Page 19 of Homeless

He put it back where it had been, and sat down on the floor beside the open trunk with his hands hanging between his knees.

“What did you mean, ‘bloody close to it’?”

He glanced back at Elizabeth. She was still standing inside the door, her arms crossed over her body. “It was not fit language for you to hear.”

“I have heard a great deal this morning that was not fit for me to hear.” She came closer. “I was not asking after your use of profanity, Mr Darcy. I was asking what you have left.”

For a moment, he considered giving her nothing. She had no business asking him that. He had not seen her for better than two years and had lost nearly everything this morning, and there was no reason on earth to lay his affairs open on the floor of a robbed room.

He reached into the trunk instead.

“That,” he said, and set the belt on the boards between them. “And this.” The oilcloth packet followed it, and he opened the fold of it with two fingers and let her see what was inside without putting it into her hands. “My licence to travel. Two letters of introduction, one of them wet. Letters of credit that do me no good whatever in any town smaller than a major port. And that.”

She looked at the sealed sheet a long moment “And the rest of it?”

“There is no rest of it. Everything else — the whole assembled case file, the proof that some junta here in Spain is answerable to the debt — went out of that door under my own man’s arm before the soldiers were in the square. Like as not, he is on a fast mule for the coast, using my financial documents as proof of business travel and spending my gold. I have nothing else.”

She crouched down and looked at the three things on the floor as though she were pricing them.

“That is not very much,” she said, “for a gentleman eight hundred miles from home.”

“No.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“In Tudela. In Navarre. In a country half of Europe has been shooting at for six years. Men like you do not come here, Mr Darcy. They send someone. They send four someones and stay in Derbyshire and read the letters as they arrive. What are you doing in this town yourself?”

“My business is my own.”

“It was your own. It has been in the street since noon, and I am sitting in the middle of it. You may tell me to go to the devil. I shall go, and shut the door behind me, and we shall neither of us be the worse. But you have had a face on you since the square that I have seen on precisely one other man in my life, and he had just been told his ship was lost with everything he owned aboard her. So, what are you doing here?”

His jaw went hard. He refused to look at her when he answered, so he stared at the floor. “I came to Madrid in May to be paid on a loan.”

“Tudela is a long way from Madrid.”

“You have a gift for the obvious, Miss Bennet.”

“They would not pay you there?”

“They will not pay me there, here, anywhere, simply because I had papers and asked them to. It must be certified, and sworn, and carried up and down the river through the proper hands with every seal in its place, and God help the man who has misspelled a single word on his complaint.”

“Then how much is it, that you would come eight hundred miles to sit in a passage and be told to come back tomorrow?”

“That is not your concern.”

“How long do you mean to go on chasing it?”

“Until the sum falls due in England, and not a day past. After that, it will not matter whether I ever catch the man.”

She made a thoughtful noise. “And if you had every paper Jennings carried out of this house, and the whole of it sworn and stamped tomorrow morning, would what they owe you cover what falls due in England?”

“Miss Bennet —”

“Would it?”

“Good God, madam, will you leave it?” He was on his feet before he knew he had risen, and he stood over her in a room full of his own shirts with his voice ringing off the plaster. “What can it possibly signify to you?”