Page 30 of Homeless

“Mrs Darcy.” She said the name as though it had come to her still wet. “I will not spend the next fortnight teaching myself to answer to a name I mean to put off again the moment we pass the Dover cliffs. It is hard enough to grow used to a name one means to keep. I do not propose to give you the entertainment of watching me struggle with that one.”

“Then what I am to call you? Miss Bennet? A man who calls his wife Miss Bennet across a public table announces her unmarried to every ear in the room.”

“Just so. Whereas I may go on calling you Mr Darcy ‘til Judgment and trouble no one — a piece of luck I have done nothing to earn, and shall enjoy without apology. You are left with the only name that hangs nobody. You should try it before your nerve goes.”

He held her eyes as his mouth shaped the word for the first time. “Elizabeth.”

It came more readily than it had any right to.

“There. You remembered what it was, after all. I fancied for a moment that you had forgot, or confused my name with one of my sisters.”

She moved to the washstand, poured water into the basin, and washed the dust from her hands. He turned away because decency required it and because decency, tonight of all nights, had become a profession requiring advanced skill. By the time he ventured to look again, she had dried them and was pulling the pins from her hair with brisk, spare movements that ought, by every rule of reason, to have signified nothing whatever to him.

Instead, they struck directly at the remains of his self-command.

He went at once to his own coat, removed it, and occupied himself with folding it more carefully than any coat had ever deserved.

“You need not stand with your back to me like a clergyman in a fit,” she said. “I am only taking down my hair, not committing a mortal sin.”

“I had not accused you of either.”

“No, but you look as if you are considering it.”

“It is caution, that is all.”

“Against what?”

That question, asked so lightly, was among the least merciful things she had ever done to him.

He laid his folded coat over the chair. “Against making an already difficult situation more difficult.”

She made a sort of huff which might have been agreement and might have been amusement. “Then we are allies. I have no wish to make it uglier than it is.”

Uglier.

He had thought, half an hour before, that nothing said inside this room could strike him more sharply than wife. Yet something in that word, and in the tired honesty with which she said it, found a place in him that wife had not. She was frightened enough to tell the truth now. Not all of it. But enough.

When he turned at last, her hair was fully down. The candle had caught in it where the darker chestnut gave way to threads of gold bleached by the Spanish sun. She was plaiting it quickly, without looking at him.

“Is there anything else to be settled?” she asked.

He looked about the room as though hoping some forgotten piece of furniture might arise and offer instruction. There was the chair. The bed. The truckle. The jug. The washstand. A pair of married people and no precedent worth the name. “No.”

“Then let us have the courage to become silent.”

She drew back the coverlet, got into the larger bed, and lay down with her back to the room — pressed to the far edge, a careful margin of empty mattress left between herself and the side nearest the truckle, the whole of her angled away as though she expected that at some hour of the dark a hand might cross it, and meant to be beyond reach when it did.

He paused before he put out the second candle.

All evening, he had been at pains to keep his hands to himself — to teach them, by main force, to want nothing they had no right to want. And the joke of it was that she had spent that same evening arranging her body against the very danger he had been so carefully removing. That she should lie there braced against him, as though his restraint were the one thing in the room not to be relied upon, displeased him out of all proportion.

“Are you afraid of me?”

She twisted slightly to glance in his direction. “You flatter yourself, Mr Darcy. You are not an easy man, and you take up a great deal of any room you stand in, but you are a long way from frightening. What frightened me tonight was a good deal more impressive than you.”

It was a fair hit, well aimed, and contradicted by every inch of the way she lay. A woman unafraid did not press herself to the wall and leave half the bed empty between them. He extinguished the candle.

The room altered at once. It no longer contained bed, chair, truckle, washstand. It contained breath, nearness, and every sound a human body was not designed to hear from another human body unless life had gone peculiarly astray.