Page 31 of Homeless

He lay down upon the truckle. It objected in three places but held, which tonight, he was prepared to call a victory. And after a quarter of an hour, he had persuaded himself that he did not need to feel both his legs to sleep.

“Thank you for coming back.”

He had thought her asleep. He lifted his head in the dark. “Coming back?”

“To the house, after the raid. For asking after Pilar in the kitchen. For not wasting time. For not asking me to be calmer than I was.”

“Would it have served?”

“No. But most men try, in any case. I find I am grateful to be married to one who did not waste the breath. And who did not run for the nearest harbour when he might have.”

His head dropped back again. “There was nowhere else to go.”

Elizabeth had slept only in brief truces negotiated with an exhausted brain and a traitorous body.

Morning was less forgiving than night. By daylight, marriage had a chair with his coat on it, a cracked basin, two cups, and Mr Darcy in shirtsleeves at the washstand.

She lay still a moment longer than she ought, watching the line of his shoulders in the pale grey light from the window. He had already shaved. How long he had already been awake, moving about the very doom she still slept in, she could not imagine.

He caught sight of her in the little blurred mirror above the basin. “You are awake.”

“I begin to suspect I have been awake since we left England.”

His mouth altered by the breadth of a thread. “Then marriage has not improved matters.”

“Marriage has had less than twelve hours in which to prove itself. I am not unjust enough to condemn an institution before breakfast.”

He turned from the basin. The cravat hung half-made from his collar, and two or three buttons remained unfastened, displaying a hand’s breadth of dark chest hair. Fatigue had unarmoured him—not made him younger, for there was nothing boyish in his face this morning, but less guarded, the severe arrangements by which he generally presented himself to the world assembled in haste and not equal to the day’s campaign.

There came a knock at the door. “Ah,” he said. “Speaking of breakfast.”

Elizabeth pushed back the coverlet and got to her feet. “Come in.”

The youngest kitchen girl entered with chocolate and bread. Pilar came behind her with folded linen and a reprehensible grin that she scarcely bothered to conceal.

“Señora Darcy,” she said, and then blushed scarlet at her own boldness. Then, her eyes fell on the truckle and she stared in some bewilderment.

Elizabeth, who had been reaching for her shawl, got it around her shoulders in time to preserve what modesty remained recoverable. “Yes, Pilar? What was it?”

The girl burst into swift Spanish. Elizabeth caught half at once, then shook her head. “Slowly. Once more.”

Pilar tried again, with gestures.

Darcy, who understood none of it, made a hasty job of the cravat and looked from one to the other with concentrated impatience. “What is it?”

“News from the prison,” Elizabeth said. “Pilar’s cousin carried bread there at dawn. The English prisoners are to be moved before noon.”

“Before noon? Where?”

“Estella first, perhaps farther north after. The order is not clear. But once they are out of Tudela, they may vanish into the general appetite of the war.”

Darcy’s face set. “Then we go now.”

The younger kitchen maid, meanwhile, had set out the cups with cheerful imperturbability. Assuming that English disaster had not suspended appetite, she bobbed and withdrew. Pilar stayed.

“There is more,” Elizabeth said.

Pilar supplied it in a rush. Elizabeth listened, asked two clipped questions, and turned back.