Page 25 of Homeless

Whatever the woman had said had been a good deal longer than that, and twice as loud, and had concluded — to judge by the open palm held before him — in the matter of payment.

Darcy paid her.

He paid everyone. It was not the loss of the money; he had lost money before, and would lose a great deal more if Vega continued his present education in theft. It was that every coin struck some bell drawing a close in the space between himself and Elizabeth. Candle. Witness. Bread. Priest. Cloak. Wife.

He set the recovered shirts upon a bench and went looking for the second candle. One shutter rehung, one table righted, wine and lamp-black standing in the cracks of the boards. Jennings’s absence glared from every object the man had last touched.

“Mr Darcy?”

Elizabeth stood in the archway with a dark cloak over her shoulders, and Pilar beside her carrying a lantern. The servant’s cap was gone, and she wore no bonnet to replace it. Her hair was plainly styled, her face grey with fatigue, and her mouth set in that firm, alarming line which meant she had already calculated six possibilities and rejected five of them as too slow.

“Are we ready?”

“‘Ready’ is not the word I would use, but there remains nothing left to do.”

The landlady bustled past with the reclaimed cloak over one arm, paused to beam upon them both with appalling sentiment, and loosed a stream of Spanish — rapid, warm, and a good deal too long for its evident purpose — of which he caught guapo, and padre, and an unmistakable giggle.

Something pained crossed Elizabeth’s face and was gone.

“The priest keeps poor hours,” she said. “We should reach him before he sleeps, or drinks, or more probably both.”

There was that suspicious brevity again. The warmth left lying in the language he could not reach. In this instance, he was grateful to be spared it.

He took the cloak, and did not remark upon it.

“Will she come with us?”

“Yes. She intends to witness, advise, lament, and be paid separately for all three.”

“That seems comprehensive.”

The faintest light crossed her face and vanished. She took the lantern from Pilar and held it out to him.

He took it, then offered her the crook of his elbow. It was nothing but proper. Their fingers did not touch.

Even so, Pilar’s eyes went round as coins, and she was not looking at him at all, but at Elizabeth, with an expression he would have called reverence in any other house on any other evening.

“Have you everything?” he asked.

“No. But we have enough to do something foolish.”

X

A Marriage Made Of Paper

The church rose ahead of them across the square, pale and scarred, one saint shot through the shoulder and another taken off at the neck.

Elizabeth walked fast enough to make hesitation impossible. Pilar trotted on one side of her; the landlady bore down on the other. Darcy kept the lantern close and her arm closer. Every alley they passed was made for mischief, and holding her near enough to tread on his heels had stopped being a thing he could argue himself out of.

At the church door, she turned. “Do not let the landlady speak for us unless I faint or die.”

“Is that likely?”

“It depends on how long the ceremony runs.”

The side door opened before he could answer, and an old priest with a lantern and no evident delight in mankind peered out at them.

Spanish broke over him in pieces. Pilar’s eager rush. The landlady’s louder corroboration. Then Elizabeth, quick and cool, taking possession of the matter. Her voice altered in that language. Swifter, more musical, darting round obstacles and striking where it meant to.