Page 27 of Homeless

Darcy looked away too late. Her hand was still as slender as he remembered, and now it was unshaking. There was flour at the knuckles that she had not altogether washed away.

The priest began in Spanish. Matrimonio. Libre. Santa iglesia. The rest came to him as wreckage. Elizabeth translated where she must, and left the remainder to Providence.

“He asks your name,” she said.

“Fitzwilliam George Darcy.”

Then hers.

“Elizabeth Marie Bennet.”

Plain and entire. Asking nothing of him, promising nothing in return, exactly as she had been at pains to tell him. He believed her.

His body did not. Some primal part of him had overleapt the priest and the vows and landed on the far side of the ceremony, where there was no inn-yard to cross, no crowded room to set at his back, and a woman who would be within six feet of him all night, for at least the next two weeks. He had found it work enough to keep his eyes from her with the whole of England to retreat into, and now, he would have no escape.

The priest asked a question, and Elizabeth answered in irritated English before she bothered putting it into words the priest could understand.

“No, my father cannot be consulted from London by midnight, and my uncle is presently in prison, which seems a difficulty, but not an objection.”

The priest looked heavenward, in appeal or in fatigue, and spoke to Darcy directly.

“He asks whether you take me for your lawful wife.”

No bargain. No bond or stolen papers. No uncle in prison, no Vega, no understanding waiting an ocean off. All of it fell away before the simplicity of the word.

Wife.

“Yes.”

Her face did not warm, though something at the corner of her mouth drew one degree harder and did not slacken again.

The priest turned to her. “Si,” she said, in Spanish clear enough for any altar.

The next instruction wanted their hands. Darcy put out his own, meaning nothing by it but obedience.

She laid hers in it. Warm from the glove. Light. Entirely real.

His fingers closed because the priest expected it. The priest went on speaking. The landlady dabbed her eyes and sniffed. Pilar hiccuped once and was silent. A drop of wax slid down the near candle and hardened halfway.

Elizabeth kept her eyes upon the priest. Once, only, did her pulse betray her, a sharp beat under his thumb when the man said fidelidad, which wanted no translating whatever.

Darcy nearly looked at her. Prudence, or cowardice, held his head straight. He answered when he was prompted. So did she.

A ring would have improved appearances. Lacking one, the priest said something and put out his hand, and Elizabeth said, “Thirteen coins. He wants thirteen, a ‘gift’ from husband to wife for the consecration.”

Darcy counted them out of the purse. “It seems an unlucky number for the business.”

“I do not think we will be married long enough for luck to matter.”

The priest blessed them where they lay in Darcy’s palm, and then took his wrist and turned it, and tipped the coins into Elizabeth’s cupped hands.

“Las arras,” said the landlady, with enormous satisfaction.

“Ego conjungo vos in matrimonium, in nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

At the one moment that signified, the language turned, and the Latin came to him directly. Her face had gone slightly blank, trying to work out the cognates to Spanish or Portuguese or whatever the devil language she actually spoke. But this was the language of a scholar, words he understood without bothering to translate in his head. He had conjugated worse at fifteen, half asleep over a candle.

I join you together in matrimony, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.