Page 29 of Homeless

Elizabeth was leaning over, watching him. “If Spain means to preserve my reputation by furniture, I should be obliged if it would do so with less noise.”

The truckle gave at last with a shriek of wood and iron and shot out so abruptly that he was obliged to catch it with his knee. A slat immediately dropped from underneath and clattered to the floor.

“Ah,” she said. “An interesting method. Injury as a chaperon.”

He straightened, rubbing his knee. The room seemed to have shrunk in the last four minutes. There was the bed, the truckle, the chair, and Mrs Darcy nowhere to be put except among them.

The candle on the washstand put a mild, merciless light upon her face. Fatigue had thinned it. The hours since sunset had left their shadow beneath her eyes; yet no fatigue had softened the line of her mouth. She was looking at the truckle with a severe sort of resignation.

“It will do for me.”

“It will not. You will take the bed.”

“I will take the truckle, and you will leave off moving me about the room like a chair that has displeased you.”

“You have been on your feet for hours.”

“So have you. And I notice no one proposing to spare you the mattress on those grounds. It is always different when it is a man, and never, by some miracle of consistency, different when it is a lady.”

He opened his mouth, shut it, and tried again. “You will take the bed.”

“You have said that twice now. Saying it again is not an argument. It is only a louder way of being wrong. You cannot fit on the truckle.”

He had expected an argument. He had not expected how fast they fell into the way of it — the interrupting, the going round, neither one letting the other finish, as though they had been married for years and only wanted a bed to fight over. The truth, which he did not say, was that the bed was not the quarrel at all. It was the one disaster of the day small enough to win, and they both meant to win something before the day was done with them.

“You cannot mean to sleep on that contrivance,” he said.

“I can mean a great many things when tired. I have been robbed, married, and rendered homeless since breakfast. The mattress is the smallest indignity of the three.”

He lowered his face near hers and tried to adopt a manner she could not refute. “You are not spending your wedding night on a broken servant’s trundle.”

She lifted her brows. “It grows more affecting every moment. Another quarter of an hour, and I shall begin to suspect honest sentiment.”

“I am speaking of common sense.”

“So am I. You are at least six inches too long for it.”

“That is the truckle’s misfortune.”

“You propose to make it yours. And, if I am kept awake by your martyrdom, mine.”

“That bed,” he said, pointing, “is yours! I have survived worse accommodations.”

“You will forgive me if I find that somewhat incredible.” Elizabeth crossed to the truckle, stooped, and tested it with one hand. It rocked, objected, then held.

“It is ugly,” she said, “but not impossible.”

He wished, with wholly unreasonable force, that she would cease leaning over the truckle in candlelight. Particularly with her hair pulling loose from its pins and her fichu sagging.

She straightened. “Very well. I take the bed, you take the relic, and we both agree never to praise necessity again while we live.”

“That is a vow I can make with uncommon sincerity.”

He had got the truckle to stand more or less level, and, the matter of the bed concluded, attempted the courtesy the whole disastrous day had denied them. “Then we are settled, Mrs Darcy, and I —”

“Do not call me that.”

He straightened. “I beg your pardon?”