Page 17 of Homeless

“No.”

That should have reassured him. It did not.

“What happened?”

“They have taken my uncle.” Her voice was not her own; it came out flat and rapid, as though she were reciting an inventory. “Soldiers came into the house and turned it over and took him away up the street. They took the strongbox, and his letters, and every coin in the place. And there was an Englishman — the man who was with you yesterday — he came through the kitchen at a run with a valise under his arm and papers falling out of it, and he went into the yard. I do not know whether he was stealing them or saving them. I could not tell. He did not stop.”

Darcy heard almost none of it.

“Your… uncle?”

She stared at him as if he were deaf. “Yes, Mr Gardiner. My uncle.” She had begun to shake and did not appear to know it. “He has done nothing wrong. He was telling them his own name as they took him out of that door, as though it were a thing worth anything at all in this country —”

“Your uncle.” He could not get past the word. “You were travelling with your uncle?”

She shook her head. “Who else should I be travelling with? My father is gone, and —”

“But where is Mr Collins?”

He hated the question as it left him — the name in his mouth, the need of the answer — and wanted only to have it and be done.

She looked at him as though he had asked after the weather on the moon. “Mr Collins?”

“Yes. Your husband.” Impatience sharpened it; he wanted the thing confirmed and finished. “Was he among them? Was that not him I saw with you yesterday?”

For a moment, she only stared, as though one of them had gone mad and she had not yet settled which. “I have no husband, and Mr Collins is in Kent, married to my sister Mary. Unless he has lately developed a taste for Spanish prisons, he is nowhere near Tudela.”

The correction struck him with such violence that he almost forgot the wrecked room around them.

Not married.

Not Collins’s wife.

Two years of resignation, all built upon Lady Catherine’s ponderous ambiguity and his own cowardly willingness to accept it, gave way so suddenly that for one dizzy instant, he could not have said whether the floor had shifted or only his understanding of the world.

“Then who —” He stopped, began again. “Who was taken?”

She sighed. “My uncle. Mr Gardiner, as I have said three times now.”

The name reached him faintly and lodged there, half-known. Gardiner — an uncle in trade, he thought; a warehouse, a street he had never had cause to learn, a connexion the Bingley sisters had once made sport of. He had not troubled to keep it then, and could not quite lay hold of it now, for the greater part of his mind was still labouring over a certainty more than two years in the building that had come down in a single breath.

“And Jennings?”

“I assume you mean your man? I already told you, he ran. I saw him bolt the moment the passage opened — out through the kitchen and into the yard with his arms full, and not a glimpse of him since. Whether the soldiers took him, or he is halfway to the coast with his neck unmarked, I am in no position to say.”

His body went cold. “My valise… all of it…”

Then he turned and braced his hand against the door frame as if the house were rocking. “He has the strong box. He carried it himself; he always carried it himself. The letters of credit, and the draft on Ferreira, the pistol and my father’s papers —” His head went back. “God in heaven. And the claim. The claim was in the black case, and the black case was in the strong box, and he has walked out of Spain with everything I came here to save.”

“Mr Darcy, I ”

“I paid him a year in advance.” He said it as if she had contradicted him. “In London, before we sailed. A year, and his passage home. I made a point of it. But I abused him on the steps today, and he —”

Then he did turn, and looked at her — actually at her, at the flour on her sleeve and the cap crushed in her fist and the way she had not let go of the chair, and the whole recital went out of him at once.

Elizabeth’s patience, never deep, had gone entirely. “I am not sure what you would have had me do about it. I was not set to keep watch over your property. They have taken my uncle, and I could not so much as speak while they did it. You will forgive me if that occupied me rather more than your purse.”

“Forgive me.” He shut his eyes for one moment.