Page 39 of Homeless

“She is everything that is proper.”

“Oh, dear.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. Go on. Proper. That is one.”

“She is well-bred. Amiable. Accomplished —”

“You are reading me a subscription list. Amiable, accomplished, well-bred. I could describe a spaniel in those terms and make the creature sound the better match, because I should at least add that it was fond of me.” She tilted her head. “Is she fond of you?”

“She has always shown me civility.”

“Civility.” Elizabeth pronounced the word as though holding it up to the light to find the flaw in it. “You are going to marry a woman who has always shown you civility. Mr Darcy, I show the fishmonger civility. It is not generally understood to be a foundation for matrimony.”

“It is a foundation for a great many marriages considerably happier than the ones got up on warmer stuff.”

That gave her a moment’s pause, and he had the brief, unworthy pleasure of having scored a strike. She inclined her head, conceding the hit with a fairness he had not expected and rather wished she had spared him, since it made her harder to be irritated with.

“That is true,” she said. “That is entirely true, and rather bleak, and I withdraw the spaniel.” She let the road jolt them a while. “What is her name?”

“No.”

“Now that is interesting.”

“It is nothing of the kind.”

“It is the most interesting thing you have said. You will give me the sum of your ruin to the shilling, you will confess your father’s folly and your own, you will grant me that she is amiable, accomplished, and civil. But the name, her mere name, you guard as though I meant to do something dreadful with it.” She leaned forward over her knees. “What is it you are afraid of, precisely? That I shall appear at the church on the morning and rise up in the gallery to forbid the banns? I knew this man in Spain, and he owes one hundred thousand pounds and cannot bend over without an audience —”

“Good God.”

“— and once he hid behind a table from a woman half his size with flour on his coat.” Only think of the scandal. You had far better tell me the name and have done, for I shall only invent a worse one, and go about calling her Seraphina to your face for the rest of the journey.”

“You would not dare.”

“I would dare a very great deal before we reach Estella. I have already married you. Seraphina is nothing beside it.”

He looked at her — the flushed, laughing, indefatigable ruthlessness of her, entirely without malice and entirely without mercy, prying the last coin out of him for no better reason than that it was there and the road was long — and he heard himself surrender the name he had not meant to say aloud in this country to anyone.

“Lady Honoria Vane. She is the daughter of the Earl of Marchwood. And if you call her Seraphina, I shall put you out of the cart and let Boabdil decide between us.”

“Lady Honoria.” Elizabeth sat back and turned the name over with evident satisfaction. “That is a very handsome name. That is a name with land behind it. An earl’s daughter — well done, Mr Darcy, truly. I congratulate you without the smallest reservation. You will be Darcy of Pemberley, son-in-law to Lord Marchwood, and there is not a hostess in England who will not think the better of her table for having you at it.”

Darcy stared at her for a few seconds, then wedged himself further into the corner of the slats and looked up the road. He had been braced for jealousy, or pity, or the sort of feminine cross-examination that goes fishing after a compliment to itself. She offered none of the three. She was pleased for him. She had heard the whole sensible, splendid construction of his future and approved it, warmly, and she went back to watching the country go by.

“You are very quick to marry me off,” he said, “for a woman still legally in possession of me.”

“On loan,” she said, not turning from the country. “I keep excellent accounts. You will be returned in the condition I found you — give or take a wife.”

The road out of Tudela ran first through dust, then vineyards, then a country so openly stripped by war that even the trees looked uncertain of their tenure.

The Lady Honoria interrogation had annoyed him, she could see, and he had gone quiet after it as if licking a wound he would die before admitting to. She let him have the silence for a mile or two. It seemed only fair. She had, after all, got a great deal for her afternoon’s work — a name, a fortune, a father-in-law with an earldom — and generosity came easily to the victorious.

It did not last.

“Your mother is in Gracechurch Street?” he asked.

“Partly there. Partly everywhere. She is most often with my aunt Philips, though no roof was ever built broad enough for my mother’s anxieties. Kitty and Lydia are still with her, when they are not making some other household wish them elsewhere.”