Page 65 of Homeless

“Then we are agreed on the single point that signifies. I will be terribly pleased with myself once we have got across the river.”

The watch betrayed him on the fourth bale.

He had it up on his shoulder and bent under the load when the chain swung free of his waistcoat and hung turning at the end of its tether, gold and glinting in the sunlight, worth at a glance more than the whole consignment he was breaking his back to load.

He straightened and put it away, but the thing had told its tale before he could prevent it. A man loitering further down the shore — one he had marked earlier with some unease — had come a few steps up the slope, and was looking for the first time that day as if he had some purpose.

Azcárate must not have seen the watch, but he did frown at the interruption to Darcy’s work as at a tardy mule. But Darcy was more concerned with taking his measure of the man who was now walking his way.

He was no villager. He had drawn closer now, and Darcy could see the remains of a uniform of the Spanish Army. The hat discarded, the formal breeches exchanged for some loose, baggy sort of trousers, the coat worn open and loose, with the insignia either damaged or soiled. And he was, Darcy realised to his dismay, not alone. He had only noted the one before, but now there were three, the other two having come up from the waterline to join their fellow.

Darcy did not need to ask their business — they had priced him already. The watch was not the prize — the watch was only the notice that a prize was there at all, that the man hauling bales was no common labourer, and a gentleman was worth far more taken than robbed. These men had no ties, no officials to placate as they conducted their affairs, as Vega had. They would care nothing for the clever paper trail Elizabeth had established that made him a bothersome man to kidnap and hold. They need only take him and sell him onward before dark, north and north, hand to hand, until he fetched up wherever her uncle had fetched up, with someone across the water reckoning what a wealthy Englishman would bring.

Marchwood had assured him he would be quite safe. Back in England, in a warm room with a window on a lawn, the words had been true; the war was over, and the country was resuming its business with lawful civility. Everyone knew it was so — it could not be otherwise.

And none of it was true here. Here, he was the most valuable thing on the river for ten miles, and he stood in his shirt in the cold with a stranger’s wool at his feet and nothing between himself and these men but his own two hands and a woman’s quickness. A woman who would fare even worse than he.

His heart had begun to pound as it had not done since he was a boy, and the sore back and torn ribs that had been the morning’s chief insults a minute before were the least of his bothers now.

The nearer man said something to the others and laughed. They were spreading loosely apart, casually blocking escape paths as they closed in.

“Elizabeth…” He meant to move backwards, to gesture for her to stand behind the stacked bales, closer to Azcárate so she might not be instantly taken for his.

But Elizabeth was already moving.

She came at him before he had any notion of what she was doing, her finger levelled at his chest like a pistol.

“¡Ladrón!” She was shouting for the whole bank to hear. “¡Este hombre—este criado—es un ladrón!”

He had not the slightest clue what that word meant; only that she kept shouting it like an accusation, shaking her finger, her face gone wholly strange to him. Why, she was acting as if he were some criminal, and she was crying out to them for help! His first instinct was to draw himself up and demand what in God’s name she meant by it.

He had opened his mouth to do just that when her boot came down on his. “Do not look indignant at me,” she hissed. “You are not a gentleman. You have never been a gentleman in your life! Give me the watch.”

“The —”

“The watch, fool! In your waistcoat. Now, and badly. Act like a frightened man giving up a thing he has stolen.”

Darcy pulled the gold chain dumbly from its pocket, and there was no acting about it. What the devil was she on about? She ripped it from his hand and held it aloft, letting it swing by the chain for all to see, and then she was crying out again into her bad Castilian, another scalding burst of words, none of which he understood.

She rounded on him once more, speaking English again, fast and brutal. “Eyes on the ground! You are my servant, do you understand? I am the commandant’s wife, and he is riding south from Vitoria with his men to meet me this very hour. I just now discovered that you stole my husband’s watch, and you are sorry for it because you know my husband will have you hanged. Do you hear me? Look sorry, or they will have you on a rope by noon and me an hour after!”

He put his eyes on the ground.

It was the worst thing she had asked of him yet — worse than the barge, worse than the chair or the kiss or the fifty blistering miles he had walked beside her. Everything in him stood up to lift his head and end this with two fists and one English sentence these men would feel, whether they understood it or not. Instead, he kept his eyes on the ruin of his two-guinea boots, his hands loose and stupid at his sides, and let her flay him in two tongues at once.

She was not fooling them about the one thing she could not hide — that the two of them were as English as the King, and had no friend in this country nearer than the consulate. But she did not have to make them think she was Spanish to make them her allies. They were suddenly witnesses to a crime.

And the gold she brandished was no longer anonymous, no longer a thing to be lifted and melted and forgot. It was now the watch the whole bank had seen an Englishwoman cry over, “stolen” from some British official who would come asking after it, along with his “wife”.

He could not follow the rest, only the tones — the uncertain conversation between the men, a sharp demand from Azcárate to stop holding up his labourer, Elizabeth’s furious appeal to the heavens as she continued to brandish the watch. She announced comandante inglés again, marido twice more, with a jerk of her chin up the road toward a husband near enough to come asking. A thieving servant with a master up the road was trouble out of all proportion to the prize, and whatever windfall the two men had come up the slope anticipating, they were looking at an altogether different matter now.

“I am telling them they should arrest you for a thief,” she whispered out of the side of her mouth while the men conferred.

“What? Have you gone mad?”

“I also suggested you might have had something to do with a riot in town yesterday, though you denied it to me. I was going to let my husband deal with you as an unfaithful servant, but now that I know you for a thief, why —”

“Are you trying to get me hanged, woman?”