Page 110 of Homeless

This was the sort of establishment Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pemberley would frequent. Lest she dare forget the name and nature of the man, the large Spanish hotel stood ready to remind her.

He had asked for a room with a view of the harbour, and been granted private apartments, with two connected bed chambers and a well-appointed sitting room. The floor was gleaming chestnut, the bedstead was intricate wrought iron with gilt petals worked into its design. There was even a chest of drawers made of finest mahogany, and she had but one soiled gown to put in it.

All this, and this room was hers alone. Darcy had his own room, on the opposite side of the sitting room, and he had gone there at once as soon as the maid had showed them up. Elizabeth stood mutely at her own window, tears standing dead and drying in her eyes as she stared out at the harbour.

Sometime later, and it must have been a considerable amount of time, she heard his step behind her at the door. She braced herself with a long breath that quavered more than it should have before she turned round.

He looked like a different man. He must have hired the services of some valet or other connected to the house to groom him. Gone was the half-inch long stubble that had hidden his bruised jaw and gently scratched the back of her neck on so many cold nights. His hair had been trimmed to decent order, and the sun-bleached curls that had begun to fray about his face were now combed down with rosewater and pomade into the reflection she remembered meeting in Hertfordshire. Even his tattered coat had been brushed into some measure of respectability, a new shirt procured from somewhere, and his cravat tied more neatly than she had ever seen him manage.

She refused to glance down at her own attire, but the mirror across the room betrayed her, and she compared it, nonetheless. Beside him, she looked like the foundling she was.

“You should rest,” he said. “I mean to go and ask after sailings and the tides. There is no sense in both of us —”

“Yes,” she said. “Go. I am well enough.”

“I asked after a lady’s maid for you. You need but ring, and they will draw a bath, take your gowns to be cleaned, bring something for you to eat, and anything else you require.”

She forced her lips to do something that looked pleasant. “Very kind of you.”

“It is not kindness, it…” He broke off with a sigh. “We can afford for you to be comfortable, Elizabeth. You need not… Well. See that you ask for whatever you wish.”

What she wished? That was not a thing she could ask for, but she nodded vaguely and tried not to let her eyes stray to her reflection in the mirror, six feet from him.

He remained for another moment, his finger ticking along the seam of his trousers. Abruptly, he drew a breath and pulled a pair of gloves from the pocket of his coat. Heaven only knew where he had got them, but they did the work of hiding his calloused hands from the world. “I will not be long.”

“Take as long as you need.” She heard how it sounded the instant it left her — stay away as long as you like. She would not have retracted it if she could have.

The door shut behind him, and she stood alone in the good, warm room she had dreamed of for two months. A solid roof, a locked door, a soft feather bed, and the whole of it to herself.

She ought to call for hot water and bathe, as he had done. That would have been the civilised thing to do — wash the road from her, every stinking mile of it. Let a hired girl rinse and plait and style her hair for her, let another hired girl clean her gown and her linens to wash out every stain, every sweat mark, and mend every rip. And let someone else bring her tea — real tea, hot and dark, with rich cream and just a hint of honey in it, and something sweet to eat beside it.

But just now, all she could manage were tears, and the pillow looked like a willing confidante.

XLIII

Trappings

He got out of the room as quickly as decency allowed.

Darcy did not trouble to dress that shameful truth up as he went down the stair and out into the afternoon: he was fleeing his own wife. It was more than he could command of himself, standing in those sumptuous rooms with her, seeing the soft bed behind her, the salt already drying in the corners of her eyes that she would have denied with her dying breath.

Any decent and proper husband would have found a way to get his wife in his arms and kiss those tear stains away. Found a way to show her that the fear, the privation, the hardships were behind them, and yet they were the same two people, now able to enjoy the desserts of survival. But there had been something in her eyes from the moment she took in that hotel that terrified him. A staring, an incredulous tremble, a sidestep away from anyone who cast a glance her way as if she were afraid she would soil them by breathing the same air.

And that was not the Elizabeth he had married. Not the clear-eyed woman who took charge of him in a ruined church and seized his name by her boldness. Not even the quick, laughing creature who had bewitched him in Hertfordshire… God, was it nearly three years ago, now? A lifetime.

So, he had fled. He had invented the errand of the tides half out of genuine need and half to have somewhere to be that was not there, and she had agreed too readily, which told him she wanted him gone as much as he wanted to go.

The harbour, at least, did not require anything of him but to walk about it and ask questions.

He asked them badly, in the handful of Spanish words he knew, mingled with some Portuguese he had picked up from Elizabeth — half of it not decent for respectable conversation — and the French he had learnt as a boy. He was directed from one man to another down the length of the quays — to a ship's agent, to a chandler, to a weathered master mending net who spat and shook his head.

The answers, once he assembled them, were not what he wanted. There was no good passage to be had, not soon. The English-bound ships in the harbour were half of them not sailing this fortnight — loading still, or waiting on cargo, or waiting on a crew, or waiting, as one man put it with a jerk of his chin at the grey chop beyond the mole, on the wind, which had been sitting foul in the west for three days and showed no sign of shifting. A gentleman wanting a decent passage for himself and his lady, and not a berth on a filthy coaster among the hides and the bilge, might wait a week. Might wait two. The sea kept its own calendar, and no Englishman's need for haste would move it.

Darcy stood on the quay with the old helpless fury rising in him — the same fury he had stood in on a Portsmouth dock in the spring, a lifetime ago, waiting on a wind to carry him to a Spain he had not yet learned to dread. Since then, he had crossed a country twice and buried himself half in the ground and clawed back out, and here at the end of it was the same grey water and the same foul wind and the same unsatisfactory news: wait.

He was still simmering in his frustration, biting it back before it turned to wrath, when a voice said, at his shoulder —

“I know that face. Don't tell me. I know it —” The voice grew incredulous. “— Good God. Darcy? Darcy, of Pemberley?”