Page 13 of Homeless

Elizabeth!

VI

He Who Pays

Elizabeth had been trying to persuade her uncle that Tudela would eventually kill them both, but only after first making them uncomfortably grateful for the opportunity.

Mr Gardiner buttered a piece of bread and twisted his neck to work out a cramp from the poor mattress. “My dear Lizzy, one ought not to condemn a whole town merely because its coffee is bitter, its beds hard, and its officials steeped in bribery.”

“It is generous in you,” said Elizabeth, “to leave them garlic for a fourth distinction, when they have worked so hard already at the first three.”

He laughed. “You are uncharitable when you are hungry.”

“Charity generally requires better sleep and a full stomach.”

The lodging-house servant chose that moment to sidle in with a pot that promised fresh coffee. Elizabeth had learnt, however, not to hope for too much. Pilar was perhaps sixteen, narrow and brown in a faded bodice, her black hair pinned back in a hurry and already escaping. She set down the cups and a heel of bread.”Gracias, Pilar,” said Mr Gardiner, in the few syllables of Spanish he trusted himself to pronounce.

Pilar gave him a startled smile, and Elizabeth another. There was something like a friendship between them now, built over four days in which Pilar had helped Elizabeth adapt some of her Portuguese into something that passed for rough Galician. The girl tapped the cup of coffee she had just poured, mimed a gagging motion, and rolled her eyes to heaven with such eloquence that Elizabeth nearly lost her countenance.

“You see?” Elizabeth said when she had gone. “The town is redeemed by one servant girl and your incurable optimism. A pity neither is legal tender.”

“I am glad it meets with your approval in some measure. Drink your coffee, Lizzy. I would like to see Herrera before he takes his siesta.”

She obeyed, because he looked tired. Under all his good humour, she knew he had been up half the night, setting figures against routes, routes against rumours, and all of them against the dwindling patience of creditors, muleteers, and the officials of a kingdom that seemed to run on delay as other countries ran on money.

Elizabeth had an altogether different cause for wariness today. Mr Darcy was somewhere about, too. He never once seen her at supper last night, when she and her uncle had sat behind the great post that halved the room. And she did not see him at the morning meal, but perhaps he took it in his room. A man such as he would. His man had come back alone another attempt at the offices this morning, but she had not seen Mr Darcy himself all day.

She had told herself she did not care, and the lie was not among her better compositions.

A shout came up from belowstairs, and then another right over the top of it, and her uncle’s head was already up.

Boots struck the stair, more than one pair and coming fast, and outside the door, a woman’s voice climbed into a pitch that needed no Spanish at all.

Something went over in the common room with a crash that came up through the soles of Elizabeth’s feet. She was half out of her chair before she could even cry in alarm.

“Away from the door!” Her uncle was on his feet, one hand thrown out toward her. “Lizzy, away from it!”

The one voice below had become a dozen, all shouting at once, none of them asking.

Pilar did not knock. She fell in through the door white as ash, both hands at her mouth. “Señor — señora — no — no —” She had Elizabeth’s sleeve in her fist, hauling at it, flinging her free hand back toward the passage, down at the floor, at the room beneath them. And then she brought her two wrists together hard in front of her, and that needed no translating.

“Who?” Mr Gardiner caught her by the arm. “Pilar, who is it — who!”

“¡Ingleses! ¡El alcalde! ¡Vega!”

Her uncle’s breath went out of him in a word she had never once heard him use.

Vega? The name was nothing to her. To him, it was the end of the world, and she saw it cross his face. He had her by both shoulders before she knew he had crossed the room.

“The kitchen. Now!”

“No! I am not leaving you —”

“You will leave me this instant!” He was already wrenching her round toward the inner door, his hands hard enough to hurt, his voice torn clean out of its usual shape. “If they take you beside me, I am finished, do you hear? Do not make me watch it! Go!”

Downstairs, something broke. A man barked an order. Another laughed, and the laugh was worse than the order.

“Venga, venga.” Pilar had her by the arm, pulling her back. Elizabeth let herself be pulled, because the sound coming up the stair had stopped being confusion and become something with terror and wrath behind it.