Page 26 of Homeless

The priest looked from her to Darcy and asked something, to which she retorted something back that sounded irreverent.

“What did he ask?”

She kept her eyes upon the priest. “Whether you are truly the gentleman in question, or merely the tallest available Protestant.”

“And your answer?”

“That, I reserve for leverage.”

The priest spoke again. This time, she answered without any amusement whatever, and he shook his head. She came one step nearer to him and spoke very fast. His chin came up. Their words met like foils. Behind them, the landlady crossed herself and made several gestures to suggest that English ladies were terrible creatures.

Darcy stood through three exchanges of it. “What is wrong?”

“He asks whether you understand that marriage is binding.”

“Tell him of course I do.”

“He asks also whether you marry me freely.”

Freely. His eye went to the half-open door, and the single lamp within, and the broken rail, and the side altar stripped by the war and mended afterwards out of stubbornness. Anywhere but the word, which had lodged under his ribs and would not be argued with.

“Do you require above an hour to decide it?”

“No.”

“Then I shall spare us both the luxury.” She turned and translated. “Sí .”

The priest did not take his gaze off Darcy. He asked a third thing.

“What now?”

“He asks whether you are promised to any other woman. Only men hiding from their real wives or women who are already preñá marry in haste by night.”

The landlady drew in her breath and laughed aloud. “Y no será la primera que se casa preñá!”

Darcy did not care to ask for that bit to be translated. “Tell him there is no wife.”

“That is not the same answer.”

“Miss Bennet —”

“No. Answer plainly or not at all. Shall I tell him you are free to marry me?”

The blood came up under his skin, hot and immediate. To be handled so was intolerable. To have earned it was worse. Worst of all, she knew both, and asked it regardless, and would not spare him the saying of it.

“Yes,” he said. “Tell him that.”

She held his eyes one instant longer, and then she turned and spoke.

The priest’s suspicion gave way by inches. He raised the lantern and surveyed the four of them as though weighing sin against inconvenience, and at length he stood aside.

“Now,” said Elizabeth. “Before his sense of righteousness improves.”

The ceremony was shorter than a lease and graver than a duel.

The chapel was cold. War had taken its silver and the lead from its roof. Above the altar, the wall showed a paler oblong where something had hung. On the altar itself, two candles burned in candelabras that once held six.

The priest stood before them in a stole mended at the edge with thread of the wrong colour. Pilar and the landlady kept to one side, grown devout in the presence of formal sin. Elizabeth drew off one glove, finger by finger, and laid it on the rail.