Page 18 of Homeless

When he opened them again, she was watching him with impatience sharpened by fear. “Why are you dressed like that?”

She glanced once at the flour on her sleeve. “Because my uncle and the lodging-house servant girl between them possessed more practical wisdom than most ministries. They pushed me into the kitchen and disguised me as help. Pilar saved the rest by crying on command and frightening armed men with the prospect of female inconvenience.”

As if invoked, a muffled sob came from behind the door she had shut. He looked towards it.

“Pilar is sixteen,” said Elizabeth. “She works here, and she is terrified. If you roar about the passage like a bull in a chapel, you will finish what the officers began.”

“If I had been here —”

“You would have been taken too, unless you had chosen flight over English pride. That would not free my uncle. It would merely give Vega a richer Englishman to hold.”

He ought to have answered her wit with something tart of his own, but the morning had left him too stripped for it. The paper nearest his boot was a docket sheet in Jennings’s hand, ruled and totalled and trodden through the middle. He picked it up. There was another under the settle, and two more against the hearth, and one that had gone into the wine and would never be anything again. He gathered them as he went, holding them against his chest with his forearm like kindling.

“Where is the girl?”

“In the kitchen.” Elizabeth had not moved from the chair. “She will not come out.”

He went through into the kitchen, still finding papers. Pilar was sitting on the flagstones with her back against the cold end of the hearth and the pans down all round her, and when his shadow crossed the doorway, she made a sound and got her arms up over her head.

Darcy stopped where he was. “Tell her that the soldiers are gone up the lane. Tell her nobody in this house is going to touch her.”

Elizabeth came past him and knelt down in the mess of pans and spoke to her. Pilar took hold of two fistfuls of her skirt and would not let go. There was blood dried at the girl’s hairline where somebody had put her into the shelf. Darcy set the papers on the table, poured water into a bowl from the jug, found a cloth that was clean enough, and put both down within Elizabeth’s reach. Then he stood back out of the way, because he could not say one word to the girl that would do her any good.

The landlady was in the yard passage with her apron over her face. A boy of eleven or twelve, who belonged to somebody, was standing on the stairs looking through the broken shutter. In the room above the common room, an older Dutch gentleman had been robbed of his watch and his son and wished, at considerable length, to lament the affair.

Nobody was dead, or even seriously injured. It took a quarter of an hour to establish, and when it was done, Darcy came back through the passage and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen.

Elizabeth was still on the flagstones with Pilar’s head in her lap and her hand moving slowly over the girl’s hair. She had not put her cap back on, and the flour was still down the whole length of her sleeve.

“I will bolt the street door. And the yard. Nobody will come in.”

She looked up at him without any expression whatever.

“You are safe where you are. Stay with her.”

Then he went and bolted both doors, and stood a moment in the passage with his hand still on the bar. He was holding a quantity of paper against his chest with his other forearm, and had been holding it for a quarter of an hour, and that perhaps a third of it was worth the carrying.

He went up the stairs to learn what had become of him.

VIII

Bloody Close to Ruined

He had got the door open and the trunk in view — the lid up, the shirts flung out, the writing case gone — before he understood that she had come up behind him and was standing in the passage.

It struck him as strange, until he thought on it for half a second. Every other face in this building spoke a language that had been shouted at her by armed men an hour ago, and he was English, and known to her, however little either of them had pursued the acquaintance. Anyone would rather be frightened near a familiar man than alone among strangers. He only glanced at her, then returned his attention to the ruin of his room.

The trunk had been gone through, and gone through by men in a hurry. The plate was gone. The loose coin was gone. His good coat had been thrown across the room, and one boot with it. The other boot was still where it had been, on its side, half under the bed.

The pistol was gone. So was the dagger Darcy had kept for utmost need, and he had been a fool not to have both on his person.

Darcy went to his knees, took the trunk by the near corner, and dragged it out from the wall.

He put his thumbnail into the seam at the base of the trunk and lifted, and the false bottom came up as it was meant to. The money belt was still lying in it, and the oilcloth packet was lying under the belt.

“Not entirely,” he murmured. “Not entirely ruined. But bloody close to it.”

He drew it out and let it hang from his fist — a long girdle of stitched leather, sweat-dark on the inner face, made to be worn under the shirt where no cutpurse could reach it. The weight of it dragged his wrist down and swung, and the coins jangled against one another with a low knocking. Spanish gold. He had been careful to change it in Portsmouth, and had congratulated himself on the prudence. It did him no good whatever now, for a doubloon laid on a table for bread in a village of ninety souls would be talked of in three parishes by dark and followed out of town by morning.