Page 37 of Homeless

“You have already decided where it is to take us.”

“Have I?”

“You have had it decided since your uncle told you not to.” He had turned from the cart, and was now looking at her. “You do not intend to go to the coast.”

“Do you?”

He swallowed, and his gaze grew unfocused.

“There will be a ship at Santander,” she went on, before he thought of whatever protest he had behind his tongue, “with room enough for two English travellers who have had the good sense to give Spain up as a bad business. My uncle told me very clearly what I ought to do — take the passage, and leave his affairs to London agents who have done this before. It is the sensible thing. It may even be the right thing. And you have not once, in the last quarter hour, told me we ought to do it.”

“Neither have you.”

“I asked you first.”

He was quiet for a moment. “If I take ship at Santander,” he said at last, “I go home to England with a bond I cannot enforce and a mortgage I cannot pay, and I am ruined before the leaves turn. Everything I came eight hundred miles for is inland, behind us, up that road. The coast is the one direction I cannot afford.”

“So, you mean to go north?”

He slanted her a knowing look. “So, I expect, do you.”

“Well, then, we are a sorry, defiant, and possibly ignorant pair. We want the same road for reasons that have nothing to do with one another, and both of us are about to disoblige the only man who gave us sensible advice all day.”

Darcy looked at the tired carter, the open trunks, the whole shabby apparatus of their going on. “I think your uncle entirely right, Miss Bennet. And I mean to disregard him completely.”

“Then we are agreed,” said Elizabeth, “which alarms me more than the alternative did.”

The room still held very nearly everything they owned in the world scattered across its surfaces. Darcy had allowed himself, that morning, the fond delusion that packing would be a matter of minutes. He had not yet accounted for the fact that he would be doing it in a space eleven feet square, in company with a woman who moved through it on a different set of orbits entirely, so that the two of them spent the first of those minutes performing something between a country dance and a collision.

He reached for the valise. She had reached for it at the same instant, and their hands arrived together on the strap, and both withdrew as though it had grown hot.

“Take it,” he said.

“I had every intention.” She reached quickly and snatched it out of his way as if she thought he might bite.

He turned to the washstand for his razor and shaving things, and found her already there, sweeping his brushes into a roll. He moved to the left to give her room. She stepped aside at the same moment for the same reason, into him. He put out a hand to steady her and got a fistful of shawl, and they disentangled with as much speed as horror.

“Be my guest. I will collect the papers,” he said, retreating to the table, which at least could be relied upon to hold still.

He went down on one knee to gather the inventory that had slid beneath it — Jennings’s hand, mercifully legible, itemising everything now in a cart bound the wrong way up the country — and was in that undignified posture, half under the table with his coat rucked to his ears, when he became aware that she had stopped to observe him.

“Pray do not let me hurry you,” she said. “I find the view instructive. I had wondered how a gentleman of your consequence contrived to bend at all.”

“With difficulty, and without an audience, by preference.”

“Then I shall deprive myself of it.” She did not move an inch.

He came up with the inventory, his colour higher than the exertion accounted for, and put the table between them again, because the table was the only ally he had left in Navarre.

The thing acquired a rhythm at last, a wary choreography of reach-and-yield, until between them, the room had emptied into the valise and the two trunks, and there remained only the London memorandum still left on the table.

She picked it up to pack it.

He should have taken it from her. He was a half second too slow, and a half second was all the woman ever seemed to require, for by the time his hand moved, she had turned it over and her eyes had gone to the foot of the page, where his solicitor, in a clerk’s tidy indifferent hand, had set down the sum.

The whole momentum of her stopped, like a mill when the race is shut.

“That is the figure?” She read it aloud herself, quietly, as if to be certain the paper had not misled her. “One hundred thousand pounds?”