Page 84 of Homeless

The captain nodded, but Elizabeth was sure that he raised one eyebrow faintly at Darcy. “Very well. Before you go, let me show you your way, and offer what advice I can for the journey.”

“Yes, about that,” Darcy said. “My salvoconducto states that our road is the Encartaciones. Will there be any trouble about taking another route?”

“I doubt half the men checking those even read the route, but I will give you a letter, in case you are stopped. It should go some way towards proper appearances. See here.”

He pulled a map from his drawer and used a dry pen to note their path — south and west first, down onto the meseta toward Burgos. It ran away from the sea they both wanted, and they would have to climb the Montes de Vitoria. Then they would come to fortified Miranda, where they would have to cross the Ebro once more before the land would open and drop them into the Meseta Norte below.

From there, the captain said, it would be rolling and parched. Easy enough travel, but exposed and dry, with only a few wells dug and very few natural streams. But they were well enough used, the road being heavily travelled and nearly always marked by some sort of venta or posada.

Darcy thanked the captain, Elizabeth smiled at him and let him kiss her hand, and they bade him farewell. There were the mules to see to, and fresh provisions to buy and pack, and the remains of their coins to count out and be rationed. Darcy sold his trunk, the specially designed rich man’s travelling trunk with the false bottom that had saved his papers from theft and carried what remained of their clothes, pressed together, since Estella. It made more sense, they agreed with perhaps four words between them, to load the pack mule with canvas bags over his saddle and their clothes and papers and food stuffed inside, the way the arrieros did.

There was a checkpoint at the town's edge, where a bored teniente read their salvoconducto and their marriage certificate, glanced briefly at their faces, and waved them through. They spoke perhaps a dozen words the whole way out, and every one of them was about the mules, or the road, or the town where they would stop that night. Never once did anything personal pass between them, and Elizabeth was grateful, particularly on this jostling mountain road, that they each had their own mule to ride and did not have to share a narrow seat in a cart.

She sat in the mule’s saddle with her arms crossed and her face turned to the country going by. It was better than staring at Darcy’s broad back as he rode ahead of her. Better than remembering the feel of that back under her palms, the sound of his breath faltering against her ear, the strength of his body as he… She clenched her eyes and her jaw and stared at the mountains ringing the distance.

They stopped in the afternoon to rest the mules, and Darcy came towards her to help her down. Elizabeth dismounted without help just before he reached her, and he stopped, held up a hand in surrender, and went to untie their provisions from the pack mule’s saddle. He brought her back a heel of bread and some cheese — a luxury she had argued they should not have purchased for the road — and offered it to her without a word. A moment later, he returned with a skin of water, and that, too, he deposited in her keeping without conversation.

Elizabeth had never been given to much wine. Last night was certainly an excess, and the wine had been foul to begin with, but she had naively hoped that her head would have stopped aching by now. Instead, it had seemed to grow worse, piercing behind her eyes. She was pressing the tender spots in the centre of her forehead, just above her nose, when Darcy returned to help her back into the saddle.

“The altitude,” he said, when he saw her trying to massage her forehead. “The air is thin.”

“Of course,” she said as she got to her feet. “I can manage,” she added, when he held out a hand to help her into the saddle. The last thing she wanted was to refresh the memory of his hands on her.

“Suit yourself.” He turned away, and they did not speak again for three hours.

XXXII

To Burgos

They left La Puebla de Arganzón in a grey dawn that hinted at a hot day ahead, and Darcy was stiff in a way that no single bad night could account for.

He had slept, if it could be called sleeping, folded into a chair with his coat for a blanket, having given Elizabeth the cot without asking and without being thanked. He had done the same for more than a month’s worth of nights on this road, risen sore, and thought nothing of it. This was not like before. This was seated in his bones, in his hips and knees and the base of the skull — an ache that did not walk off in the first mile or ease like the after effects of a night of excess. It must be the morning cold, and the altitude, and the accumulation of years his body suddenly complained of in a way it had never done before.

She was worse.

He watched her come down to the yard and get herself onto the mule — slowly, with a care she would have scorned in anyone else, one hand going to the small of her back and then, as if she had caught herself, taking it away. She had rubbed at her temple twice before they cleared the gate.

He counted such things now. He had begun counting them somewhere on the far side of Vitoria and had not been able to stop. It could not be… it would be too soon for her to feel the effects of pregnancy. Was it? He thought so — it had only been a few days, but he had never seen her so altered, and the only thing that had changed in those last few days was…

He thought himself foolish for even considering that as the cause, but he was ignorant enough of such things that he could not entirely rule it out. Her body had been hard-used since Tudela. Travel and poor food had worn her thin, heat and worry had left her exhausted. It would be a cruel trick of nature if she were also now nourishing another life within her.

“You slept?” he asked her as they started out.

“My eyes were closed, the same as yours. Did you sleep?”

“I was asking about you.”

She did not look at him. “Do not fuss. It does not suit you, and it wastes the morning.”

He did not bother asking anything else. He rode his mule out onto the road, the pack mule tied off to his own saddle and Elizabeth riding behind him. The road ran south and west, down and away, and the country began the long, slow business of changing under them.

They came down towards the Ebro through country that dried as it fell. The green closed behind them mile by mile — the soft Atlantic lush of the Basque hills that he had cursed for its wet and would, he suspected, come to miss. Ahead, the land widened and paled and hardened, the trees thinning to nothing, the sky getting larger and whiter and more indifferent. By the time Miranda came in sight, throwing its old castle up on a hill above the river, they were in a different Spain entirely, a bleached and open one, and the wind came off the tableland ahead with nothing in its way to break it.

The Ebro River at Miranda was not the brown, idle thing he had watched drag past Tudela, nor even like the bloated Ega at Estella. It ran fast and hard under the town, green-grey with the mountains reflected in it, and the bridge across it bore evidence of the war like everything else — one span rebuilt in raw new stone where the old had been dropped into the water by one army or another. There was a sentry-post at the near end where a hot, weary soldier demanded their papers.

Darcy handed down the salvoconducto and the marriage cerfiticate. Elizabeth had to answer to Señora Darcy and let the soldier look for a long time at her, longer than their papers required. Darcy was lifting his hand to back his mule up beside hers, because the soldier’s stare was starting to look less official and more curious, and he had no intention of letting a look become a touch. A scene at a bridge was a night in a cell, and he could not afford either.

The soldier named a toll. There was no toll; it was simply a sum the man had decided he was owed for the labour of letting them pass. The coin went. It was always going. He had stopped, somewhere back, wincing as each one left; now it was just a steady bleed without cease. The silver from the moneychanger's shop was more than half gone. The money he had got for the watch had dwindled after bribing the clerk in Vitoria and “thanking” Captain Ferrers. The silver buckles had been liquidated into a mass of copper coins, some of which had paid for feeding three mules and themselves. The gold cross, he still had, sewn into his money belt. He thought about the cross more than he liked.