Page 7 of Homeless

It was the finest King’s English, delivered with the cold authority of a man unaccustomed to being kept waiting, and therefore impossible in Tudela to mistake.

She turned before she could think of any reason why she should not.

A tall man stood halfway up the tribunal steps, hat in hand, his dark coat carrying London into a place that had no leisure for it. Beside him, another Englishman, rougher in face and humbler in dress, was labouring to make a clerk understand what the gentleman plainly believed ought to have been obvious to any Christian government.

The clerk shrugged, answered at length, and spread his fingers over a docket as though the whole kingdom of Spain were unfortunately contained in that one sheet and could not be hurried on any account.

The gentleman answered too quickly for his interpreter, clearly agitated by the refusal, and declaring he would not stand for it.

“Sir,” said the other man in English, “if you please, one at a time.”

Another man in a stained travelling coat had come up hard against the table, papers already thrust out, and began his own case over the top of the exchange. He got three words into it before the tall Englishman turned and interrupted him.

“You, sir, will wait until I have done.”

The man in the coat came on anyway, papers first. “Señor, if you will only —”

The gentleman turned on him. “Wait!”

The word went off like a shot, and the turn that carried it brought him full into the light — the man with the papers falling back a step, the clerks stopped down the length of the table, the whole square gone still around the one word. He did not follow it with another. He let the man feel every eye that had come round, and only when the papers had sunk did he take up his sentence again, to the clerk, from the exact word where the interruption had carried him off.

She knew that face. Something dropped through her, quick and cold, the way a stair gave way in the dark. Her breath caught on it, and she could not for her life have said why.

Fitzwilliam Darcy.

Hertfordshire rose with such indecorous force that Tudela, the clerks, the soldiers, the market, and the smell of mule leather went thin for a breath. Meryton came with it; the assembly room; her own younger self, too ready to make entertainment of offence.

None of those things had any right to be in Navarre. Yet there he was, as unmistakable in Spain as he had been in Hertfordshire, carrying height, reserve, and offended dignity into a square full of men who neither knew nor cared what Pemberley might be.

He had not altered so much as circumstances had altered around him. The grave mouth was the same. So was the brow that, crossed, still took on an air of command injured by disobedience — the look of a man born to move through a world that made way for him. This one did not. Tudela let him wait, put him under a clerk with ink on his cuffs and no English at all, and made him one more anxious gentleman with papers.

His interpreter said in Spanish, “My employer's claim was received three days ago. He has returned twice and been told only to come again.”

Elizabeth caught enough of the clerk’s reply. Treasury stamp. Regional authority. Not here. Perhaps Pamplona. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps after the present troubles. Always another office, another signature, another absent gentleman indispensable only because he could not be found.

“I do not ask him to discharge the claim this very day. I ask where the officer is to be found.”

The interpreter softened that into something for which the clerk might not call for his arrest. The clerk spread his hands. Nobody knew. Somebody else had the paper. The commissioner had gone north. The royal service had many demands.

Darcy turned from the table with a visible growl, the last of his patience spent… and stopped dead.

His gaze had gone out across the crowd without object, fixed on nothing, until something snagged and arrested the movement. His eyes caught on her and stayed.

His entire body locked. His interpreter was saying something, but Darcy seemed not to make sense of the words. He only stood, drawn up, arrested — a man who had steeled himself against every trial the square could offer, and met a shock he had not thought to guard against.

He knew her at once. She saw the composure flee and something else take its place. Not pleasure. Nothing so foolish. Yet perhaps it was flattering, after a fashion, that he should know her on the instant, after so long.

He did not bow. Neither did she. Between them stood one mule, two clerks, a widow in black, the interpreter, a boy carrying oranges, and two years and a half of silence.

Then the mule broke it. Something spooked it — a dropped shutter, a cur underfoot, she never saw what — and it flung sideways with a scream, scattering the boy’s oranges under a dozen feet and the boy after them, wailing; the widow’s basket went over; a clerk lunged for his papers and lost half of them to the wind; and the whole of the square broke at once into shouting and grabbing and the fury of men who had waited three hours and must now wait longer.

She moved while she still could. Not away from him in retreat — she would not give him that — but sideways, unhurried, as though the mule and not the man had decided her, turning her shoulder to the tribunal table and letting the crowd rise between them like a curtain rung down on a scene she had no wish to play out.

The same commotion that freed her fetched her uncle back. He came against the current at a steady walk, calling her name before she saw him. “Lizzy! There you are. I have found him.” At his shoulder walked Don Herrera, in a decent coat, who looked prepared to discuss warehouses, transport, and prices, provided no one asked his opinion on the king, the French, or his religion.

“Herrera says he will give us half an hour if I keep his glass full. I thought that a fair exchange. Come, keep me from accidentally insulting his ancestors or trading away more than I can fairly afford.”

She went, and for the next half-hour had no leisure for English ghosts. Herrera had access to warehouse space by the river, knew which roads north still possessed bridges, and praised the owner of the vineyard that had produced the grapes with such passion that dishonesty might safely be assumed. Mr Gardiner bargained, laughed, calculated, and drew out information with that air of frank enjoyment which made men underrate him until they found themselves bound to a price they had not meant to concede. Elizabeth kept pace between them, one man’s Spanish going over into another man’s English across whatever improvised bridge she could throw up fast enough to bear the traffic.