Page 58 of Homeless

“We have not much of the copper, and we would do better to keep that against the next town, and the next, where we wish to be overlooked and forgotten. Silver is too much for a barge passage, too notable, and these other items would mark us as thieves. Or, perhaps worse yet, prove we are the very foreigners who incited a riot. We cannot show them here.”

She sat down on the bed. “Is there no place to cross on foot? Perhaps the river may be persuaded to be reasonable.”

XXII

A Hard Bargain

The river had been in no mood to reason for days. The snowmelt had brought it down brown and fast and over its banks, and it would not drop for weeks — the high country had only begun to give up its winter, and would feed the river faster than the river could carry itself to the sea. The ford the town used in dry weather was a memory now, with a fast, dirty current running where it had been.

The sun was still climbing by the time Darcy and Elizabeth arrived at the barge. They could not wait the water out. Nor could they go round — the only roads that held to dry ground ran back the way they had come, toward Tudela and away from everything they needed. The river had to be crossed, and there was one man who kept a barge and the nerve to work it across in such water. His name was Azcárate, and he had probably come through six years of war by making himself useful to every army that passed and loyal to none.

They found him at the landing, mending a line. “How much to cross the river?” Elizabeth asked in Spanish.

He did not look up from the line. “That depends on when and how many.”

“The when is now, and only two of us with two small trunks. How much?”

Azcárate named a sum. It would put them over the water and impoverish them at once.

“You mistake us for a bishop’s entourage,” she said with a laugh. “We are but two travellers with a thin purse, but for that figure I should expect to keep the barge, with you sitting in it to row.”

“The water is high. You say you wish to cross now, but the barge might be lost, and then where would I be?”

“I should be desolate if you drowned with your barge, but even more so if my trunk and my only clean petticoat goes downstream with it.”

“You have two trunks, you say?” Azcárate laughed and went on mending his line. “Your purse cannot be so very thin. Sell one of them and buy passage.”

“What is he saying?” Darcy asked.

Elizabeth turned and whispered into his ear — that no matter how battered, they still looked like wealthy foreigners.

“We cannot sell anything else in this town,” he murmured back. “But you can try to trade yours for our passage. It is larger and will fetch a better price. We leave behind whatever we can live without and put the rest in mine.”

Elizabeth winced slightly. Her undergarments packed with his shirts and papers… it seemed an intimacy that would mean nothing to a proper wife, but… well, there was nothing else for it. She made the proposal.

Azcárate shook his head and said he had no use for a woman’s trunk, and asked what else they had to barter. Elizabeth dared not mention the silver buckles or the gold cross, so she suggested a lower figure in coins. He declared it impossible and named a different figure. They went on so for a good while, each taking the other for a liar — she chipping at his figure, he defending it like a maligned saint.

And the whole time, because she had begun to guess where it tended, she noticed he had been taking the measure of Darcy. The breadth of his shoulders. The size of his hands. The way he seemed to wait on Elizabeth’s lead.

Azcárate set the line down. “I will make you a gift, being a Christian man. There are sacks to come down to the landing — a full day’s loading, and more than my back will thank me for alone. Let the big one carry them, and your crossing is half of what I said.”

She did not look at Darcy. She had no need to; even without the Spanish to follow it word for word, he had read the nod Azcárate gave toward his person. She could feel the objection gathering in him before a word was uttered.

“A third of what you said,” she answered, “and he carries until the sacks are done and not one beyond, and you feed the two of us at noon.”

Azcárate looked at her with something close to respect. “You drive a hard bargain, Señora, for a woman with no barge.”

“I drive the only bargain I have.”

Azcárate glanced once more at Darcy’s height, his strong back, and nodded. And now, she had only to convince the man she was married to that a day’s worth of labour would not permanently disgrace him.

The sacks were grain, and damp, and heavy, and there were a great many of them.

Darcy had performed, in nine-and-twenty years, no labour more punishing than a hard day’s riding, a round at Gentleman Jackson’s, or the occasional ill-judged opinion. He had supposed himself strong. The supposition survived the first hour and died somewhere in the second, when his back had begun sending up reports he had no power to answer and his hands had passed out of soreness into a numb dishonesty, gripping because he forced the muscles to clench and not because he could feel them.

Azcárate worked beside him at half the pace and twice the result. He hardly seemed to strain and was not even sweating from the labour. The insult was not lost on Darcy.

Elizabeth waited on the landing through the rest of the morning. It was the only practical place for her, and he would not have had her out of his sight in a town he no longer trusted, but he suspected she was enjoying the privilege of overseeing his humiliation. He told himself it was the humiliation he objected to. He was not wholly able to believe it. Stripped to his shirt with the sweat running, he could have marked blindfolded the inch of ground she stood on, and told to the instant whenever she stepped away to fetch clean water for them to drink.