Page 47 of Homeless

Elizabeth stood just inside the door as Darcy moved inside and surveyed the accommodations. “You will —”

“Yes, yes. I take the bed, you do battle with the rats on the floor.”

His face went ashen, and he lurched unconsciously towards the door. “Surely not. There is a perfectly adequate… Oh. The chair is…” He cleared his throat. “Well. Perhaps the housemaid can procure… some alternate accommodation.”

“Mr Darcy, there is presently a clerk and a handful of guards just a few doors down who believe us to have already indulged in every rash and licentious behaviour, and I think they would each buy you a glass of vino for the entertainment you provided them today. Will you now disappoint them by letting word get round that the señor would not share his wife’s bed?”

He narrowed his eyes. “You have a rather dark sense of humour, Mrs Darcy.”

“Yes, but you knew that two years ago. And do not call me that.” She dropped her damp bonnet on the post of the bed and brushed several rain or sweat-streaked ringlets of hair off her forehead. She put her hands on her cheeks and found them hot, even a little tender from the sun earlier in the day. Darcy’s expression had altered strangely, but instead of speaking, he turned away and removed his coat.

He refused to look at her for some while after that.

XVII

Inland

Their route was inland, the old Camino de Estella. It was “safe,” or so went the claim, but regardless, it was the road their route-mark had appointed for them. The problem was transportation. The carter who had delivered them from Tudela had already turned back with a load of wine, leather, and Darcy knew not what else.

They found another who was transporting wine to Estella. He cast a somewhat intrigued glance over Elizabeth, then named a price for two places among his barrels that would have bought all the barrels.

Darcy stepped slightly in front of Elizabeth. “How do I tell him we will only pay half?” he whispered.

“La mitad,” she murmured back.

He stared the carter down and repeated the phrase.

The carter shrugged, clucked to his mule, and rolled north without them. The rain had cut little rivers into the mud that made the wheels dip into the ruts, and Darcy stared after him up the ruined road.

He might yet be forced to pay such a sum. Their clothing might be soiled from two days in a cart, but they still looked like prosperous travellers. And his purse could not long sustain such expectations.

He still had some large denominations, but these villages dealt in narrower coin — a piece pressed into a sentry’s hand to render a sealed paper legible; a second piece to render the same paper legible to the sentry’s superior, who had been visited by a sudden inability to read; bread at the price of meat; meat at no price a Christian would name aloud. By the third day, he could have told to a real what it cost two English travellers to be suffered along the Ebro. The sum had the disobliging habit of increasing while he attended to it.

After two hours of haggling, he was still no nearer finding transport to Estella because the carts were all too full, or too dear, or bound the wrong way. There remained one option. One Darcy, after glancing at the petite woman in his keeping, could not think on with any equanimity. They would have to walk.

But there was no help for it. He settled on placing their luggage with a recua — an eight-mule train, all tied nose to tail and laden with far heavier things than their trunks. At least their road took them along established pilgrim routes, lower roads. No mountains to cross, no rivers to ford. And in following a mule train, they could depend on some safety in numbers, and a guide who knew the road. Darcy counted out the coins — after Elizabeth argued the price down as far as they dared haggle — and they waited on the muleteer’s train to be loaded before they could set out.

Sometime late in the morning, hours after Darcy would have liked to start, they finally left Calahorra. On foot. He, who had crossed two kingdoms intending to hire the best of everything and dispense the rest in bribes, went on foot through mud that closed over the ruin of boots that had cost more than the muleteer would see in a year.

The worst of it was in watching Elizabeth. If his own feet were sore within the first two hours, hers had to be nearly blistered in those worn boots she had. But he found, more often than not, that her strides did not slacken, her head never hung, and she had no intention of waiting for him.

And they were seen. For that, nothing had prepared him. Money had bought him discretion all his life, so wholly that he had never once, in nine-and-twenty years, been obliged to consider the privilege, because he had never once been without it. Now, every village turned its idle gaze toward them and made of them what they might — a lady who walked like a gentlewoman and bargained like a fishwife, and a man who dressed like a lord but whose wife led him about like a servant. They answered to no honest description, and Spain, having lately acquired a great suspicion of anything out of the ordinary, watched them pass with little warmth.

She bore the watching better than he did, which he resented on principles he chose not to inspect. A stare from a stranger made his temper rise to meet it; she answered it with a tilt of the chin and purpose in her stride, leaving him no choice but to affect some semblance of better humour and keep up with her.

Once, when the road shrank to a single brown channel, she misjudged a stone, and her foot went from under her. His hand was at her waist before she went to her knees — half a second’s courtesy, the kind he had done for years and never thought of again. She had wrapped her hands around his arm in a heartbeat. There was an instant’s look of utter shock on her face as she met his eyes, but a second later, she released him and shook out the muddy lower half of her skirt, then walked on as if it never happened.

Two hours later, he could still have named the exact places where they had touched.

They passed the first night at a venta, where he paid for accommodations that barely wanted the name. No water, not even any of the day’s stew from the pot, for it was scraped and cold by the time they walked, tired and muddy, up to the door. The woman of the house did offer enough coarse, dark bread to soak up the terrible wine she poured, and told them where they might dip a bucket from the well themselves.

“You might have kept the money,” Elizabeth whispered, when they regarded the place they were to sleep. Not a bed. Not even a room with a door. Just a corner, with two rough blankets… and six other nondescript bodies already scattered on the floor. “I think we might have been more comfortable sleeping with the mules.”

Darcy scowled. How had it come to this? Fleas and dirt and hard floorboards for a lady to lay her head upon. The only mercy was that the lack of privacy was complete. Tonight, he would not lose sleep trying to keep his distance from her. He would lose sleep keeping others from her, instead. “Take the place nearest the wall,” he murmured. “But you will have to answer to the fleas and lice yourself.”

She did not even shudder. She only glanced up with a beatific smile. “I have a scarf to put over my hair. What of you, Mr Darcy? Would you like to borrow my fichu to wrap around your head?

He picked up the blanket nearest the corner and put it in her arms. “I might have thought your feet would be sore enough to take the salt from your tongue, but that does not appear to be the case. I will bid you good night… Mrs Darcy.”