Page 3 of Homeless

He drew off his gloves, cast them on the table, and produced from his coat a packet of letters so thickly folded and sealed that the whole had the appearance of a campaign rather than a correspondence.

“Spain,” he said.

Mrs Gardiner looked up at once. “Spain?”

“At last, Spain. The Peninsula is open; the French are gone; every man in the City with a pipe in his imagination has his eye upon the old ports, and because they all stare one way, nobody troubles himself to look another. I have letters from Bilbao, from Cádiz, Santander, and” — he tapped the thickest seal with a finger still darkened by ink — “from Tudela.”

Mrs Gardiner twisted to gape at him. “Tudela? What is that?”

“Tudela, my love! Southern Navarre, on the Ebro. Wine, wool, iron, inland trade, and hardly a British merchant on the spot before the scramble begins in earnest. I should like best to get my hands on the wool, but Herrera is pressing me to buy the wine first. There is a well-travelled road just there that meets up with the Ebro River, and Herrera says wool and wine could be got wholesale just now. They only want the right man to organise their rescue upriver for export.”

He spread the letters before them, sorting as he spoke. “The great houses will go where every other great house goes. Madrid, Lisbon, Cádiz. A smaller man may gain ground elsewhere, if he goes quickly and chooses well.”

“How long?” asked Mrs Gardiner.

“We should be gone by the first week of May, if I can have the letters answered in time, and I mean to. Once landed, twelve weeks if all prospers — fourteen, if roads and officials prove stubborn. Home well before the leaves turn, either way.”

“Those are the very things that trouble me. What can you know of the roads?”

“I am told quite reliably that they are passable. Bad in places, of course, but used. The war is over. Trade has begun again. Petitioners travel, lawyers travel, officers on detached business travel. Wives go, too, where the object justifies the journey. It is not fashionable, perhaps, but neither is it wild. Had I any conviction of real danger, I should say nothing at all and stay in London nursing my disappointment.”

That answered more than the question itself. Mr Gardiner had enterprise enough to grow rich if luck favoured him, but not the sort that mistook rashness for spirit. He loved a speculation; he did not offer his household to it blindly.

“You cannot mean to go alone!” cried Mrs Gardiner.

“No.” He turned to Elizabeth. “I had settled that before I even set down from the carriage. Lizzy, I want you to come with me.”

Had anybody else spoken so, she would have taken it for play. From him, the notion raised alarm.

“Me?”

“You. You know my Portuguese correspondence better than any clerk in the house. What Spanish you lack, you will mend faster upon the road than any fellow I might hire for wages and lose to drink at the first posting inn. Portuguese will carry us farther than most men suppose. Besides, you have been dying of good behaviour these six months, and I have no wish to leave you in London to become a model of female patience. You would be useful to me, and the journey may do you more service than the spring assemblies.”

“Am I invited as a companion or smuggled out to spare Aunt’s nerves?”

“As salvation to my ledgers.”

She laughed; then the laugh died in her throat almost as soon as it came. Spain. Roads. Inns.

Names Rosa had spoken in the back passages at Longbourn, when Elizabeth was small enough to sit on a flour barrel and believe every one of them a place out of a fairy tale. Rosa had come from a country she fled as a young widow and never ceased to grieve, and she had taught the language in scraps, between tasks, glancing at the door, as though a person might hand a language on quickly, while there was still someone to take it. It had been a useless accomplishment for years. It was, now, the one thing Elizabeth owned that could be turned to account.

Mrs Gardiner frowned. “Ledgers are all very well, Edward, but you talk of taking a young woman somewhere possibly quite dangerous. Usefulness is not the whole matter.”

“No,” said Mr Gardiner, instantly sober. “Which is why I have made inquiries before speaking. There will be letters of introduction. We shall travel where other English travellers lodge, take decent arrangements, and have no taste for heroics. Tudela is not the front. It is a town reopening itself to trade. And we go as British subjects into a country Britain has but lately bled to deliver. There is a consul at the coast and the Navy in her ports; an Englishman in difficulty there would not find himself without friends. If the reports before me implied otherwise, I would not carry Lizzy a mile beyond Hounslow.”

“Men often say a place is safe when they mean only that another man has not yet been killed there.”

“Very unjust, my dear. It is not at all imprudent. Many are travelling the very route I propose without inviting ruin.”

“And you believe it proper?” asked Elizabeth. “Proper enough, I mean, that you would answer to my mother for bringing me?”

“I do.”

Mrs Gardiner remained quiet a little while. Then she said, “I cannot say what your mother might find decent, Elizabeth, but as a mother myself, I would not consent to it if I thought you were to be carried through a country still in flames. I have no relish for such courage in people who belong to me. But your uncle is right in one point at least: there are journeys a lady may make when the arrangements are decent and the purpose substantial. Uncommon, perhaps, but not disgraceful.”

Thomas stirred. Elizabeth bent and placed him back in the cradle before her arms betrayed how tightly they had drawn around him.

Gracechurch Street, with its useful rooms and kindly suffocation, had grown all at once too small to contain her. She had not known, until the door opened upon Spain, how nearly she had come to fearing her present life a permanent one.