Page 20 of Homeless

“Then it will not cover it.” Her chin had come up. “You are ruined whichever way the thing falls, there is nothing to be got by staying, so you may as well take ship at Santander tomorrow and leave me to walk to the coast alone. Have I understood you?”

“No.”

“Then it would cover it.”

“It would cover it, and a great deal besides, and I will thank you —”

“How much besides?”

He turned away from her. He got as far as the window and stood there with his hand on the frame. Behind him, he heard her getting to her feet.

“My father did not make the loan out of sentiment,” he said. “He was told the Spanish would beat Bonaparte, and he believed it, and he wished to be on the right side of the war and to be paid for standing there. It was lent at interest. Under seal, upon security, at a rate that would have made him a very great deal richer than he was.”

“And the security?”

He did not answer.

“Mr Darcy, what did he set against it?”

“Everything,” he said, to the glass. “He set everything against it.”

Behind him, she made no reply, but when he turned round, her hands had come out from behind her and were shaking.

He had said too much. It could not be recalled, and there was no profit in looking at it, and he found that what he wanted, standing in that ruined room, was to have somebody else’s disaster to attend to for a quarter of an hour.

“What about your uncle?”

She lifted her head. “I have no idea.”

“Have you anybody in this country besides him? A correspondent, a house he traded with, a Spaniard who would answer for you?”

“There is Señor Herrera.” She said the name without any hope in it whatever. “My uncle was to have taken warehouse space from him by the river. They shook hands upon it yesterday.”

“Then Herrera has an interest in seeing him at liberty.”

“Herrera has an interest in not being seen to have shaken hands with a man the alcalde has arrested.” She got her hands folded around the bed post, as if it might keep her on her feet. “He will be at his own door by now, wondering how many people saw us come out of his counting-house. He will not know me tomorrow.”

“There is a consul at Santander.”

“Two hundred miles, and the last of them over mountains.” She had begun to move again, along the wall, away from the window. “And who is to escort me there? Suppose I arrived. What am I then? A woman at a strange door with a fantastical story.”

“You would be an Englishwoman in distress.”

“I should be an Englishwoman nobody could account for.”

He had no answer to that. She was looking at the floor as though there were something written on it.

“What do you mean to do?”

She was so long in answering that he thought she had not heard.

“Miss Bennet, what have you?”

She blinked and returned to reality. “I have four pounds and some shillings sewn into a petticoat, which is money my aunt gave me for emergencies, and which will not keep me a fortnight. I have no passport of my own; my name is written on my uncle’s, and my uncle’s papers are in the alcalde’s hands. I have a trunk of gowns that will fetch nothing, a bit of Portuguese that everyone here mistakes for Galician, and the goodwill of a kitchen maid of sixteen. Everything else in this house that belonged to us has been carried off in a cart.”

“Your uncle’s man of business —”

“In London. Seven weeks by post, if the post ran, and it does not. There is nobody in Spain who knows my name. There is nobody in England who knows I need them.”