Page 64 of Homeless

“Then I will take the chair.”

“The chair? You walked into this country a gentleman, and Spain has made a mule of you, and now means to make a martyr.” She lay back. “By all means. I have learned there is no talking a man out of a penance he has set his heart upon. Suffer in it, and welcome.”

He took the chair. The bars hit his lower spine and the canvas cut off the blood to his knees inside a minute.

It was still better than risking the bed.

“When your back seizes in the small hours — and it will seize, for you spent the day a beast of burden, and the bill for it falls due about three o’clock — you may take that side of the mattress,” she said. “The one by the door, and I will even be generous and give you the larger half, as you are at least half again as large as I am.” He heard her rolling over and scooting closer to the wall. “So long as it is not this side. This side is occupied.”

The bill came due at something near three o’clock, exactly as she had promised.

It began low in his back, a single fibre drawing taut, and spread along the night until his whole frame — the wrenched muscle, the strapped ribs, the offended shoulder — stood in joint petition against the chair. He had only to rise and cross four feet of floor to the edge of the bed she had ceded to him. Only to lie flat for a few hours on something resembling a cushion, let his abused muscles unknot as far as they would.

But to lie beside her was to risk… everything. She would move in the dark, hunting his warmth in her sleep, and he would hungrily wrap himself around hers, and this time, he might not recover his dignity. So, he angled his shoulder as best he could to relieve it, stretched his sound side against the screaming muscles, and let prudence be the better part of valour.

It was not prudence. None of this was, not a single second, but there was no honourable path that could serve. She had let him kiss her tonight, claiming it was only a practical undertaking somewhere on the same level as her translating his business affairs or him seeing to her physical safety. It signified nothing, she said. But he had discovered, on this road, that he was no longer to be trusted with things that signified nothing.

The arrangement was temporary. The paper would dissolve when it had done its work. A man did not build on ground he had promised to give back. And he had known over two years ago, when those eyes first captured him, that a man with a hundred thousand pound note to repay had no business being fascinated by a girl with only her wit to recommend her.

He could not afford her. Could not afford what his heart did whenever she looked his way, could not afford the way his body kindled when he had kissed her. And he could not afford to let her see any of it.

He recited the catechism to the rafters and stayed where he was, upright and aching and at least, in his chair, answerable to no one for the direction of his eyes.

By the moonlight through the window, he could trace the line of her, the dark fall of her hair off the bolster, the slow tide of her breathing. She had turned and was facing him now. Sleep had done to her what the waking day forbade — taken the vigilance from her shoulders, the readiness from the hand lying open on the mattress. Her brow was soft, her features open, her lips softly parted on her breath.

Darcy crossed his arms over his chest and tried staring at his own feet instead. It did not signify.

Yes, that was his mantra, and he must remember it. She was only a tired woman asleep in a bad room in a town neither of them had wished to see and could not safely linger in another day. They had both agreed to the rules, and the rules would be the only reason they both survived this.

He had reached for the rules so often on this road that they had begun to wear thin where he handled them, like a coin rubbed past its stamp. Temporary. Surrendered in advance. Promised back before it was ever his. They held in daylight, when her tongue was sharp, and the country was bent on killing them both, and there was no leisure for anything else. They did not hold at three in the morning, with her undefended in sleep four feet away, and his own guard too spent to mount.

Of every calamity Spain had arranged for him, the one he might not be able to survive, the one he had walked into clear-eyed, unbribed and unforced, was her.

The river had come up in the night. Yesterday, it had been a broad brown shallows, swift in the centre, but low enough at the margins to wade and still enough for the biting insects to gather among the rocks at the edge. This morning, it ran high and fast between its trees, thick with the sludge from the road it had stolen, bearing off branches and bramble and causing the ferry to bump and tug at its traces like an impatient horse.

Azcárate waited at the head of his ferry, and the night’s flood had plainly come down to him as a gift. This morning, the bank above it was stacked with a fresh consignment come down in the dark — wool bales, roped and tallow-marked, shoulder-high, some merchant’s whole hope of the season waiting to go over before the water rose another foot and stranded it on the wrong side until August.

“Where the devil is he going to put all that?” Elizabeth wondered aloud. “It is already riding low from all the grain sacks.”

“I fancy we will be sitting on it, and I think the price of our passage just went up,” was Darcy’s bitter reply.

Darcy did not need the language to read the man’s face. Azcárate had already something of a monopoly on the river, and by now, he could not have helped but to hear of the English couple who turned over the money changer’s office and could not afford to be seen another minute on the southern shore.

But last night’s flood had made other men desperate, too, and the only ferry for miles in either direction could ask what it pleased.

Elizabeth marched sharply up to him with a half-pleasant greeting of the morning, then came to the point and put their case. The fee was paid by Darcy’s back and his coin; the crossing was owed by the bargain of the day before. Darcy stood at her shoulder, affecting the firmest face he could master honestly, and followed it the best he could. He had, by now, a handful of words he had been at pains to learn — paid, yesterday, the man, across — and he had Azcárate’s answer without needing Elizabeth’s translation. The man’s insolence spoke for itself, and he was fluent in it.

Elizabeth looked ready to spit by the time she turned back to him. “He says the fee bought a crossing and not the head of the queue. The bales belong to a man in Vitoria who will have the law on him if they spoil, and that he does not mean to lose the shirt from his back for the sake of two who paid him in a few hour’s worth of work he could have done just as well himself, who have not the price of a candle between them. And he says — this is the flower of it — that if we are in so great a hurry to be elsewhere, the elsewhere will come a deal sooner with your shoulder under his cargo. He puts us over when the bales are aboard. Not before.”

It was a clean piece of robbery and left no room for protest. To wait for the water to drop was to spend days they could not buy, at a crossing where every loaf would be priced against their need; to wait was to let the road north close another hand’s breadth over everything they hoped to salvage. Azcárate had read their desperation and had built his price as high as he dared.

He took off his coat.

“You need not.” Elizabeth put out a hand to stop him. “We will find another crossing.”

“There is no other within a day in either direction, and you know it, and so does he.” He was at the buttons already. “It is only my back. He is welcome to whatever remains of it.”

“He is terribly pleased with himself for having got several more hours of free labour.”