Page 12 of Homeless

“He refused us yesterday,” he added.

“He did, sir. But a thing refused once is not always refused twice.”

It was, in Darcy’s experience, refused rather more dependably the second time, but he did not bother reporting that.

“There was an English party breaking their fast below, not half an hour ago,” he went on. “A merchant and a lady, come from London, by the talk. I have seen the man twice with Herrera, the wine factor, and the alcalde’s clerk took his paper without leaving him to stand in the road. Where we are told to come back tomorrow, this merchant is asked to dinner.”

“Not a merchant. A gentleman, Jennings. Whatever his errand, he is no tradesman.”

Why it should matter, he could not have said, only that it did, and out of all proportion. A clergyman with a living in Kent, a Bennet wife, and a Longbourn inheritance did not turn wine-dealer in Navarre. If the man was abroad at all, he was abroad as Darcy was — on some business with this government, and the better received for being nobody to whom it owed money.

Beneath that ran a colder notion — that Lady Catherine, who never let a useful man sit idle, might have dispatched her parson to Spain herself, with some grievance of her own to press before this government. The idea would not survive a moment’s scrutiny. He kept it regardless. It gave the resentment somewhere to stand.

“Gentleman or merchant, sir, his door opens, and ours stays shut. And the lady does his asking in the shops. I make myself understood here; she makes herself welcome, which is worth a good deal more in this country.”

Darcy raised his head. “The lady has the language?”

“Better than I speak for you, sir.”

That was precisely the wrong detail. Darcy had a sudden rush of memory, images, a voice that had left all too familiar of an impression on his mind. Not once had he ever heard her mention Spanish among her accomplishments. But then, if memory served, she was not the lady trying to boast of her accomplishments back when he knew her.

“If our own door stays shut,” Jennings finished, “perhaps theirs might be borrowed. You might consider introducing yourself, sir.”

“We will borrow nothing. My claim stands on its own.”

“As you say, sir.” Jennings took up his hat.

“I pray your Spanish is equal to it. Mine would start a war between Navarre and Derbyshire.”

“Yes, sir. Your Spanish is not reliable.” He said it as another man might remark that it looked like rain, and let himself out.

The laugh came once more through the wall. Darcy took up his coat and quitted the inn rather than be required to hear it a third time.

He had been walking long enough to become uncertain whether the town had altered under him or whether it was only his own senses that had gone awry.

Carts wedged in the narrow streets, children bolting under wheels that ought to have killed them, a cooper somewhere hammering at a hoop. He had bought a cup of wine from a stall where the seller looked too bored to cheat him, drunk it, walked, and bought another. Neither had done anything for him but make him more willing to be miserable in public.

The morning’s business had gone as the last had gone. The clerk was not at his desk; the clerk would return within the hour; the hour had come and the clerk had not; and when at length some under-official consented to receive them, it was to explain that the matter could not proceed without the stamp, and the stamp could not be had in Tudela, and he was desolated beyond expression.

The ill-judged oath he had flung at Jennings was still in his mouth, sour as the wine. He had not even the excuse of meaning it. Spain had failed them and Jennings had been standing there, not at fault, holding the useless papers, and Darcy had turned his epithets on the nearest face because it was the only one that would not answer back. And then, sooner than unsay it, had told the man to go back alone.

Now, the wine sat poorly on an empty stomach. It had not rendered him insensible. It had merely loosened the order of his thoughts and left his disgust with himself more candid than before. Pride, jealousy, exhaustion, old shame, the new sharp misery of seeing her, near enough to breathe through the wall — all had gone walking with him, and none had grown quieter for the exercise.

If he had possessed the smallest remnant of wisdom, he would have gone back and made his peace with Jennings. A man who intended to repair his fortunes ought not to be found straying half-drunk through Navarre because a woman had laughed too near him.

Instead, he had crossed the square, and then another, and gone down toward the river. He stood a while, watching the Ebro tumble past the broken stone. Then he went on again. Bought yet another cup of wine somewhere. And somewhere between one street and the next, he began to hate not just his circumstances, but the whole wretched snarl of his life. Lady Honoria. Pemberley. Georgiana's portion. Money he did not have. Spanish delay. Lady Catherine and her certainties.

And Elizabeth in the next room, married and unattainable, and still apparently capable of reducing him to idiocy without once addressing him.

He came round into the inn’s street still arguing his life over in his head, and the argument stopped in his mouth.

People were crowding at the door—a carter reined in to gape, neighbours pressed close and talking over one another, the landlady on the step with her hands going and nothing sensible coming out of her, and above her a shutter wrenched half off its hinge and hanging into the air.

He was across the street before he knew he had moved.

He stopped dead.

For one fraction of a second, his mind produced Jennings, papers, money, his own trunk, the treasury documents. Then something lower and swifter than thought seized hold of him.