Page 24 of Homeless

“How far is it to Magdalena? Is that not the church with the stripped nave and burned timbers? I wonder that any priest still darkens its walls.”

“Only a few minutes walk, and the side chapel is still standing.”

Elizabeth pictured the square with its broken frontage and the fountain gone dry under a sky that did not care how many people bargained beneath it. It would serve as well as Westminster, if it served quickly.

“Good. We go there.” She turned toward the door.

Pilar caught at her sleeve. “And if the English gentleman changes his mind?”

Elizabeth laid her hand upon the latch. “Then he will have the distinction of doing it in public, and if there is one thing I recall all too plainly about Mr Darcy, he despises a spectacle.”

She opened the door and stepped into the passage.

Mr Darcy was already there, coming toward her out of the wrecked common room with a leather purse in one hand and a candlestick in the other. His coat had lost its symmetry. Dust darkened one knee, and wine had dried in a long stain down the cuff where he had carried the papers against his chest. He had the look not of a gentleman of consequence but of a man whom consequence had seized by the collar and dragged through a dinner party.

He halted when he saw her. “How much time have we?”

Not “What are we doing?” Not “Must it be tonight?” Not even “Is this necessary?” Only that.

For one absurd second, the violence of her relief almost turned her knees to water. “Very little. We need a priest, two witnesses, and enough silver to persuade sanctity into haste.”

His eyes went past her to Pilar, then back again. “Can it be done?”

“Yes. Can you pay for it?”

He lifted the purse. “I can pay for an offence against heaven, if heaven remains moderately priced.”

From the kitchen behind her, Pilar whispered in some awe, “Ay, señorita. Qué guapo es su novio!”

“Oh, miss. How handsome he is, your sweetheart!”

Elizabeth turned her head and gave the girl a look which required no translation at all, and the girl put her apron over her mouth.

“What did she say?” asked Darcy.

“Nothing whatever.”

“It was more than a dozen syllables of nothing.”

“It was a piece of impertinence.”

He frowned for a moment with the candle in one hand and the purse in the other. The flame dipped, and he righted it.

“I see. Then, I am to go and be married in a language I do not speak, by a priest I have not met, before witnesses who are laughing at me.”

“Yes.”

“Very well.”

By the time he had bought back two shirts, one cloak, half a wheel of cheese, and the use of the landlady’s testimony, catastrophe had revealed a vulgar genius for becoming domestic.

Ruined walls did not prevent a woman from haggling. Broken chairs did not settle accounts. The landlady had wept over her shutters, denounced every army in Europe with impartial fervour, and then turned practical, and now attached herself to the new emergency, preferring scandal to despair.

She kept up a torrent, rapid and aggrieved and loud enough to carry through three rooms, and Elizabeth stood between him and the whole of it, turning to him now and then to render perhaps a fifth into English. The gentlest fifth on offer.

There was no sense in testing her. He had only the small wince before each glance toward him, and the pause in which she pared something plainly scalding down to a sentence fit for a drawing room.

“She is glad to be of use,” Elizabeth said, while the woman brandished a torn shirt at the rafters and flung it aside. Then something brisk in the tongue he could not parse, and a second shirt was held to the lamp, pronounced sound, and pressed upon him. “She wonders whether the señor will want a cloak fit for a church.”