Page 34 of Homeless

Darcy sighed. “Tell him whatever you like that sounds imposing. He may have it in writing for the ledger if he likes.”

She spoke, and the clerk shrugged — kinship by marriage was a nuisance, but one the law recognised. He dipped his pen, made his note, and raised a hand with finger and thumb held delicately apart.

“He wants paying again.”

Now the silver, and the man swept it off the table quickly enough to shame an honest one.

A guard came in. The clerk spoke to him, then turned back civil, a civility bought coin by coin.

“Five minutes. If my uncle weeps, we take the blame for disturbing the peace and go.”

The guard’s eyes went over Elizabeth’s face. His gaze turned to a faint smirk, admiring and familiar, as though he had leave.

And there it was — the thing Darcy had been holding down since the door, up through his chest before he could stop it, because that look was what she became the moment he was not beside her. He stepped to place his shoulder in front of her.

“He will address my wife through me.”

Elizabeth looked at him a moment. Then she said it in Spanish, and whatever she said took the good humour out of the guard’s face, and he tipped his head toward the inner passage.

“Come,” she said. And then, she murmured, only for him, “That was very well done. I told him your boxing has a fearful reputation at Gentleman Jackson’s.”

“You have told people a great many things this morning I was not consulted on.”

“I have,” she said, and did not look sorry.

Her uncle stood at the grated hole that passed for a window, turning an empty cup in his hands. He was pale, unshaven, his coat past saving and his temper with it, but upright, and whole. She was across the cell before the guard could reconsider his charity.

“Uncle!”

He turned. The cup slipped out of his fingers and rang away across the stones, and he never looked after it. “Lizzy?”

Then his arms were round her hard enough to hurt, the cold of the cell still in his coat, and everything she had carried so carefully since the soldiers came loose all at once against his shoulder. He held her off to look at her face and pulled her back before he had finished looking.

“Are you hurt? Tell me you are not hurt. Where have they had you? Did anyone lay a hand on you? I had no word of you, child, none — I was afraid to ask, lest they know to look for you, but I made what demands I could, and then heard nothing, for hours —”

“I am well.” She braced a hand against his chest, half to hold him, half to hold herself up. “Look at me. Not a mark on me. I promise you.”

“Then we shall do,” he said. “Then we shall do. You took a grave risk in coming here, Lizzy, and I’ll not…”

His eyes caught on something past her shoulder, and the warmth drained from his face. Darcy had come through the low door behind her.

Her uncle’s glance went from Darcy, to the guard still in the doorway, to her, and back to Darcy.

“They do not open a prison door for a merchant’s niece. How are you standing in this cell, Lizzy?”

“Respectably. I am not a captive, Uncle.”

He grabbed her shoulders. “What have you done, child?”

She had meant to lead him to it gently. There was no gentle way through a locked door in five minutes. “I married Mr Darcy last night.”

His gaze went to the man bent under the low ceiling — the gentleman from the square, the rich one, the one she had waved off yesterday as barely an acquaintance — standing loose and unwatched in a cell where her uncle was chained to a wall by nothing but the price of his own skin.

“No! Tell me you have not.”

“There was no time for —”

“Good God.” He drew her in by the wrist, close, his back half to the door, and when he spoke it was almost under his breath — a man who had done business in rooms where the walls listened. “Lower your voice, and answer me plainly. Is it done? Truly done, before a priest, in a register, so that it holds?”