Page 109 of Homeless

She saw the masts before she saw the docks and the shore — a thicket of them above the roofs, rocking gently, rigging crossed against the pale sky. Then the road bent, and there was the harbour itself, grey and glittering and busy, crowded with vessels of every size, fishing boats and coasters and, out toward the deeper water, the larger ships, the ones that crossed to England. She gazed at them, and something cracked open in her chest that she had kept carefully shut for two months, and had to look away before it undid her.

There were English voices in the crowd.

After so long of surviving and carrying on in her mangled Spanish that began as scattered Portuguese, the sound of her own tongue spoken carelessly by strangers — a sailor cursing, a merchant haggling, two officers laughing over something — warmed her like a kindly hand on her shoulder. Santander was a port that did business with England; naturally, there were English here. She had known it in the abstract. Hearing it was different. It meant they were nearly out.

Two days ago, they would have been awed together. He would have taken her hand, kissed and squeezed it in triumph. She would have pointed out the ships, or the English voices, or the fish woman's extraordinary hat. Now, neither of them remarked on a thing. He walked silently beside the mule, his eyes on his feet more than the port, and they moved through the city side by side and separate, each walled in their own misery.

Her eyes were still swollen. She had wept most of the night and slept little, and she knew she looked it, but she did not care except that she disliked strangers seeing it. Darcy looked no better — the bruises going yellow-green now, the split lip healing badly, and under the marks of the mountain, a pallor that sat on him like a second sickness.

A little sob took her throat, and she fixed her eyes on the sea. She had dreamed of it for weeks. She looked at it now, and mostly wanted to sit down somewhere and cry.

The port authority stopped them where the street gave onto the quays — a sharply dressed official at a table under an awning, with a soldier or two lounging nearby, checking the papers of those who looked as though they meant to leave rather than merely to sell fish. It was nothing like the checkpoints of the interior. There was no menace in it, no ravages of war in the man's face, only the officiousness of a functionary in a busy port with too many travellers and too little interest in any of them. He held out his hand without looking up.

Darcy gave over the salvoconducto, and Elizabeth produced her certificate — the marriage lines, creased and stained and softened almost to cloth with handling, the single paper that said who she was, the thing she had traded her previous life to obtain. She handed it over now to a man who glanced at it for perhaps three seconds and handed it back. He made a mark in a ledger and waved them through with the back of his hand.

That was all. After everything — after the raid at Tudela, and the gaol and the checkpoints where a wrong word meant a cell, after the riot in a money changer’s office and Darcy’s injury on the barge, both of them nearly dying of the fever and losing almost everything they had on the pass, the last official act of Spain upon them was a bored man's hand waving them toward the sea.

“We are through,” Darcy said. The first words he had spoken to her in an hour.

All she could do was blink the sting of the sea from her eyes.

The house of business stood in a street behind the customs office, a solid stone building with a brass plate gone green from the salt air, and Darcy stood before its clerk feeling like a beggar.

He had not seen his own reflection in some weeks, and did not need to now. He knew what the clerk saw — a tall Englishman in a coat that was a long way from presentable, unshaven since Burgos, his face still marked from the beating on the pass, his boots gone through, his hands — he looked at them — a laborer's hands now, cracked and blunt-nailed. It was a wonder Elizabeth had ever let him put those hands on her at all.

The clerk looked as though he meant to have Darcy escorted from the office until he laid his letters of credit on the counter.

That was the strange power of paper. He had carried it since May, worth a fortune and not a mouthful, useless on a mountain to men who could not read it, and here, on this counter, in this stone room, under this clerk's suddenly attentive eye, it became what it had always secretly been. The clerk read the names, the sums, and the seals of the London house that stood behind them, and his whole manner shifted by degrees from suspicion to something approaching deference. He went to fetch a senior man, who read the papers again and looked at Darcy with new eyes and offered him a chair.

They brought it out to him. After all of it — after counting coins by candlelight in Estella, after they bled away real by real, after watching Elizabeth sew their last pennies into her hem and guard them like a dragon, a man in a clean coat counted good English-backed coin onto a polished table and asked, deferentially, whether the sum was sufficient or whether Mr Darcy required more.

It should have felt like triumph. It felt like almost nothing. He did not even have a purse to put it in, so he took the money, thanked the man, and walked out into the street with more in his pockets than they had held since Tudela.

The first notion to come to him was that he could buy Elizabeth a proper dinner and a proper bed and hot water to make herself feel human again.

The second, hard on its heels, was that none of it would buy back the thing he had lost on a wet mountainside last night. Or, rather, the thing he never truly had.

They had survived on nothing together. They had been closer with two coins and a heel of bread than they were now, with his pockets full and his letters honoured and every material want in the world suddenly answerable. The money had come back, but at such a price! Out on the road, there had been only the two of them against the whole of Spain, and now Spain was beaten and behind them, and there was nothing left to stand against together. She would leave him the moment their feet touched English soil again, and no amount of good coin on a polished table could do the smallest thing about that.

The mule, they sold to a cheerful young carter near the quays. That was a loss that struck harder at him than he ever could have accounted for. He had spent his life riding thoroughbreds, driving matched carriage horses, even breeding a handful of racing horses. This humble creature, with his oversized ears, Roman nose, and obnoxious braying whenever he was hungry, hardly counted as a steed.

But he had been Elizabeth's mule, the steady, patient beast that had carried them off the pass and down the long green valleys and had asked nothing but its feed, an affectionate pat or two, and given no trouble the whole, hard way. The carter looked him over with a professional hand — felt his legs, looked in his mouth, watched him move, and pronounced him sound, which he was. He was hale and well and better fed, if anything, than either of his owners. He stood now in the carter's yard in the sun, ears working, coat glossy from the nights Darcy and Elizabeth had bought less food for themselves so he would be strong enough to carry them. He was worth good money. Darcy named a price, the carter met most of it, and that ought to have been the end of it.

Elizabeth had come to see it done. He had thought she meant to make sure they were not cheated, but she did not haggle at all. She stood at the mule's head with her hand on his nose, and when the price was struck she said to the carter — who plainly thought her mad — that the animal had come a very long and very hard way, and had been a very good creature, and would he be so kind as to let it rest some days before he put it back to work. It had earned a rest. It had earned, she said, more than she could say.

The carter, bemused, agreed to whatever the strange, thin Englishwoman wanted. Darcy watched his wife stand a moment longer with her hand on the mule's face, saying something too low for him to hear, and then step back and turn away quickly with her jaw set.

“It is only a mule,” she said, to no one, walking off.

Twice, he saw her swiping at her cheek as he followed her.

The apartment was clean, dry, and it did not bear one sign of rodents.

There was a real bed with more pillows than anyone could possibly want, a real coverlet and clean linen. There was a washstand with a jug and a basin and a towel, and even a bit of lavender water for good taste. There was a window that looked down on the harbour, and a fire laid ready in the grate, and a door that shut with a key.

And she would have given it back in an instant to be sleeping in a ditch with his arms around her, the way they had been before she ruined it.

They had not spoken to each other directly since the checkpoint. She knew only that he now carried an obscene amount of money in his threadbare pockets, and that he had asked after and been directed to the finest fonda to be had in the city. And when he led her up to the face of it, she had gazed up… and up… and her mouth had gone a little dry.