Page 28 of Homeless

The first thing all night he had understood entire, and without her. The thing that bound him.

The priest made the sign of the cross over them. Pilar burst into tears again. The landlady kissed Elizabeth on both cheeks before anyone could prevent it, and then embraced Darcy with a speed no delicacy checked. He endured it. Resistance was too complicated.

The priest held out his hand for payment. That, at least, wanted no interpreter.

He paid him.

When he turned back, Elizabeth had drawn her glove on again. It restored no distance whatever. It informed him only, and with unnecessary vividness, that beneath it was the hand he had held while promising before God to remain where necessity had put him.

“Señora Darcy,” said the landlady, delighted by the sound of it before the bride could possibly be equal to it.

Elizabeth’s head came round as though the woman had struck flint by her ear.

Nothing ready stood in her face. No answer. No strategy. No irony quick enough to arrive ahead of feeling.

“We had better go,” was all she said.

Pilar went ahead of them with the lantern and set it on the chest, turned back the coverlet, and looked at the jug and found it full and set it down again. She did all of it without once raising her eyes above the level of Darcy’s waistcoat. It was the officiousness of respectable indecency. She was sixteen years old, and she knew precisely what the purpose of this room was meant to be on this particular night.

It was not the chamber Darcy had occupied before the raid. That one had lost a shutter and half its lock. This room lay above the stable court at the back, narrow but whole, with a truckle for a servant rolled beneath the window and one larger bed set under a faded coverlet that might once have been crimson and had now subsided into the colour of exhausted roses.

“One room,” Elizabeth murmured.

One room. One bed. Married people.

What had they imagined? Separate wings of a palace? A constitutional amendment in their favour?

Elizabeth removed her cloak very carefully and hung it upon the chair.

Darcy set down the candle with equal care.

He could not look at the bed. But he could also look nowhere else. This, then, was the first practical consequence of usefulness.

Mrs Darcy.

His wife.

Across the room, Elizabeth put one hand upon the bedpost, as if to assure herself it had not been imagined into being by fatigue. Then she turned and met his eyes.

For a long instant, neither of them spoke.

At last she said, with a frankness almost heroic in its insufficiency, “Well.”

He had never heard helplessness in her before.

And because it was helpless, because the room was shut, because the priest had spoken and the landlady had named, and there remained now no road at all except through this, the answer rose to Darcy’s lips before caution could intercept it.

“Yes,” he said. “I believe we are married enough for the evening.”

XI

Married Enough

The truckle would not come out.

Darcy discovered that the first domestic trial of matrimony lay not in sentiment but in carpentry.

He had one hand under the frame and the other upon the floorboards, applying to the recalcitrant thing a degree of force which, in a better-regulated world, would have been reserved for an honest fight.