Page 16 of Homeless

They had half a dozen travellers, Mr Gardiner among them. They were walking him toward the street door, with a soldier at each elbow, and her uncle was still talking, his hat gone, his voice pitched to carry to any officer within hearing.

“I am a British subject! I demand to be taken before the alcalde—el alcalde, do you understand me? And you will send word to the English consul. To the consul! My name is Gardiner. Edward Gardiner, of Gracechurch Street, in London —”

The soldier on his left said something that made the other laugh.

“— and I have committed no offence whatever, and this house is full of witnesses —” He tried to stop walking. That was all he did; he only set his heels. They took him under the arms and lifted, and his feet went out from under him and struck the boards, and when they set him down again, his coat was pulled up round his shoulders like a man half out of a sack.

Elizabeth had come two steps into the passage when Pilar’s hands closed on her from behind—both fists in the back of her gown, hauling her backwards. Elizabeth got one more look, over the shoulders of soldiers, at her uncle’s grey head going toward the light of the open door.

He turned it. Not toward the kitchen; he could not have found her there, would not have looked if he could. He turned it toward the stair, and the upper rooms, and the empty passage, and everywhere else that she was not — so that no man beside him should learn where to look.

Then the doorway took him, and the light, and he was gone into the street.

After that, the house became noise. Cupboards opened. Trunks dragged. The landlady protested and was overborne. Pilar sank to a stool and began to cry into both hands.

Elizabeth remained where she was, upright only by force, the cap strings cutting at her throat as she choked back panicked sobs.

Prison. Vega. Englishmen. Money.

Elizabeth took one breath, then another.

Her uncle had not been lost; not found guilty of some crime, or beaten by men who only wished to harm random Englishmen. He had been taken for money.

And she had no means of buying him back.

VII

The Bottom Falls Out

The common room was a shattered ruin. Chairs were overturned. A bottle was smashed by the hearth and drooling all over the boards. One shutter swung on a damaged hinge while the other looked like it had been splintered by a blow. There was paper scattered near the door, and more of it strewn on toward the passage, as though a man had run with his arms full and lost what he could not hold.

Darcy picked up the nearest sheet, and the blood drained from his face into his stomach. It was… egad, it was a copy of the loan schedule, in Jennings’s hand. These were his papers. It was rumpled, with dirt smeared across the bottom by somebody’s heel.

“Jennings!”

There was no answer. Overhead, a door slammed, and somewhere below stairs, a woman was crying, but he did not hear a single masculine voice in the house.

He turned toward the stairs, then back toward the kitchen passage. Nobody was stirring. He rushed toward the front door again in the stupid violence of a man with too many fears at once and no order for any of them.

Where was Elizabeth?

His eyes went over the room — marks on the floor, a dropped kerchief, boot prints in flour near the passage. His heart was thundering as if he truly had been there, been the one to see her dragged off, and he despised it. This was absurd. She was Collins’s wife. Whatever had happened in this house could be nothing to him. He had a servant to find and a claim to save, and no business standing in a wrecked room listening for a woman’s step.

Then, somewhere back in the passage, a latch clicked.

He turned toward it. Whoever came through that door might be the landlady, or the girl who had been crying, or a soldier who had stayed behind, or Jennings. He stumbled three strides toward the passage before he even knew he was moving.

A figure resolved in the dim. A servant, by the cap, and there was flour down one sleeve, and her hand rested on the latch behind her as though she had shut something in there she meant to keep shut.

Then she came into the light of the broken shutter.

Every part of the morning scattered from his mind at once — Jennings, the papers, the money, the mortgage, Spain — and what was left was only that Elizabeth was standing there, on her feet, with her hair dragged half out from under the cap and the strings of it printed red across her throat. Filthy, upright, alive.

She checked at the sight of him.

The relief came so hard it passed for pain, and the name rose with it — Elizabeth! — he bit it back, because he had no right to it. Mrs Collins he would not say; his whole being refused the shape of it. So, he stood a few feet from a woman he had not spoken to since Hertfordshire, with no name he was permitted to use and no notion how to begin.

“Are you hurt?” It was the one thing he could ask without a name.