Page 59 of Homeless

He had the sack high on his shoulder when the grain inside it shifted.

Not far — an inch, the wet weight sliding, finding the wrong place to sit — but the inch took the load off his bones and out past them, and his body went after it, because to drop the sack was to lose the day’s wage in the river mud. His boot found the slick place Azcárate had warned him of in a Spanish he had been too proud to ask translated. His side came down hard against the iron lip of the gunwale.

The pain came a half-second behind the contact. For half an instant, he believed he had got away clean, and then it opened along his ribs like a struck match, white and total, and took his breath out from under him. A whimper — there was no other word for it — started up out of him, and he bit it in two before it cleared his teeth. The landing tilted and came back. His hands had kept the sack — the one thing they had done right all morning, holding on past all sense — and he stood bent under the weight of it, breathing through his nose in short, hard pulls, while the heat ran wet down his side and his shirt began to drink it.

Azcárate did not look up. He set his own sack down and reached for the next, and gave the Englishman’s hurt no more notice than a barked knuckle would have earned, because to him that was all it was — a soft pair of hands meeting iron for the first time, the lesson every boy on the river had taken at twelve and lived.

Darcy straightened. The ribs told him, in terms that left nothing to be guessed at, that straightening had been a decision made above his present station.

Elizabeth was somewhere along the landing behind him. He did not turn to find out how near. He turned his hurt side away from her instead — the one thing, in the whole graceless morning, he still had it in him to control. “Está bien,” he said to Azcárate in his bad and useless Spanish, and bent, against the loud objection of everything below his collarbone, and lifted the next sack.

She had come with the water and got within three feet of him before she saw it — the stained white of his shirt gone dark down the side, a wet black line of it in the bad light, too much of it.

“You are bleeding!”

“It is just a scrape.” He turned his side away from her, angling like a boy hiding a torn coat from his governess.

“Turn back here and hold still.”

“Elizabeth —”

“I said, come here, and hold still.” She set the water down and took a fistful of his shirt at the shoulder, drawing it back from the wound. The fact that he let her, with no further protest, alarmed her past the blood.

The cloth came away with a sticky sort of tearing that drew a hiss of pain from Darcy, and she made herself look at what was beneath it. It ran long and shallow along his ribs, raw and weeping and already angry at its edges — clear enough to mend if it were kept clean, certain to poison him in three days if it were not. Her hand had gone flat to the warm skin above it, to hold him still, she told herself, and nothing else. Under her palm, he had frozen entirely, not breathing, every line of him locked against the small weight of her hand.

“Well.” She found her voice. “You have ruined an adequate shirt and frightened me half to death, and for what — to lift sacks faster than a man who has lifted them since before you were breeched?”

“If we do not get this load moved today, there will be more tomorrow, I can promise you.” He shifted, and turned his face away as if she would not see him wince. “We ought to be done before nightfall, or at least we would be, if you had not stopped me and let me stiffen up.”

She pressed two fingers to the skin beside the wound, not gently, to learn how deep the heat went. He hissed and pushed her hand away.

“We will wash this tonight in clean water, whatever clean water costs, wherever we can find it. You will let me bandage it, and you will not argue, because I do not mean to haul your corpse the rest of the way to Santander — which would be a heavy corpse, and a complaining one, and would find the bearers too slow and the grave beneath its dignity.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “Corpses cannot complain.”

“Yours would, I am sure of it.”

XXIII

Taking Instruction

Azcárate would not cross the river as dusk fell. The last of the grain sacks were loaded just before the sun shot red-gold over the valley, which left enough time, in Elizabeth’s estimation, for them to push off and find some lodging on the north side of the river before night fell. But the bargeman said it was impossible. Too dangerous, he said, with the light low. They would have to cross in the morning. And so, there was nothing for it but for Darcy and Elizabeth to return to the same room they had hired the night before, and hope no one watched their return just after dark.

Supper was bread and a broth with the rumour of a fowl somewhere far upstream of it, and they ate slowly because slowly made it last. It did not make it enough. The hunger that stayed behind when the bowl was empty was a feeling she was coming to know too well — not the sharp want of a missed meal, but the kind that meant to keep them company now the whole way to the sea.

He had washed the scrape as she ordered, in water that had cost more than the broth, and sat now on the edge of the bed with his shirt drawn off the one shoulder and held to his far side, baring his ribs. She knelt behind him with a strip torn from the tail of her spare shift, which was the cleanest cloth they owned and a poor character for the rest.

“Lift your arm.”

“You are uncommonly free with your orders tonight.”

“I am uncommonly free with them every night. You usually ignore them, anyway. Lift your arm, Mr Darcy, or bleed through 'til morning and account for yourself to Azcárate, who will find some way to charge us for the inconvenience. I am indifferent which.”

He lifted his arm.

She passed the cloth around him, and the backs of her fingers went along the warm skin of his side. “You flinched.”

“I did not. That was you.”