Page 36 of Homeless

Of every mouth that had shaped it since the church, his was the one that reached her. She stopped.

“Tell your aunt I am well. I want a letter in your own hand from England, written from my own parlour, when the ransom is paid.”

She did not have time to answer before the door came shut between them.

XIII

Amassing Ruin

The sun outside the gaol had the gross indecency to be cheerful.

Elizabeth came back into it with her uncle’s last pressure still burning in her hands and the title Mrs Darcy sounding in her ears with a greater intimacy than the priest had managed to give it. The street was alive with carts, women at doorways, and a mule which looked long resigned to suffering another day in the hot sun. That common life, continuing in sight of prison walls, appeared to her almost insulting.

Darcy fell into step beside her without speaking. They walked a little way like people not yet fit for the public air. At length, he asked, “How do you come by the language?”

She blinked at him, her mind not yet drawn from the gaol cell. “What?”

“Spanish. Portuguese. Whatever alchemy has enabled you to make threats sound respectable to clerks.”

“Oh.” Her gaze fell to the pavers again, and she crossed her arms over her stomach. “Portuguese. I learned it on the back stairs at Longbourn. My mother took on a maid the year I was fourteen — Rosa Maria da Conceição, though Mama had her down to plain Rosa before the first evening was out. She had been a gentleman’s daughter once, in the Minho, with land and a name and a marriage arranged for her, until the French came through in ‘seven and left her none of the three.

“By the time she washed up in Hertfordshire, she had lost her country, her people, and any patience she had ever had for England, so she avenged herself on the whole of it by teaching me verbs. I followed her like a duckling; she talked to keep from weeping, I think, and I was generally the only thing in the way of it. So, I learned the language, and with it a country I had never seen — roads, river-towns, a convent where she had been a girl — a whole map made of her homesickness, which I have never had cause to doubt. My uncle traded with Lisbon, so he made some use of me when I had few other diversions. By the time I reached Spain, I had enough of one language to be cheated in another.”

“So that is why your uncle brought you? You had been helping him?”

“For that, and because I was there to be brought.” They turned down the narrower street toward the lodging-house. “My father had died. My uncle had letters to answer and business he meant to grow, and the kindness to pretend I might be of use in both. I had no wish to sit in Gracechurch Street cultivating resignation while other people were busy.”

He was quiet so long she thought he had let it go. Then he said, “I am very sorry for your father. I ought to have said so before. I had no proper occasion.”

She felt, absurdly, as if somebody had touched a bruise she had almost forgot to protect. “There has been a general want of proper occasions.”

“I do not mean it formally.”

“No.” She kept her eyes on the street before them. “That is why it signifies.”

They walked on. A woman under a striped awning shouted after them in Spanish that the English bride had chosen herself a handsome husband. Elizabeth did not translate. She had translated enough this morning.

After a little while, Darcy asked, “And your next younger sister?”

She glanced up. “Mary?”

“You told me in the inn that she had married Collins. I am still trying to reconcile the fact to the gentleman. I do not know him personally, but I cannot suppose him to be a sensible man.”

Elizabeth gave a short laugh. “You may spare yourself the effort of making him agreeable. Mary has done the work already. Mr Collins had Longbourn, a living in Kent, and a general fondness for admiration. My sister had fortitude, piety, and a taste for improving books. Between them, providence contrived a harmony I should never have predicted and cannot sincerely regret.”

“I cannot account for why I assumed. I am only surprised to hear it was Miss Mary.” He said it to the road ahead, not to her.

She squinted up at him, shading her eyes from the sun. “Two years is a long while to be wrong about something so important as the name of another man’s wife, and you do not strike me as a man with much practice at it.”

“I begin to suspect Lady Catherine has much to answer for.”

“Only now?”

That almost drew the shadow of a smile from him. It vanished as they turned into the yard of the lodging-house and found the landlady waving with a dishcloth in one hand and a rooster under the other arm. A carter with a mule flicking flies stood under the eaves, and Pilar was arguing with a driver in Spanish.

The landlady saw them and cried out in triumph that a cart was found, and would not grow cheaper by being admired.

Elizabeth translated for Darcy’s benefit. “The landlady has found us a cart that will carry us out of Tudela within the hour, if we can agree on where it is to take us.”