Page 10 of Homeless

“You have been dull as a dropped stitch since the square, and I have been too well-bred to say so before now. What is he called, this gentleman of yours who cannot manage a clerk?”

“He is not mine, and he is called Mr Darcy. Of Derbyshire.”

“Darcy.” His eyes rolled up as he searched his memory and found his scrap of it. “Ah, yes, I recall. The gentleman forever at Mr Bingley’s elbow when Netherfield was taken. I have the name from that season — and a poor season it proved, for Bingley turned out a sad disappointment in the end. A man does not raise a whole neighbourhood’s expectations and then decamp without leaving some debt or other behind him. I dislike an unpaid account. But it was not Bingley your aunt remarked upon at the time. It was the friend. She fancied she knew something of the family of Derbyshire, where they sat. I have lost the whole of it, but the impression, and the impression was not unfavourable.”

“My aunt knows something of everybody. It is her recreation and your livelihood.”

“Evasion, Lizzy. I have traded too long not to know the article when it is handed to me shorted on weight. In the square, you described a gentleman, disagreeable, known slightly, and never troubled over. You did not describe a man you could not eat your supper for.”

She broke the bread into pieces smaller than her appetite required and tried to look very industrious as she spoke.

“He looked as unpleasant as I remember. Proud, certainly. Disagreeable, often. When first we met, he refused to dance with every woman in Meryton within my hearing, and found time besides to observe which of us was not handsome enough to tempt him.”

“That is a more exact verdict than most people trouble to render on an old acquaintance, and rather too general to merit such vehemence. Were you the one he found not handsome enough?”

“I have no intention of answering that.”

“I ask only from curiosity. A merchant’s vice.” He watched her over the wine. “You have not eaten. That is not like you, and it is not like the stew, which is better than it has any right to be.”

She looked down at the dark table, the chipped bowl, the candle leaning in the draught. There was no retreating from so much.

“I only wonder at his presence here. Mr Darcy is not the sort of man to dirty his coat in a small Spanish town. If he had business, he would send another to contract it for him. Unless it were personal, or perhaps even secretly scandalous.”

Mr Gardiner grunted. “Then I pity the man.”

“You pity everybody. It is your chief extravagance.”

“Not everybody. Only those who look as if life has just sent them an invoice they cannot pay.”

She laughed and carried on with her spoon.

Across the room, the English voice had given up on Spanish and gone quiet. The seat was half hidden by the timber post, but the translator had returned to the table, and took on the office of securing whatever his employer had been trying to purchase. A few moments later, the taller man took the wine bottle the servant brought and excused himself, while the translator remained to finish his meal.

Elizabeth had not meant to care whether Mr Darcy stayed or went. The room was simply emptier for his going, and she turned back to her uncle before she could make anything of that.

They finished supper more easily after that, conversation drifting to an innkeeper in Bilbao who cheated only Protestants, the wine shipment that would either make her uncle's fortune or give him an excellent grievance, the chance of letters from England if the post remembered that foreigners existed. But the earlier subject was still there under the rest of it. By the time the candles had burned down and Mr Gardiner rose, stiff from the day's bargaining, the room had begun to empty.

“Come,” he said. “You look fit for more argument, and I am not equal to more than my bed.”

“I had not meant to begin an argument.”

“My dear Lizzy, with you, it is enough that another person looks at you incorrectly.”

She took his arm to hide a smile and let him lead her out.

V

Her Laugh

Aman might walk half of Navarre in hopes of escaping a laugh and find it waiting for him at the next turning.

Darcy crossed the broken street below the lodging house with his hat in his hand and the night air doing him no service at all. Tudela after dusk was a hive of biting insects, which Darcy tried to fan away from his face with his hat. It had been an unusually hot, humid season, so he was assured, so what might have been a pleasant evening last week had this week scarcely dipped below the daytime swelter that left his collar limp and his brow damp. Gentlemen ought not wear waistcoats in the summer, he thought sourly, or at least might do away with the cravats.

None of his discomfort broke the tyranny of that one remembered note from the inn. Elizabeth Bennet had laughed within fifty yards of him, and another man had answered.

She was married. He was as good as pledged elsewhere.

No honourable action existed on either side of those facts. Nothing in Tudela — not treasury stamps nor corrupt clerks nor the whole mouldering apparatus of Ferdinand’s government — had altered the condition under which she belonged to another man, and he had no business wanting even the sound of her voice.