Page 66 of Homeless

“Shh. Watch.”

The nearer man spat and said a thing that wanted no translating, and the other two laughed. The nearest man then pointed at Elizabeth and asked her something that sounded, to Darcy’s jealous eyes, like a man a little too intrigued by his woman.

Elizabeth laughed in reply, a coy-sounding thing as she shook her head and rambled off a dozen words that seemed to decide the Spaniard. He made the sign of the cross over himself, tipped his nonexistent hat to the lady, and the three men sauntered off with the sourness of men who had come up for a fat purse and been handed a foreigner’s quarrel over a stolen watch. They would wait for easier money. There was always easier money.

“What was that?”

“I told them that they could take you to be held at the local gaol, if it pleased them, because the commandant would surely come there to collect you when he found his wife delayed at the crossing. But they had no interest in matters of the law, for reasons I did not inquire about. His last question to me was whether I feared you would do me harm before my husband could come and do you a greater harm. I told him that of the two of us, you were far more likely to come to some inconvenience, and he seemed satisfied with that.”

“Good Lord, woman. Have you uttered one honest word since you entered this country?”

She gathered the watch, chain and all, into the palm of her hand and dropped it… of all places… down inside the bodice of her gown. Darcy could only stare stupidly as she paused for a moment. “Our wedding vows. To have and to hold until Santander do us part. I meant that. You had better finish loading the wool before Azcárate has more barrels delivered. “

He shook his head. “You might have warned me what you were about.”

“I might have. Then you would have argued, and we would both be in a boat we did not choose. You made a passable thief, in the end. You looked sullen enough for it.”

“I had provocation.”

“Load the wool, criado.”

He loaded the wool.

XXV

Do Not Ask It

The crossing was worse than the bank had promised. The bales went first, and the two of them after, crammed into what room the wool had left. The flat barge went out onto the rolling sludge on a rope strung bank to bank and bucked the whole way over. Twice, the river shouldered it hard enough that he put out a hand — to the gunwale, to a bale, once to her arm, which he let go the instant the barge righted. Then Azcárate put them off against the far mud, and that was the last of him.

They stood on the far side with the flood between him and the men who saw his watch, the men who saw Elizabeth’s riot of the day before, and the terror he had held off until now came due all at once. They had been a few minutes from it — a hand on his arm, a walk up the bank he would not have come back down, and she being passed about for the entertainment of brigands. The tremors took his breath until he had to fist a hand to his teeth and close his eyes. The only thing that recalled him at length was her hand on his shoulder.

He sucked in one last gulp of air, then forced his lungs to release it in even, slow draws, before he turned to her. “You really were rather remarkable back there. I never heard so many falsehoods in my life, but that was clever thinking.”

“I just enjoyed calling you a thief. Have you any idea what I would have given in Meryton to make such a spectacle of the proud Fitzwilliam Darcy of Derbyshire?”

He tried to laugh, found he had little heart for it, and only shook his head instead. “I believe I have an inkling.”

She took the watch from her bodice and held it out. It was still warm from her, and he put it away without a word.

“You were better than I looked for, if it is any comfort,” she added. “Eyes down and mouth shut? I had not known you could do both at once.”

The watch had to come off him. He would have sold it at the money changer’s, but after yesterday’s debacle, he did not dare even try to haggle it away on the northern shore of Estella. No village short of a real town would be large enough to swallow the sale of a gold watch from a ragged Englishman, and the silver at his wrists and knees was a question he could not afford to have asked aloud. There would be nothing until Vitoria, and until then, he was a walking target.

“I ought not to have called it stolen.”

She had not spoken in the better part of an hour, and she said it nearly to herself rather than to him. An apology from Elizabeth was rare enough to be worth searching for the trap in it.

“I do not see why you should regret that,” he ventured. “What does it matter now?”

“Well, it is a fine-looking thing, and I might have risked it being taken by the authorities.”

“Still, I fail to see the problem. It was not taken, and neither was I, which, I hope, would have troubled you a little more greatly than a stolen watch.”

“Oh, it is not that. I would hate to be the reason you lost your father’s watch. Something dear and sentimental like that? It was a near thing, I daresay.”

She thought it was his father’s watch? Only a fool would carry something both precious and valuable into a country so lately torn apart. Which, of course, did make him a fool — he still wore his signet ring, but he had at least some foresight. He could have ended her misapprehension in a sentence. It was only a cheap watch, barely fine enough to call itself a timepiece.

It was silly, perhaps, but he rather enjoyed the notion that he did have one secret from her. “Think nothing of it,” he said at last. “I shall have to sell it anyway, of course. It is a greater liability than I had accounted for.”