Page 52 of Homeless

Darcy could think of no help for it. They would have to venture into the town proper themselves, find lodgings, and hire a boy with a cart to come back for their belongings. But if no one stayed to guard their trunks… all his papers… There would be no point in sending anyone to cart them back.

“Wait here,” he told Elizabeth. “I see a church on this side of the river. There should be something else nearby.”

“How do you propose to —”

“As you have said, money talks as fluently as the tongue. I will be no more than half an hour.”

The room he hired was square and clean, with a good door and a decent bed and a promise of no vermin and no other bodies sharing it. He had paid, he was fairly sure, a good deal more for it than a man born to the country would have. But he had a place for them to rest, and a boy with a donkey and a little cart to come back with him. For that, he was reasonably proud of himself. He had stood in a strange market with only a handful of words of the language and no more notion of which inn to approach than of which path to take to the moon. And still, he had come away with the hire of a decent place. If the innkeeper’s wife had run to the kitchen, jingling her coins and crowing about how she had got the better of the Englishman, Darcy was at least not there to see it.

He came into the arrabal, and all his triumph went cold.

Three men had gathered round the trunks where he had left her — garrison men, coats gone ratted and faded, with the whole idle afternoon to spend, and her to spend it on. But it was not the men that stopped him at the mouth of the square.

It was Elizabeth, who had not lowered her eyes to a one of them, and sat in the ruin of her good gown like a wilted dove. Her jaw was tight, and she was returning their stares with an arch challenge in her eyes that he remembered from the Meryton Assembly. It was the last thing a frightened woman should do, and the surest way in Spain to be taken for some other kind of woman… and she was giving it everything she had.

He sprinted away from the boy following him with the donkey and cart, and crossed the plaza.

“Get up,” he said at her shoulder. “We are leaving.”

She got to her feet at once, and still she did not lower her eyes — not for the man nearest her, not for the one who laughed when she shot to her feet, not for any of them. There were a good number of jeers and shoves when they all saw that she would not affect any sort of modesty. He could not make out most of the words, but he clearly caught “puta” more than once. And “Yo primero.” He was fairly certain he knew what that meant.

Darcy took her by the arm, a little too roughly if it must be confessed, and he turned her toward the street.

The bolder of the men came with them. “¿Cuánto?” A coin rose to the edge of his sight. “¿Cuánto por ella, señor?”

Darcy put the coin off with the back of his hand and turned a look on the man that had scattered better crowds than this one. The man grinned and named a higher figure. A second fell in at his other shoulder, brandishing a purse. He had just been paid, it seemed, and he meant to spend it all.

On her.

Darcy grabbed her hand and dragged her off until Elizabeth’s feet stopped, and she snatched her arm out of his grasp. “You needn’t be so brutish about it!”

He stopped to stare down into her face and took her arm again. “What I need is to get you off the street before these men think to complete the transaction!”

“Yes, and the more roughly you try to handle me, the faster you try to walk away, the higher the price goes. They think you are withdrawing your merchandise and holding out for more.”

He walked her faster, anyway. It gained them nothing. The two more insistent men kept following, and the third left the trunks, which even now were being attended to by the boy with the cart, to see how it would end.

“Mr Darcy.” Her hand had found his sleeve and shut on it, and her voice had dropped to a deep tremble he had never heard from her. “You are only making it worse. We have business to conduct in this town. I cannot go about, even on your arm, if every other man in this town thinks I am for sale. Everything I say, they answer with a price and an offer I would rather not entertain. I… I do not know what to do.”

She had never once, in his hearing, owned to a thing she could not do. Her hand was shaking where it gripped him. Her chin was up still, but she had let him pull her rather closer than she ever had before.

He could not reason with them because he had no words, and she had probably already tried explaining that she was not there on “business.” He could not outwalk them, because she was right — more had begun following them now, and the coins were jingling. He could not even seem to frighten them.

One thing remained that a man with a woman to sell would never do.

“Mrs Darcy?”

She turned her eyes to him — off the men at last — and the fear in them was plain now.

He took her face in his hands and kissed her.

He had meant it to be seen. At the first of it, that was all it was, a thing done for the square. Then her mouth seemed to soften. He pulled her in a little closer. A man claiming his wife would certainly —

That was when she slapped him soundly.

Darcy reeled back, his hand instinctively going to his cheek. “Bloody hell!”

Elizabeth was advancing on him now, her finger pointed like a master scolding a naughty boy. “How many times have I told you not to call me that?”