Page 108 of Homeless

“Why? And do not tell me some empty excuse, or that you must practise going without, or whatever riddle it was last time, because I have turned it over every mile since and it makes no sense, Elizabeth, it makes no sense. We are married. Truly married, in every sense. You want this — do not trouble to deny it, I can feel that you do. So tell me plainly, for once, without the wit and without the riddle. Why not?”

“Because I will not destroy you!” It tore out of her before she could stop it.

He raised up a little, his brow darkening in the moonlight. “How could you possibly — Elizabeth, you have saved me. More times than I can count, but even if you had not, why —”

“Oh, stop it, Fitzwilliam, you know exactly what I mean. You know what will happen if you return to England with an impoverished wife, no claim paid, and a mortgage you cannot answer in due time.”

He blinked and sat back a little more. “Like as not, I will have to approach the bank and request an extension, or some modification in the terms.”

“And how likely are you to get that?” She pushed her arms behind her and raised herself up to look into his face. “Particularly if you are found to have offended a very powerful man and slighted his daughter after having given her your word to return?”

“I was not formally engaged to Lady Honoria, and even if I had been, do you think I would turn my back on my wife just to save face? What do you take me for?”

She let the air out of her lungs, and she could not help it — she reached to touch his face, but he jerked it away. “Very well, since you will have it plainly. Every time we do this, you gamble Pemberley's whole future on my courses coming. But one day, they will not come, and then it is done, then we are chained together past any undoing, whatever either of us wants, and —”

His face was cold as glass. “Whatever either of us wants,” he repeated, slowly. “There it is again. You have said it before. On the mountain, and in the loft, and now. When the time comes that I must not. Past any undoing. You are still planning to leave me?”

She could not make her mouth form the lie that would answer it.

“You are!” He pushed back from her and raked his hand through his hair. “After everything! After Vitoria, and Burgos, after you dragged me back from the grave with your own hands, after sobbing in my arms in the pass — you are still, in your own mind, going to reach England and let me go.”

“I am going to give you the choice —”

“I do not want the choice! God in heaven, Elizabeth, how many times, in how many countries, must I say it? I do not want the choice. I have made my choice. I made it in a wine-market square in Tudela, I made it in a room in Vitoria, and I have made it every day since, and I will go on making it every day until I die, and the one person on this earth who will not let me make it is you!”

“Because you cannot afford it!” She was crying now, furious, cold, hungry, past all restraint. “Because you would be ruined, Fitzwilliam, you would be ruined, and it is half my doing that you are still chained to the ruin, and one day, love will not be enough to feed you. One day, you will look at the wreckage of your life, what you should have been and done and had, and what Pemberley used to be, and you will hate me, and I would rather —”

“Elizabeth, no,” he breathed.

She shook her head, her face crumpling like a watershed. “I would rather let you go while you still look at me the way you do now, than keep you until you cannot bear the sight of me. That is why. Are you satisfied?”

The dark was quiet except for her own ragged breathing and the drip of the trees.

“No,” he said at last. “No, I am not satisfied, because you are wrong, and I do not know how to make you see that you are wrong. It breaks my heart that you have carried this the whole way and let me think —”

He stopped because she had buried her face in her hands and was weeping. She felt his hand reaching for her, felt the heat of his fingers near her cheek, but he never touched her.

“You have been saying goodbye to me. This entire time. Every kindness. Every affection. I thought you were coming to me by inches and you were leaving me by inches, the whole while, and letting me hold you because you meant to remember it after.”

She crumbled and wished she could vomit, but there was not enough in her stomach for that. So, she wept, her shoulders heaving, and he did not reach for her again.

“I will not touch you. Not until you ask me to, and not because I have stopped wanting you, but because I will not have you flinching from me as though every kindness were a debt you are frightened of owing. When you want me, you know where I am. I have been here since Tudela, and I am not going anywhere.”

He lay down, his back to her, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Take the blanket. I am too angry to share it tonight without saying things I would regret, so I shall be angry over here, and you may be right over there. In the morning, we will walk to the sea and not speak of it, and that will have to do.”

XLII

The Reflection of a Gentleman

Morning was just turning from crisp, salt air into humid heat when their mule walked in from the low, green wilderness to the city.

Elizabeth had grown so used to emptiness — to wind-punished plains and broken villages and roads where a single traveller was an event — that the city came at her almost as a violence. It was upon her before she had quite made sense of it, and Darcy was dismounting behind her, telling her that she would ride the rest of the way and he would walk, and she ought to arrange her skirts for modesty’s sake before they were in the thick of the city.

She had blinked numbly and put herself in order. Everything about the morning had been numb, which was the only kindness on offer today. It was as well that the bread had given out last night, because neither of them had the stomach for it this morning. There had been no touches beyond the necessity of riding the same mule, no eye contact, and only half a dozen words between them.

The city was upon them in what felt like a dozen paces. From a dirt, rock-strewn path, they were suddenly on cobblestones, and the streets filled with people, more people than she had seen in one place since England, going about the ordinary loud business of a city that had somehow gone on living all the while she had been half dying in the interior. There were houses with glass in the windows. There were shops. There was a woman selling fish from a barrow and a knot of men arguing over a cart and a boy running with a message and a church bell going for no reason she could discern, and over and under all of it, unmistakable now, the smell of the sea — salt and tar and fish and weed, the smell of the edge of the world, the smell of the way home.

And the ships.