Page 11 of Homeless

He turned without thinking of where he was walking and came into a square where the French had left a church front gashed by shot. A dog slept beneath the basin, scratching occasionally at his fleas, but did not trouble himself to bark at the intruder. Darcy stopped and flipped his hat over in his hands twice, then set it decisively back on his head.

Mrs Collins.

He had said the words to himself so often that they ought to have lost force. Instead, they gathered it. Another man held the rights of habit, of nearness, of lawful claim — received her laughter in private rooms, crossed a supper table to her nightly, possessed by law what Darcy had not been permitted even to want.

And the last turn of the screw was that any man found useful by his aunt could not have been clever enough to know what he held. Her quickness, which had once left every remark of Darcy’s own examined and found wanting, would be spent on a husband who took it for pleasantness and never saw the blade in it.

Collins.

The name was intolerable, though it had no right to be. He had seen almost nothing — a shoulder in the square, a masculine outline across candlelight when their shapes passed his door in the hall and he had glanced out to see their backs. Out of that, his jealousy had built an impression of the man, and it likely did the real Collins no justice at all. Husband to Elizabeth Bennet, he had been given two years to alter beyond Lady Catherine’s prescription, and a wife whose society might, by miracle or punishment, have improved him into something less insufferable.

That thought came near enough to laughter that Darcy despised himself for it.

He took off his hat to fan his face again and walked on.

It was worse because she had looked well. Travel had touched her, certainly. The Spanish sun had browned her more deeply than any English summer could have done, and hard use had put a kind of capability into her carriage which could belong neither to Meryton nor to any drawing room in Kent. Yet, she had looked alive in a country which ought by every reason to have worn every English comfort out of her.

If Lady Honoria came to his mind then, as duty rather than wish had lately obliged her to, the comparison was not to her credit. She was amiable, handsome, and attached to him by all the threads a family calls prudent. She laughed sometimes, though never as Elizabeth Bennet laughed. The comparison was unfair, and he made it anyway. Honoria's cheerfulness belonged to safe drawing rooms. Elizabeth's laugh had gone through a Spanish inn like light through a crack in the wall.

He halted beneath a wall patched with newer stone over older violence and shut his jaw against the direction of his own mind.

This would not do. He had spent two years and a great deal of dignity persuading himself he was cured, and one afternoon in a wine market had shown him the sum of that labour: he stood in a foreign town begrudging a woman her marriage and playing false, in thought, to a lady who had said that she would wait for him, and would trust him with her hand. There was a word for that, and it was not fortitude.

He returned to the lodging house no wiser than he had left it.

It was dreadfully fitting that she would be lodging under the same roof. Practical, of course. He had seen no other inn worth the name, and English travellers would all be directed to the same place willing to provide beef and tea for a king’s ransom.

Then, from beyond the turn of the corridor, he heard her voice.

He had not heard it in two and a half years. He would have known it through a wall twice that thickness, and his frame arrested in the passage like a horse brought up on the bit.

She was saying something — the words came through the boards as sound only, unshaped — and then a man’s voice answered her with what sounded like gaiety in his tones, and Darcy’s hand closed on the rail.

The third door past the turn. He marked it, and stood there some while afterward, listening to nothing at all and unable to persuade himself to go to bed. Hang it all, she was another man’s wife! He had no business lurking outside.

At last, he went to his own room, shut the door, and found that exhaustion had made no promises about sleep.

He sat. Rose. Opened the valise and shut it. Pulled the cravat loose and left it hanging. The papers lay on the table, folded and sealed and useless. The Spanish swam in front of him. Docket marks. Instructions to present himself tomorrow, or yesterday, or before the world was made. Without Jennings, he could not read a word of it. The whole kingdom might as well have written to him in birdsong.

He ought to have been thinking of that. Instead, the only picture his mind would reliably produce was the image of Elizabeth Bennet taking her hair down before her vanity, half in candlelight, laughing with another man.

What precisely had he supposed would happen if chance ever threw them together again? That marriage would have dimmed her into ordinary contentment? That Collins — Collins of all men — could have made her commonplace? Vanity had entered at the beginning, and vanity remained.

Toward dawn, when even misery grew tired of its own company, he gave over the pretence of sleep and opened the shutter a hand’s breadth. The town beyond lay colourless and cold, the roofs ash-grey, the church tower sparkling like bone by first light. Somewhere below, a cart started. Somewhere nearer, a woman called for water. Morning came with the same indifference as the river.

So be it. Day would bring clerks, officials, delay, and labour fit for a sane man. He would conduct himself as one. He would find Jennings, recover the line of the treasury business, learn where the missing stamp might be had, and keep himself as far from the Collinses as the dimensions of Tudela allowed.

It was an excellent plan.

It had the grave defect of requiring Elizabeth, Tudela, and his own mind to cooperate.

“The offices open at nine, sir. The clerk we want keeps his desk until eleven and dines after. I will go at nine and put the matter to him as I put it yesterday.”

“The offices open at nine,” Darcy repeated. “In this country, that is not an hour but a rumour. They opened at nine yesterday, by which the porter meant something nearer half past ten, and only then to inform us the man we wanted had gone to his brother’s christening.”

“His cousin’s, sir.”

“I stand corrected. It makes all the difference.” He did not rise. There was no profit in presenting himself at a door that would not admit him before ten, and every reason to let Jennings go ahead and break the ground — so he told himself, and did not examine how readily the reasoning had arrived, nor that it kept him above stairs while the common room below was in use.