Page 8 of Homeless

Darcy stayed in her mind like a splinter left from an old fall. An annoyance, but not a loathsome one. By the time Herrera had bowed himself away, and the bells rang the hour to a town that paid them no mind, she had settled on one sensible resolution. She would not renew the acquaintance. He had no claim upon her history, and she had no appetite for his.

They walked back through streets too narrow for two carts to pass without violence.

“You lost half a sentence there with Herrera,” her uncle teased as they walked. “Tudela is teaching you humility.”

“Tudela is teaching me that merchants and pirates are in the same line of work.”

“No. That striking-looking fellow at the tribunal taught you something. You stood like a woman turned to salt, Lizzy. I saw you from across the square before ever I heard the mule.”

She stopped in the road. A mule train came on regardless of the lack of space, and she stepped from its path without looking where she stepped. The heat filled her throat and flooded her face before she had any hope of dismissing it. He had seen her. Not the mule, not the crowd — her, standing rooted, staring at a man across a market square like a girl at her first assembly.

“You were watching me?”

“I am always watching you. Your aunt would have my head otherwise.”

The heat in her cheeks would not go down. She turned her face to the road, to the mules, to anything with no name attached to it. “An English voice will catch the ear in a foreign square. It is a national weakness.”

“Ah. Then he is English. I had begun to suspect him a troublesome apparition, but you looked as though you might have recognised him.”

“I knew him slightly in Hertfordshire.”

“Slightly? Is he a merchant?”

“No.”

“A lawyer?”

“Much worse. A gentleman.”

Mr Gardiner laughed. “Poor man. Spain will use him cruelly.”

“It looks as though it already has.”

“He did seem rather put out about something. Was he disagreeable when you knew him?”

“Frequently.”

“You were forgiving, no doubt.”

“Never.”

“I would be disappointed if you had been.”

He looked at her sidelong with benevolent curiosity, but one of his chief merits lay in knowing when a relation preferred to keep her own counsel. He let the subject go, and by the time they reached the lodging house, they had returned to wine, roads, and the perennial question of whether any muleteer in Navarre intended to honour his word after taking a deposit.

The house stood in a street so narrow that guests in opposite windows might almost have exchanged hats. Foreigners went there because foreigners were tolerated there, and because the master had discovered that petitioners, traders, and displaced men with business before the authorities paid promptly if the stew were hot and the straw not quite alive.

Elizabeth spent the afternoon over her uncle's figures. By dusk, the room below had filled with the smell of cooking and the stable, and with men in a tired temper who had been cheated and robbed, by their own estimation, enough to make a bishop swear.

IV

Mrs Collins

Elizabeth Bennet was in Tudela.

He had turned from the clerk’s table with his temper spent and his business no further on. It was the same morning he had spent at Zaragoza, and at Sigüenza before that, and at Guadalajara before that. The same shrug, the same regret, the same courteous assurance that the gentleman he wanted had been here until very lately, and was expected, without fail, a little farther on.

He had come to Spain to stand before a tribunal at Madrid and be paid; he had instead been passed hand to hand up a valley and along a river he had never meant to see, chasing one commissioner’s signature into towns whose names he had not known a month ago. Tudela was merely the latest of them, and would not be the last, and he had ceased some days since to expect that any of them would be. He wanted nothing but a place to rest his eyes that was not the face of the man who had wasted his morning, so he had cast his frustrated gaze about the square…