Page 70 of Homeless

“That was not my father’s watch. I purchased it for eight pounds two summers ago, after I cracked the crystal on my own watch and could not be without the time while it was being repaired.”

Her mouth dropped open, and she swatted his shoulder, driving his elbow unhappily into his still-tender ribs. “You fiend, you! You let me tell that man that you were parting with a family treasure!”

“Perhaps it was, once, but not my family’s. And before you bruise me in public again, I say we should find a place to stay for the night for ourselves and three mules with our newfound fortune.”

The office they were sent to was neither the first nor the second they tried that day. The Diputación had burned; what remained of the province's business had been parcelled out among whatever buildings still had roofs, and this one — a former grain factor's house behind the cathedral — held the records the French had left behind when they ran.

Darcy understood the last part only because Elizabeth stopped in the doorway and did not go in.

“What is it?”

“He said the ledgers are here.” She was looking at the room beyond the clerk's table, and Darcy followed her eyes to it: a chamber stacked to the beams with boxes, bound registers, loose paper roped in bundles and stacked without order, a decade of a province's accounts heaped like firewood. “Most of it, anyway. Whatever the French carried off from half the towns of Navarre pand could not carry home.”

He did not yet see why that should stop her breath. He only saw a great deal of paper.

The clerk asked their business. Elizabeth gave it, and Darcy discovered he could now understand a fair percentage of the words — the bond named, the junta named, the year named. The clerk was shaking his head before she had finished even asking.

“He says war claims are not settled here.”

“I have not asked him to settle it. Tell him what I want is the record. We are only trying to verify the junta's ledger, that they received the money and undertook to repay it. If he does not have the ledgers, I ask for the junta himself, or the proper commissioner, to certify the copy I do have.” He had said it a dozen times now, in a dozen anterooms, and it seemed doubtful that this room would hear him any more clearly than the last ones had. “Tell him all I have is the English side. The Spanish side is in the junta’s keeping, and I want it found.”

The clerk spread his hands and delivered a speech that went on rather longer than the answer required, and Darcy watched his wife's jaw harden while her lips applied that sweet smile she used whenever she meant to coax a man past his indifference.

“Well?”

“He says he cannot look. He has no men, no order to the records, no instruction to search them for a foreigner, and a hundred people ahead of us who want the same thing—a deed, a will, a note of hand, a son's death recorded.” She tapped one finger on the counter. “That last is true, at least. The rest is a door he would like us to pay to have opened.”

“Then we pay him.”

“I think not.” She said it in her most reasonable voice, still smiling at the clerk. “If he takes your coin today, he will look for an hour, find nothing, and swear he searched a week. He wants to be bribed before he knows whether the thing exists — which tells me he does not mean to find it.” She turned back and spoke again, and this time there was iron under the courtesy, and a dozen words in it Darcy did not know.

The clerk's manner shifted. Not much. But he looked, for the first time, at the paper in Darcy's hand rather than at Darcy's coat.

“What did you say to him?”

“That the record concerns a debt the restored Crown will one day be very interested to have found or lost, and that when a commissioner comes asking — as one will — it will matter a great deal whether a certain clerk was helpful or obstructive to the English gentleman who first reported it.” She kept her eyes on the man, who was now regarding her somewhat warily. “It is even true. There is a commissioner. He is somewhere north of us, currently being unhelpful to someone else.”

It was a peculiar experience, watching Elizabeth Bennet frighten a functionary in a language he could only partially follow, with a threat she had assembled out of scraps he had let fall over three weeks of failure — and to see it work, marginally, where his own name and his own paper had bought nothing.

Thus began a volley of questions. Elizabeth answered each of them, smiling and more reasonable than Darcy had ever had a mind to be over the matter. Slowly, the clerk’s tone changed from refusal into something grudging and conditional.

“He will have someone look,” she said at last. “He does not promise to find it, but I have hinted at a handsome gratuity if he does. He says the records are in no order — the French shelved nothing, they only stole and stacked — and that what we want, if it survived, could be in any of two hundred bundles, under a name spelled three ways, in a hand no one troubles to read. Days. If we are fortunate, and he does not simply forget us the moment we are out the door. Which he may.”

“Days,” Darcy repeated.

“Better than weeks or months.” She was still looking into the room beyond the table, at the heaped and roped and rotting paper.

“It must be in there, Fitzwilliam. The thing every office between here and Madrid has told you does not exist because it was burned. It was not burned. The French were too greedy to burn it.” She stopped speaking and looked up at him. “Oh, now you are making me nervous. What is that look on your face?’

He put away the smirk that had grown and cleared his throat. “That is the first time you have called me ‘Fitzwilliam’ instead of ‘Mr Darcy.’ Shall I send for an apothecary? Have you a fever?”

She cast her eyes heavenward. “That is what you took from what I said? That your name slipped out of my mouth sideways?’

He shook his head. “Go on. What are we to do about the bond?”

“At present? Nothing we have not already done. I would wager my best bonnet that it is sitting in that room, thirty feet from us, and a man who earns nine reales a week will not walk across the floor to find it unless he is made to.”

“I thought we made him.”