Page 9 of Homeless

And there she was, against the tribunal wall in the broken shade, watching him.

Not a woman who resembled her. Not a trick of an English profile in a foreign crowd. Elizabeth Bennet herself, eight hundred miles from any ground on which he could account for her. Her eyes had found him with that old quickness, as though she had merely been waiting to see how long it would take him to notice.

For one moment, Tudela vanished — the heat, the stink, the clerks, all of it — and left only the fact of her under a Spanish sun, her gown grey with the road, her face thinner and a little more tanned than he remembered.

Then the square closed over her. A mule bolted, the crowd broke into shouting, a petitioner reeled across his path; and when the press thinned, she had already turned away on the arm of a tall gentleman, easily, without haste, as though the sight of him across a wine market had merited neither greeting nor flight.

He had not crossed to her. He had not so much as bowed. By the time the gap cleared, she was gone.

She would be Mrs Collins now.

He could have sworn an icy hand had just closed on his neck, and his stomach curdled. Two springs ago, Lady Catherine had complained, with some relish, that her clergyman had set his heart upon one of his Bennet cousins, been refused, and married the next younger sister in her place. The chief offence, to her ladyship, was that a man under her patronage should have contrived the business so clumsily. He ought to have had his first choice, but was apparently forced to settle for one less beautiful.

While she was still speaking, Darcy had left the room on a sudden personal urgency, because he could not listen longer. But he did not need to hear more. A man like Collins began at the top, with Miss Bennet. Her beauty would have been hoarded by her mother against a brilliant match, so she would have been permitted to refuse.

The sister taken in her place would be Elizabeth, who had wit instead of fortune and nothing to recommend her to caution but the entail she might keep in the family. Of course, it was Elizabeth. He had built two years of silence upon it. He had set his eyes on Lady Honoria because she was proper, amiable, accomplished, and because a man might at last grow tired of bleeding in secret over what could not be had. None of that altered because Tudela chose to produce Mrs Collins in a tribunal square.

Only the gentleman did not answer to the Collins of his imagining — small wonder, for Darcy had never once set eyes on the man.

Collins had come into Hertfordshire sometime after Darcy had quitted it, and by the time Darcy went to Rosings the next spring, Mr Bennet had died, and Collins was master of Longbourn. Perhaps he was not altogether a monster, but he could not be a rational man. Not if Lady Catherine valued him as one who took her advice.

Married to Collins. She would be mistress of Longbourn, a clergyman’s wife with a clergyman’s dull years stretched out before her—she, of all women born, who had refused to be dull for the length of a single evening. It was not to be borne.

But it did not have to be borne. It was simply true, and had been true for two years, and he had merely failed until this morning to have it thrust before his eyes.

“— so, unless you would rather present yourself cold at Pamplona, sir, I had better write to the officer tonight, over your name or the consul’s, whichever you —”

The words had been going on for some time. He came up into the middle of them with no notion how long Jennings had been at it, nor how much had already been decided while he stood in a Spanish street conducting a quarrel with a marriage two years old.

“Yes, do that,” he said, because it was safe, and then heard how little it answered.

Jennings had stopped. His eyes came to rest on Darcy for an instant, his face carefully blank. He had been caught out, then, and Jennings would sooner die than let it be seen.

“The name,” Darcy said. “You had better write down the name.”

“I have the name, sir. I have had it these five minutes. Shall we go on?”

“Indeed.”

They returned to the lodging house through streets crowded with carts, priests, discharged soldiers, and boys driving goats. Jennings said the commissioner was gone up to Pamplona now, by way of Calahorra and Estella, and any records would be with him; a week’s hard travel to stand in another anteroom and be told, very civilly, that the gentleman had just that morning been called away.

Darcy had heard the same sentence in four towns and had stopped being able to tell them apart. He bore it now as he bore the noise of the street: as one more thing between himself and an end he had begun to doubt existed, an accompaniment to his frustrated musings about Elizabeth Bennet already fixed beyond amendment.

The denizens of the lodging-house common room had the rough cheer of travellers too used to discomfort to mind it. Stew smoked in earthen bowls. Bread came to the table hard enough to use as building bricks. In the corner, a priest ate under a cracked saint, and two muleteers were quarrelling over a harness. Across the room, an English voice, stiff enough to sound affronted by nearly everything, was trying to make itself understood by some unlucky servant and getting nothing back but bewilderment. Elizabeth watched with a curiosity that was not entirely detached, and tried not to permit any more private musings on the voice’s owner.

Evening was when the midges were the worst, and Elizabeth had learnt in the first week to sit in the back of the room, near whatever fire was to be had, whether she wanted the heat or not. Her poor neck and hands were already a map of itching welts, and she would not confess to a soul alive how many had got up her skirts and made a meal of her thighs. Tonight, they had got lucky, and were in the warmest, driest part of the room, half-concealed by a post and mercifully unbothered by the pests. And, hopefully, unnoticed by that same English voice across the room.

Mr Gardiner, who had the enviable gift of becoming hungry in any climate, broke his bread and surveyed the room with placid interest. “If Señor Mendizábal charges me tomorrow for those casks as if they travelled under angelic protection, I shall deduct for every saint who plainly absented himself from the road.”

Elizabeth, whose spoon had made a dutiful progress through the stew without her appetite ever joining it, answered a moment too late. “You will ruin religion in Navarre.”

“I should be sorry to finish what the French have so nearly completed.” He looked up. “You have not heard a word I have said these last ten minutes.”

“I have heard every one. You mean to cheat Heaven upon an invoice and call it enterprise.”

“My dear Lizzy, Heaven is welcome to any advantage it can secure over merchants. It has bishops, kings, and public opinion already in its interest.”

She permitted a roll of her eyes and a smiling shake of her head before she returned her attention to the stew. Mr Gardiner became only the more attentive.