Page 42 of Homeless

Elizabeth had been twisting her hair up, so she only cast her eyes on the note and did not yet pick it up. “What did you learn?”

“They had with them certain captives. One was a foreigner, middle-aged, well dressed when they brought him in, and loud about it. Under a captain’s guard — Llorente, the man thought, though he would not swear to it. They fed and watered their horses and went on west before the light.”

She pushed the last pin in her hair and took up the note. There were only a few words in Darcy’s quick, severe hand:

Llorente, perhaps. English prisoner, well-dressed, loud. West, before dawn. Calahorra by midday if the road holds.

“If the road holds?”

“The bridge west of here is being watched. Militia, customs, patriots, thieves — one cannot always distinguish among them at first view. We may be delayed.”

“But not turned back?”

“I do not mean to permit it.”

Elizabeth drank the coffee because he stood there watching, and she required something to do with her hands and mouth.

“So, we chase Captain Llorente to Calahorra,” she said, “learn what he has done with my uncle, and continue until Spain repents having admitted English people.”

“That is the outline.”

“And the details?”

“The details depend upon whether there exists on that road anyone who can answer to my own concerns. In that case, I am in hopes that your Portuguese will serve as well or better than Jennings’ Spanish.”

“I had thought that one of my principal domestic duties.”

A quick knock echoed at the door. When Darcy opened it, the landlady’s daughter entered with a jug balanced on her hip and, after a bob of apology toward the newly married English, delivered in rapid Spanish the morning’s gossip. Elizabeth listened, asked one question, and translated.

“She says the cart driver will not wait beyond a quarter hour, and the western road is full of uniforms. Oh, and she says that if the English husband means to dispute yesterday’s price as loudly today as he did last night, she hopes heaven will close his mouth, as a mercy to the house.”

Darcy extended a palm full of coins. “Tell her she need not invoke heaven. I will make no protests.”

The girl grinned at them both, called Elizabeth señora, and vanished again.

When the door shut, Darcy turned to her with a wry look that felt altogether too companionable.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“That means there is something, and you are only too civil to say it.”

“It means Spain appears resolved to believe us married.”

“Technically, we are. At least until Santander.”

“Yes,” he said, gathering the papers. “We must try not to disappoint it.”

The bridge west of the village had once been Roman, then Spanish, and was now chiefly military.

Darcy sat with one boot braced against the cart while the mule was checked, the driver contradicted, and himself scrutinised by a cynical guard. A raw wind came down the river. Elizabeth sat opposite him, pale from the cold, bad coffee, and too little sleep. She would not complain of any of those deficiencies. She would rather, he suspected, have bitten through her own glove.

Three militia men stood before the cart. One had taken charge by virtue of a magnificent moustache and the fact that he stood half a head taller than his companions. He wanted names, business, destination, papers, and asked why the lady, and not her husband, was the one who did all the talking.

Elizabeth had already leaned forward to answer, but the officer kept gesturing for her to get out of the cart to speak to him. For what purpose, Darcy could only guess.

“My wife will not be badgered out of a cart to stand in this mud,” Darcy cut in. “Tell them they may speak to me, and if my grammar offends them, they may comfort themselves that my money will be more fluent.”