Page 21 of Homeless

“There must be some means of recovering your uncle.”

“Pilar says they have taken him to the town gaol. Not for any crime, but to hold him until they can make better use of him. These men mean to be paid, or petitioned, or overruled, and I cannot do any of those things.”

“You can go to the gate and ask.”

“With what? A clerk will come out to me and be perfectly civil. He will ask whose I am, and I will have no good answer to give. I may stand in that street until Michaelmas, and no one will hear me.”

“Then somebody must go for you.”

“Yourself, I suppose?” She let go of the post. “You have already offended every clerk in Tudela in Spanish so bad, there ought to be a law against it. Have you any notion how long a man may go on doing that in a country where every second house has buried somebody? You have no translator and very little tact. You cannot ask directions of a muleteer without being cheated, you are on no record locally which would make it inconvenient to wrong you, and you are a man whose very manner pronounces how much he is worth back in England. Sir, you will be in a cell beside my uncle by the end of the day, and you will not know what they have charged you with, and there will be nobody left to ask.”

He drew himself up. “You are speaking to me with a very great deal of freedom.”

“I have very little left to lose by it, and I am not wrong. You have been in the square and let a whole town listen to you argue about a large sum of money. What do you suppose they saw? A gentleman in a good coat with a seal on his hand, in a country where every man who fought has gone home to nothing. You are not a person to them, Mr Darcy. You are a sum. And a sum that travels alone, and speaks to nobody, and is not expected anywhere by anybody, is a very tempting sum, indeed.”

“Then by all means, let us have your remedy!” He stalked closer to her. “I am to sit in this house until the money runs out, is that it? Or perhaps I am to be led about Navarre by a lady with four pounds in her petticoat, and be very silent, and be grateful? You have described my situation with great accuracy. You have not proposed anything whatever.”

“I have not finished.”

“You have been at it a quarter of an hour.”

“Because you have interrupted me at every turn!” She put her hand over her mouth, and took it away. “Forgive me. I am not accustomed to being frightened.”

“It is not a sentiment with which I am overly acquainted, either.”

She frowned faintly and crossed her arms. “There is one thing that grant me respectable access to the gaol, and would make you a man this country cannot make disappear without somebody writing it down.”

“I fail to understand you. You are asking for my protection?”

“I am asking for your name.”

For the length of a heartbeat, he was a fool in a wine market again, and everything he had spent two years burying came up his throat at once — she had said his name, three feet from him, in a room with a bed in it —

“Miss Bennet.” His own voice had gone somewhere he did not recognise. “You are speaking madness.”

“It is the only thing that makes sense.”

Heat rushed into his face. “But you cannot suppose that I would stake my name to such a —”

“Stake? Oh, that does sound so very irrevocable No, I mean only to borrow it. By the church door.”

IX

Your Name Will Do

“You propose marriage?”

“I propose terms on which two stranded English people may stop being separately useless.”

He crossed his arms. “What terms?”

“Vega can be bribed, or stalled, or leaned upon, or shamed. Which of the four, I do not know yet, and I shall not find out from a kitchen, in another woman’s apron. When my uncle’s case is laid before whatever office will hear it, it would come from Mrs Darcy of Pemberley, and not from a woman with no name worth reading twice.”

He narrowed his eyes, tapping one finger on the opposite sleeve. Married to Elizabeth Bennet… “You realise what you are saying,” he asked cautiously.

Her features paled for the first time since the kitchen. “I… I have not worked out the whole of it. I know that apart, we are both finished.”

Mrs Darcy. She could be his… the object of far too many of his fascinations, after two years of silence raised over the wrong woman entirely. And Elizabeth Bennet was standing in the wreck of his chamber, laying out a marriage as plainly as an engineer laid out a bridge.