Page 45 of Homeless

Elizabeth smiled with a brightness which, in Hertfordshire, would only have foretold mischief. “My husband is already out of temper,” she said in a combination of Portuguese and Spanish, “which will be inconvenient for you if we are kept standing here. Captain Llorente entered a foreign prisoner under a blue-sealed order. We want the folio and the destination, nothing more. You can be quick and earn our thanks in coin, or you can be slow, and I do not think you would like my husband when he is impatient. He is rather a bother.”

The clerk blinked.

Darcy set down a coin. The clerk frowned, and then, after a few moments, a folio appeared.

Elizabeth bent over it. Darcy leaned in until his sleeve brushed hers, and she put a deliberate inch between them before she read.

There it was, at last. Edward Gardiner, inglés, corresponsal comercial. Taken with papers, trunks, and effects. Held for examination under the emergency revenue powers. Transferred the same day, under auxiliary warrant, to the keeping of Don Mateo Ibarra, contractor for the transport and safe holding of persons and seized goods worth the recovering.

Worth the recovering.

Not to be made an example of. Not to be disposed of. Kept — because a live man could be sold back, and a dead one could not. That much, at least, was a relief. The confirmation she needed to breathe a little. So long as he was worth something, he would be well cared for. Or at least, not starved and beaten.

Beneath the entry, in another hand, she read: “To be moved on when the bond is answered.”

“These men mean to ransom him,” she said in English, too low for anyone but Darcy.

He turned his head sharply. “We already knew that.”

“But they will not release him cleanly,” she whispered. “This does not say that he will be returned. It says he will be moved on.”

His eyes narrowed, and he lowered his face closer to her ear. “As in Bilbao, perhaps? An exchange at the port?

She shook her head faintly, glancing at the clerk, who was already starting to draw the paper from her grasp. “It does not say, but I think they mean to bleed him by instalments,” she murmured. “Keep moving him as long as they can get money for him. Not kill him, not at once, but…”

“Elizabeth,” he whispered, pulling her aside so the clerk could not overhear, “that is only one interpretation. Like as not, they will have the money and the letter from his agents in London and the consul, and they will send him home as soon as they are satisfied.”

“And what power do his agents have here?” she hissed back. “What is to stop them from just keeping him until they have got everything that the London house appears willing to send, and then…”

“Do not allow yourself to fancy it. Men with value do not end up buried. Their own greed would prevent it, for if they were in the habit of bleeding men dry until they paid off their own expiration, eventually their demands would start falling on deaf ears. They want to be paid for the next man they take, and the next.”

“But who knows where —”

“Ask him.”

She stopped and stared. Darcy gestured, rather impatiently, and she stepped back to the desk, feeling somewhat less impertinent than before. “Ibarra. O contratante — el… el hombre de los presos. ¿Para onde? Dónde los lleva, os homens?”

“The men, where does he take the men?”

The clerk drew a long sigh and glanced over her shoulder at two impatient men behind her, each trying to push their way to the fore until they encountered Darcy’s stern glare.

“Por favor,” Elizabeth added.

The clerk pointed at the document and began rattling off a series of names and words that Elizabeth had to strain to catch.

Llorente had taken custody of Gardiner from Vega in Tudela and brought Gardiner into Calahorra. Ibarra had taken charge before midday and pushed him onward the same hour, bound north toward Bilbao. North of here, the coast belonged to the king’s returning regiments, and a foreign couple chasing a prisoner into that traffic would soon be detained beside him.

And that was all the clerk was willing to say. He motioned for the next petitioner to step up, waving Elizabeth away. She remained there, still trying to talk, until Darcy dragged her off by the elbow.

She let him pull her a few steps, then snatched her arm back. “I had not yet done!”

“You learned all he was planning on telling you. I would prefer if you did not put me in a position to be manacled and led off to gaol myself for getting into a fight with the whole room over one loud-mouthed woman.”

“So, what do we do? He said we should not follow to Bilbao, but of course, we must.”

“Bilbao is better than a hundred twenty miles through Basque country. Do you speak that language?”

She blinked.