Page 38 of Homeless

“The principal,” he said. “Yes.”

Her head came up.

He knew what was coming, and could no more have stopped it than stopped the tide. She had the counting sickness worse than any clerk he had ever employed, and the sum had already gone into her like a key into a lock. She stared at him for a handful of seconds, then her eyes dropped to the page again. “Lent in the year nine. At interest. Under seal, you told me, upon security. Five years of interest, then, running the whole while and never once paid.”

Her eyes widened as her lips moved faintly. “Then they do not owe you one hundred thousand pounds at all, Mr Darcy. They owe you a very great deal more than that.”

He reached to take the paper from her hand, but she turned slightly, pulling it back as her expression changed from awe to disbelief. He sighed. “The interest earnings alone should tally to something above seventy thousand pounds, which would have been a handsome return on only five years’ investment. If I ever see them.”

She sobered, and at last, she returned the page to him. “Little wonder that you came all this way yourself. I now forgive you for seeming the least bit cross in the square.”

He folded the paper and put it with the others. “What do you mean, cross?”

She laughed shortly. “Only that your face two days ago when you were refused was that of a man who looked prepared to burn down the clerk’s desk. No, Mr Darcy, I do not blame you, with a mortgage in England eating the estate from underneath you while you chase a man who is always in the next town but one.”

“You have a great gift for putting a thing at its worst.”

“I have a great gift for telling the truth. One hundred thousand pounds? My uncle would have called that a hanging figure.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning a sum large enough that a man will do very foolish things sooner than let go of it. Your father, for one, who set the whole of his son’s inheritance against a war. And you, for another, who has crossed a kingdom and married a stranger sooner than write it off.”

He buckled the straps on his valise and refused to look up at her. “You are hardly a stranger.”

“I am the nearest thing to it, or I was yesterday. I suppose a night hearing each other snore has already torn down any pretence of calling one another slight acquaintances.”

The landlady’s fist descended upon the door, and her voice came through it announcing that the driver was entertaining other offers on his mule and his cart, and if they still wanted his services, the price was going up by the minute.

“We are coming,” Elizabeth called in Spanish. “Come, husband. Your ruin will travel faster if we carry it between us.”

XIV

Nothing to do but Talk

The cart had one virtue, which was motion, and every other quality of a penance. It had been built, so far as Darcy could determine, by a man with a grudge against the human spine. Within a mile, he had surrendered the last of his bearing to it. Elizabeth sat opposite, on the other board, and rode the lurching of the thing as easily as she appeared to do everything else, which he was beginning to find a provocation in its own right.

The driver — a leathery philosopher named Boabdil, talked only to his mule and had no English at all. It left the two of them shut up together more privately than any drawing room, jolting north through country the war had stripped grey, nothing to look at but each other and nothing to do but talk. Darcy would rather have walked.

She was quiet for perhaps a quarter of an hour. He had learnt, that morning, not to trust her quiet, and was proved right.

“Tell me about your heiress, the one waiting for you to reclaim your fortune and sweep her off her feet.”

He shifted against the rail and looked away. “No.”

“That was very quick. You have been rehearsing it.”

“I have had nothing to rehearse, because there is nothing to tell, and if there were, it would not be told in a cart.”

“It is a very good cart. It keeps our secrets admirably. Boabdil, do you not keep our secrets?” The driver only looked up, slapped a fraying hemp rope on his mule’s rump, and did not alter his pace.

She turned back to him. “There, you see? He would not be alarmed if you announced yourself engaged to a mermaid. You told me, while I was in the middle of proposing to purchase my safety from the mob with your name, that there was an understanding waiting for you in England, and that yesterday’s disaster had endangered it, and that you hoped to Heaven it survived so that you should not be reduced to cleaning grates. That is a great deal of information to have volunteered, sir, for a man who now declines to give me any at all.”

“I was under duress. Soldiers had ransacked the house.”

“And now merely a cart is ransacking your composure, which I grant is the lesser assault, but I am comfortable, and it is a long way to Estella, and you have nothing else with which to entertain me.” She folded her hands in her lap. “What is she like?”

He gave it up, because the alternative was silence, and silence in that cart meant his own thoughts, and his own thoughts at present were a memorandum with a figure at the foot of it.