Page 82 of Homeless

“We need not behave like idiots. What is done is done.” She tied the ribbon at last, pulled the knot tight, and went to the table for her hairpins. “If there are no consequences, there is no reason it need govern the rest. I will be free to choose elsewhere. You will be free to marry your heiress. We shall both of us have what we wanted from the beginning.”

Free.

The word crossed his mind and found no place to lodge. What freedom was there now in a world divided into before last night and after it? She thought she was restoring order. She was asking him to assist in the erasure of the only sacred happiness he had ever touched, while bearing herself the harsher cost if the erasure were ever tested before the world.

Yet even now, he could not tell her so.

He could not tell her that she was his wife in more than law now, and that he would never again be a man untouched by her. He could not tell her that the night had gone deeper into him than any vow spoken in the church. If he pressed, if he pleaded, if he let one syllable of his private torment show, he became monstrous.

So, there remained only one answer.

He fastened the first button of his waistcoat and found that even so small an action required more concentration than he possessed.

“Then, by all means, let us leave Vitoria as soon as possible.”

XXXI

Nothing Saved

The office had not improved in four days. The same heat, the same flies, the same clerk with ink to the second knuckle, the same heaped and roped paper going quietly to rot in the room beyond.

What had changed was inside Darcy's own skull, where a headache sat behind his eyes like a meaner version of himself and would not be reasoned with.

Elizabeth stood a careful half-pace to his left. Not a single unnecessary word had passed between them since dawn. He had gone downstairs and taken a pot of something flavourless and cold out to the stables, where he ate beside the mules. He had no idea if Elizabeth had eaten, but there was a dullness in her eyes and a sharpness in her manner that could have been explained by a headache, or an empty stomach, or simply by being forced to breathe the same air as him. He did not ask, did not touch her, had not even held the door to the office for her because her skirt would have to brush his trousers.

When the clerk finally looked up, Elizabeth’s voice was courteous, but utterly devoid of hope or expression. It was as if she had decided to be disappointed in advance, and he could well imagine why. A disappointment meant a longer delay, more conversation, and perhaps another blind chase to some other Spanish town. Another week, another month in his company, and after declaring so hotly this morning that she wanted nothing more to do with him, she would wish to make good on that desire as soon as possible.

Every time his eyes went to her, the night came rushing back, and he could not cherish the night without abhorring the morning. He would have to teach himself to put a bar and bolt on that door and pretend, as she did, that the night had never happened. He certainly could not afford for his eyes to cloud or his throat to close up in a public office, with his head splitting and his temper worn through.

So, he watched the clerk, who was not worth looking at, and tried to fool himself into thinking Elizabeth noticed his efforts.

The clerk left his desk and went to a counter behind him, then returned with something in his hand.

“Is that…?” Darcy asked.

She turned to him, and some of the resentment, some of the wall she had bricked up between them, faded for an instant. “Your bond. He found it — the junta’s own records.”

The words made no sense at once. “He… he found it? In that pile?”

“He says he paid two boys to sort through a stack of papers for three days. He wishes you to check the name and signatures, but he declares it is the very paper you seek. And he is hoping you find the effort worthy of your gratitude, which, I assume, means he thinks you will pay him handsomely.”

The clerk slid the paper across the counter, and Darcy caught it with his fingertips. He was still staring at it in disbelief when the clerk said more to Elizabeth.

“He says they found it yesterday evening in a bundle the French had shelved under the wrong year, mixed with troop requisitions and the junta’s ledgers and the general’s household receipts.”

Darcy was still blinking at the page. It seemed hardly credible. “This… this no ledger entry. This is his half of the loan agreement! The receipt of the money, naming my father, the sum, and the undertaking to repay!”

Elizabeth was gazing at him as if she had known that all along, and had assumed he did, too. “Well, yes. That was what I asked them to find.”

“But this… I thought this had been burned, or carried off. I do not think you understand, nobody acquires this. It is far beyond what might have been… Are you sure? How can we know it is not some forgery to make me part with more silver?”

“I never gave him the name George Darcy. I only gave him the surname, and he could not have invented the terms. Compare them to your loan schedule, and I think you will find they match.”

There was no need to consult the loan schedule. He knew it by heart, knew the numbers and terms, the name of the junta, the original date of signing… it was all there.

“He says the seals are whole,” Elizabeth added. “He even verified that they are the correct ones.”

It was real. The notary's mark, the countersign, the junta’s own stamp bitten deep into the paper, the phrases he could not read but had heard read to him in three towns as the thing that did not exist because the French had burned it.