Page 51 of Homeless

Tomorrow, they would be in Estella. Better lodgings, thank God. A cessation to several days of walking that had left his muscles hard and his toes tender, to say nothing for what it had done to Elizabeth. Today, at last, her steps had started to drag, her eyes to lose their spark.

She had grown thin these last days. Not merely lean, but hard and spare in a way that was beginning to trouble him. And with the poor meals to be had on the road, was it possible that a woman in the midst of her courses could become faint? She had not yet, but he had taken to watching the span of her footprints in the dirt, measuring the distance with his own strides, the sooner to detect a falter before it happened.

Estella would offer better food and a place to recover both their strength and their wits.

But more than that, there remained a hope that someone might know something about anything important. He had begun to laugh at his own hope of finding the commissioner to certify his claim. He would probably chase the “right” man across Spain five times before he ever caught up with anyone who would admit to being useful. That was assuming the Navarrese junta records survived at all to be examined and claimed against, which was…

Something ran across his face in the dark — quick, warm, and abominably soft.

The sound that came out of Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley was not one his acquaintance in town would have credited, nor one he would afterwards concede had occurred — a blood-curdling, warbling, wholly involuntary thing, and he was on his feet with his back to the wall before he had fully opened his eyes, his heart going like a hare’s.

There was a rustle from the bed, then a gasp. Then it began, very quietly, to shake.

“Do not,” he said.

“I have said nothing.” She was failing to say it from behind her hand, and he could hear every inch of the failure. “I would not presume! It is only that, well, I did tell you the floor was let, but I suppose now you have met the tenant.”

“I think you mean the plural, for I believe there are several.” He swept the back of his wrist across his forehead. It had broken out into a cold sweat, and his heart was still thumping in his ears.

“Well, you cannot stand in the corner all night. If you promise not to breathe on me, you may take the edge of the bed.”

Darcy glanced in the darkness back towards the straw. He could not see it… but he could hear it. The scratching and shuffling, even a squeak.

“The bed, then,” he said, gathering the wreck of his dignity about him like a wet cloak. “Only for a few hours. The edge of it. I shall go back out to the mules before it is light, and we need neither of us speak of any part of this again so long as we both shall live.”

“Agreed.”

He drew off his boots and lay down along the outermost inch of the mattress, on his back, his arms folded upon his chest in the attitude of a man laid out for his own funeral and resolved to give the undertaker no trouble — a careful, freezing strip of air kept between his shoulder and her back at a cost of vigilance he would not have owned to under oath.

Her breathing slowed. The shivering eased — partly the blanket, partly the plain fact of two bodies warming one cold room with or without touching. He kept his eyes on the rafters. He held to his inch of distance with a rigour he had once spent on questions of land and law, and meant to be back in his boots and out of doors before the light.

XIX

Public Stakes

Elizabeth woke by degrees, foggy and warm — a thing that had not befallen her in so long that her body took the comfort some while before her mind thought to distrust it.

It was some hours yet before dawn, the hour when only a faint glow breaks the horizon and weak silver leaks through the window. There was a shutter working somewhere on a loose hinge, that small complaining creak she knew so well — the east window at Longbourn her father would never mend, that had let the dawn in upon every morning of her girlhood. And Jane was snuggled against her back, her knees tucked up behind Elizabeth’s, her breath warm at the back of her neck, an arm come over her in the night the way Jane’s always did, the hand loose and heavy and dear at her…

But the creak was wrong — wrong pitch, wrong wall. And the hand was too large, too heavy, too far cradled over her chest to belong to any sister in Christendom.

She woke the rest of the way all at once. There was no Longbourn. Only the weathered beams of a stable loft, a pile of straw across the room, and no Jane within eight hundred miles of her.

She stopped breathing, her eyes wide as her face froze. She had been cold. She must have been, because… Good Lord, she had hugged his arm to her body as if hoarding the warmth, and his hand was… was entirely covering a part of her anatomy she scarcely dared to touch herself. Bits of sleep and dreams came back to her now — flashes when she had stirred against the weight at her back, found it comforting, and surrendered to the depth of slumber again. She must have lain there in his arms for hours.

There was no way out from under a sleeping man’s arm that did not wake the sleeping man. She closed her hand about his wrist and lifted it, and he woke at the touch with a sharp intake of breath. His eyes went straight to his own fingers — the telltale curve of them, shaped by the body they had been resting on. He blinked.

Neither of them moved. His hand still hung open above her ribs where she had raised it; hers was locked about his wrist; both past any hope of pretending, close enough that she marked the exact instant the horror took him and stopped his breath. Then he was gone — off the bed and onto his feet, so fast the wood frame banged the wall behind him.

“Forgive me!” He stood with his back to the wall, as far from the bed as the wretched little room would put him, and looked as though he wished it further still. “I was asleep — I had no notion — that is no excuse, I know it for none —” He cupped a fist to his mouth, and she was fairly certain he muttered an oath behind it. “I will sleep with the mules for the rest of the night.”

She sat up, hauled the blanket to a more defensible latitude, her face hot enough to have lit the room. “Do as you please. I am too cold to argue with your conscience, and too tired to admire it.”

The sun was still high when they stumbled into the outskirts of Estella. The Ebro River split the town north from south, and their road brought them up the southern path.

The muleteer stopped at the arrabal, before they had properly entered the town, and dropped their trunks. His mules were done; it was time for them to drink and rest, and they had paid for transport north through the plain, he said. He would take not one step more with their belongings unless Darcy paid him a princely fee to walk their trunk directly to wherever they meant to sleep.

Elizabeth tried haggling with him, but in the end, they were left standing in a sort of plaza, with perhaps fifty mules and their arrieros crowding about. No one wanted to stop loading or unloading their beasts to act the tour guide and lackey for two Ingles who did not know where they were trying to go and had no coins of the right denominations to pay.