It ran longer in Spanish than in English, and Darcy — who could not follow a word — had the strong impression his remarks were being improved upon. Whatever she put into them, the smile went out.

The clerk took up the card. He could no more read the English than Darcy the ledger, but the engraving had a language of its own. He asked something, and his eyes went from Elizabeth to Darcy and back.

“Your relation to Mr Gardiner,” she said. “Not mine, yours is what he wants to know.”