Page 105 of Homeless

“And I told you,” she replied sweetly, “not to call me that.”

His face darkened. “You have not objected in some while. A man does not suffer his wife to be touched and stared at by other men, Elizabeth.”

She gave a little jerk of her hips, pulling her apron strings out of his hand. “Then perhaps you should take your hands off me so others do not follow your lead.”

He subsided, but not without his mood blackening and his face probably following suit. A moment later, Elizabeth returned with a heel of dark bread that was still warm, a little cheese, and the promise that she would be done before midnight. She said he might stay there watching her like a guard dog, so long as he bit no one, or he might curl himself into the corner of the stable beside the mule and sleep for an hour or two, which was the wiser course, to her thinking.

He ate his half of the bread slowly to make it last, and wrapped hers in his handkerchief to keep it for after she had finished for the night. He fell asleep at the table.

The stable corner was dry, at least, and out of the wind. There was clean straw, and the warm, now comforting smell of the mule and the ox two stalls down, and one blanket.

One blanket, a stable floor, and the high cold of the Campoo night already seeping up through the straw, the kind of cold that did not kill a healthy person but would do a convalescent no good at all. They would naturally have to lie close all night just to keep warm, and as of this afternoon, she was no longer bleeding. And, of course, he had been there when she arranged her garments, put aside the necessities of the last few days. So now, even he knew that small, grim chaperon had gone, and taken with it the one honest reason she had had to keep a handspan of air between them.

“Come here,” she said, before he could make some gallant, idiotic offer to sit up all night against the wall. “You are ill and I am frozen and I would very much like to be warm tonight.”

He lay down… fell, really, his knees buckling the moment he attempted to bend them. She dragged the blanket over them both and fitted herself against his back — she chose his back deliberately, so she would not have his face a breath from hers all night. He was too tired and too sore to think of anything besides sleep, and so was she. Surely.

Apparently, that was not entirely true.

It came up through her slowly, treacherously — his heartbeat under her hand, the firmness of his body against her thighs and breasts, the rise and fall of his breathing, the scent of his skin through his clothing. Just him, warm and alive and near. She closed her eyes, drank in a breath, and pressed her face against his shoulder blades.

A little while later, he turned in his sleep. And then, his lips were against her brow after all, his hand coming to rest over her waist. In order to keep warm, share the blanket and stay as close to his body as she had been, she had to turn over herself and let him pull her hips into his.

Her own body, depleted and hard-used as it was, chose that moment to remember the other night. The one she had begged for — his hands and his delicious mouth and the way he had undone her by inches. The way he had taken her and given back, filled her and wrung her out and made her thank God they were both alive to do it. She squeezed her eyes against the memory as though she could shut it out.

It was stupid. They needed sleep, and just hoarding another body’s warmth did not mean she needed to become a slave to her baser desires. Especially not with —

Behind her, she felt him wake to it, too.

He did not move… not all of him, anyway, but part of him was decidedly awake. He did not say anything, but his breathing changed — she knew his breathing, God help her, she had catalogued every pitch and rhythm of it, and she would have known from across the room exactly how alert he was.

His arm lay heavy and unmoving over her. He was holding himself still by main force, and she could feel the tension simmering in his arms. Good Heavens, how did he have the strength for desire? She swallowed and forced her breathing to stay even, and, most importantly of all, not to let her hips rock back into his.

“Elizabeth?” he whispered at last. “I do not suppose…”

“Go to sleep, Fitzwilliam.”

“Right.” His arm tightened, just slightly, and then went still again. A few moments later, he was already gone, the breath rattling in his throat.

She lay in his embrace, with her eyes open on the dark stall, warm at last, and further from sleep than she had been in a week.

By the fourth day the land had begun, at last, to forgive them.

Darcy noticed it the way he had noticed his fever breaking — not all at once, but in a slow accumulation of small mercies he did not trust until there were too many to deny. The hard tableland was behind them now, given up somewhere on the descent from the pass, and the country had gone green and wet and close, folding into steep little valleys where water ran loud over stones and the trees came down to the road and threw shade. The air had changed. It carried water in it, and the cold, clean smell of the sea. Every damp, green breath of it was a promise that the north country was real, and they were nearly in it.

He would have enjoyed it more, had he been able to feel his feet.

They had walked most of the day, taking the mule in turns because he could not, in conscience, ride while Elizabeth went on foot, and she could not, in conscience, let him walk while he was still the weaker. So, they had spent a good deal of the day in a wordless contest of stubbornness over who should be spared, and both lost, and both were footsore and haggard with hunger by the time the light began to go and the farm showed itself at the head of a green combe: a low stone house, a byre, smoke, and the bark of a dog.

“I will talk to the woman of the house,” Elizabeth said.

He did not bother arguing. He had learnt, at some cost to his pride, that this was simply how they ate now. He could out-argue scholars in Latin, school his own steward in planting and flock management, manage all the investments and ledgers his father’s wealth had left to him with or without accountants and solicitors, but he could not talk a farm wife out of a single egg.

Elizabeth, however, wearing a smile that shamed the sunrise and dressed in a gown a beggar would decline, could stand in a strange farmyard and, within the quarter hour, have the household half in love with her and the kettle on. She was doing it now. He watched her make herself known to the woman of the house — the battered English couple, robbed on the pass, the husband still ailing, only wanting a dry corner and willing to earn it — and watched the wariness in the farm wife's face give way to Christian charity.

He thought, not for the first time, that he had married the most formidable person he had ever met, and had been too great a fool in Hertfordshire to see it.

Charity only went so far. The keeping of two people and a hungry mule meant that they must offer something to earn their meal. The wife asked Elizabeth to write a letter to a son gone for a soldier, which she managed in half an hour. Darcy’s end of the bargain took somewhat longer.