Page 48 of Homeless

The next day proved somewhat more trying. Already footsore, they had the added trouble of being hungry and ill-used by last night’s lodgings. Darcy wondered bleakly if Elizabeth might be right — they might have done better to roll out a blanket on the grass and sleep near the mules.

He was put out enough at the start of the day, following mule tracks and glaring daggers at any soldier or checkpoint official who dared cross their path. But then, he began to notice something odd in Elizabeth’s behaviour. She was glancing behind her, brushing at the back of her skirts as if looking for something biting her. And the moment the mules stopped for water, she pressed in among them and held a heated debate with the muleteer about accessing something in her trunk.

Darcy eventually had to intervene, because it became obvious at length that whatever she wanted was going to cost extra to unload and load again in the middle of the day.

“What is so important that it cannot wait until we stop for the night?” he demanded.

She only looked up at him with her jaw locked until her chin started to quiver. Egad, her eyes were almost filling with tears, too. But she refused to say a word.

He cast his hands in the air. “The first time in recorded history that you refuse to speak! Where is the famous tongue I married you for? The Elizabeth Bennet wit that cuts like a blade? What the devil am I to…” He had turned about to face the mules, who stood in a patient semicircle at a dugout watering hole, when his eyes caught something on the ground behind her.

Blood. A few random drops of it, and all marking the path she had walked.

And that was when he understood. Damnation. This was a matter he had precisely zero experience in, and wanted none. He reached into his purse and pulled out a handful of copper coins. “Give him all of it if he demands it. Tell him he can have the silver, too, if he will fetch you… whatever you need.”

She closed her hand over the coins he poured into it, and her throat bobbed strangely. She turned away without a word, and that was the last he saw or heard of the matter for the rest of the day.

The sun's progression across the sky did nothing to improve his mood. By the end of the day, he had paid for his ill humour in more than an aching jaw and a growling stomach. His purse had dwindled still more.

The muleteer knew his route and declared to them that they would stop by sundown at the next village. However, there was a river crossing where he could let his mules drink again, so once Darcy and Elizabeth were on the far side, she sat down on a low wall and removed her boots to rub her sore feet.

“You frightened me at the bridge just now,” she said. “Telling three men with muskets that your money was the more fluent of your gifts. They will remember that long after they have forgotten our faces. The Englishman whose money speaks.”

“It carried us across.”

“It carries us across every barrier on this road and chalks a mark at each — ‘Here is a man worth stopping.’ You heard the clerk as well as I did. ‘Recoverable value.’ My uncle is a merchant with a merchant’s purse, and they have carried him north to sell back to his own people by the pound. And you — you are a gentleman with a watch worth a cottage, a note of credit in your coat, and probably a few peers of England behind your name. If they would take him, Mr Darcy, consider what they would give to take you, if they only thought it expedient enough. Thank God they did not.”

“There was a toll,” he growled between his teeth. “As there has been at every river and stream and mud puddle we have encountered. I paid the toll for our passage.”

“And a great deal more besides. You ought to let me negotiate for —”

“No.” A woman, negotiating with men carrying guns? She truly was mad. He would much rather they hardly noticed her and let her pass by, even if his temper and his purse were made to pay the price.

She pulled her boots back on with a hissing sigh and a shake of her head. “I had thought you merely proud. I now find you are also a danger to yourself, and to me, who has agreed to walk a war at your elbow. Learn to be less than you are. It may be the one thing on this road that keeps us both breathing.”

XVIII

Hot Water

Hunger had arrived first as a sharpness and became, over the day, a dullness, which was worse. The bread had been a quarter of what hunger asked, and divided by the custom that had grown up between them without a word, the larger half to her hand and the smaller kept in his — a division she had twice tried to correct and twice lost, not by argument, for he made none, but because he had eaten his share and walked away before she could press hers on him.

The place they came to at dusk on the fourth day was a posada in name. In reality, it was no more than a stable loft with a ladder that was anything but straight. The woman of the house gave them a room above the beasts, a tallow end, and a jug of bad wine. She also gave them, at a price that ought to have made a harlot blush, a thin soup the colour of the road, which Elizabeth ate to the last grey spoonful and could have wept to see the bottom of.

At long last, Darcy held the ladder for her, and she put her foot on the first rung. She bounced lightly, and it held.

“Pray, desist,” Darcy said from behind her.

She twisted about on the ladder, bumping into his arm with her hip. “Afraid I will break it? I would rather find out with my weight on the lowest rung than yours on a higher one.”

He winced. “That was not my complaint. Your…” He closed his eyes. “Just climb up.”

Elizabeth shrugged and continued up. As soon as she had gained the top rung, he muttered something about polishing the silver and chilling the champagne, and stepped away. Well, he could do as he liked. Spain had done little to make him less peculiar.

She put her knee on the floor and then straightened to look around the room. It was not precisely a hay loft, but it was little better. A guest room of sorts, with tired, broken straw piled along the side of the room, a shelf, and a basin with a clump of tallow soap in the bottom and a treacherous-looking crack.

And there, tucked into the corner, a bed — a real bed! Elizabeth nearly gasped as she clambered to her feet. No door, exactly, but no one else to share with, either. She had stopped, some leagues back, expecting better of any roof, and here was the best thing they had seen since Tudela.

If one ignored the fact that the straw moved occasionally.