Page 41 of Homeless

Nothing else. There was no profit in trimming a thing already as black as it would go.

The rest of the afternoon passed in its own coin — jolting quiet, a question or two about the road, the mule stopped and started and stopped again. But the air in the cart had changed and would not change back. Jane was in it now. So was Bingley. And behind them, unbidden, the whole of what the two of them had been before yesterday had made near strangers into man and wife.

XV

Esposa

By the time the light came down, the driver had deposited them at a posting-house — not much to look at, he allowed, but harder for thieves to reach than the open road. The posting-house possessed a stable, a kitchen, two rough bedchambers, and pricing scheme far above its weathered beams and creaking doors.

Darcy paid for broth, bread, and a room so narrow that they would have been more comfortable in the open air where they were not living on each other’s breath. The woman at the hearth showed them up with the frank assumption that a married couple would know what to do with it.

Darcy thanked her in the six words of Spanish he trusted. She left them alone, the door shut, and the room became a problem.

It held a bed, which he did not look at directly, as though it were an indelicacy in the corner. It also held a horsehair chair of great age and greater aroma, a joint stool, a washstand, and a candle that had clearly been apportioned on the understanding that guests at such an hour had no further use for their eyes.

“You will take the bed,” he said.

“I had assumed a new phrasing for the same argument this evening, Mr Darcy. You disappoint me.”

“I am too tired to contest anything of greater consequence than my own name.”

“Then we are agreed, which I find came alarmingly easy.” She set her reticule on the washstand and stood looking at the chair. “And I assume you mean to take the chair, just as you took the truckle, but I daresay the offering is far worse this time.”

He had removed his waistcoat, and was already slipping off his braces, daring her to look at him in his simple linen shirt. “That will do as well as another.”

“It is made of decay and one dead animal.”

“Two, I should think, by the smell of it.” He drew the joint stool round to the front of the chair with his boot. “I shall put my feet up and be a monument to gentlemanly restraint, and in the morning, you may tell the woman at the door I snored like a contented man.”

There followed a quarter hour of the most elaborate courtesy either of them had shown all day, conducted entirely around the furniture. She required the washstand; he found urgent occupation at the window until she had done. He desired to wash his forearms and neck; she developed a sudden fascination with the contents of her reticule.

She lay down at last under the coverlet, still half dressed, her back to the room. He took the chair, and the stool. The candle, he pinched out between finger and thumb because blowing it felt too much like a thing a man did in his own bedchamber.

“Mr Darcy?”

He opened his eyes into the darkness. “Yes?”

She was quiet for a few seconds. “Nothing. Only I find I cannot say goodnight to a husband and mean an acquaintance by it, and I have not worked out the word for what you are.”

“When you have worked it out, you might tell me. I have been at the same problem since Tudela.”

Elizabeth woke with her cheek on folded linen, her neck bent nearly sideways, and the conviction that dawn had come too soon.

For one confused instant, she did not know where she was. Then the candle-stump, a man’s valise on the chair, the shawl that had not been about her shoulders when she went to sleep, and the smell of horse and smoke restored the world in proper order.

Mr Darcy had gone.

Not far, however. The papers had been stacked out of danger. Her reticule had been set on the stool instead of left under her elbow. A chipped cup stood within reach, and though the coffee looked capable of removing varnish, it was still warm.

She eyed it with suspicion.

There were certain gestures that must inspire open gratitude. There were others — small things, like a straightened shawl, a cup left within reach, bread wrapped in a napkin because somebody had observed that she ate almost nothing yesterday — which were altogether more troublesome.

The door opened and Darcy entered with the morning at his back, hat in hand, coat powdered with dust. “You are awake.”

“I had not meant to die in this bed.”

“That is as well.” He set down a folded scrap of paper. “An ostler set a loose shoe for a group of soldiers last night. He spoke a little French, which was a piece of luck, so I was able to get some intelligence of him.”