Page 67 of Homeless

“That is a shame. You are quite right, but I shall count it Spain’s greatest injustice, taking such a treasured memento from you when you cannot even be assured you will have a home to return to when it is all done.”

“Your sympathy is touching.”

“I will have more of it to dispense when it comes to the moment of sacrifice. I might even shed an honest tear for you.”

He smiled a little to himself. “Do not strain yourself overmuch in the exercise.”

The man who kept the venta had been pricing her since they walked in. Elizabeth felt his eyes on her the moment they sat at the broad table in the common room, and Darcy was watching him with a suspicion bordering on hostility. But the man possessed nothing threatening in his manner. Rather, after some while, he approached the table with a smile and an extra pot of something hot they had neither called nor paid for.

His eyes spoke eloquently enough of his intentions — down from her face to her bodice and up again, arriving at a notion that plainly pleased him. She had been looked at before in her life; she had not, until recently, been totted up like a cask behind a counter and assigned a price.

“A woman like you,” he said, as though laying a gift before her, “is wasted on the road.”

He said he had need of hands behind his counter of an evening. Good wine, good custom, good coin. She had only to pour it and to smile while she poured; a face like hers would fetch the muleteers down out of three valleys, and he knew how to be generous with those who brought him trade. Four reales the night, he said — twice what he would give a Spanish girl, and he wished her to know it, because an English girl was an exotic accent and face behind his counter. He would give her her board, too, and whatever the drinkers left on the counter when the wine was in them.

Four reales the night was not much, but after a few weeks… Elizabeth tallied the numbers in her head, and they were not entirely unfavourable for two travellers who were bleeding money with every mile.

Darcy had not followed half of it. His Spanish ran to bread and money and the names of the saints, and the innkeeper had spoken low and fast and very largely to her bodice; but he had read the innkeeper’s manner, for which he had needed no language on earth to comprehend.

“What does he want with you?” He had set his bread down.

“A pot-girl. Behind his counter to pour the wine and make myself agreeable to anyone who pays. He offers four reales a night — double, he was careful to tell me, what a Spanish girl would fetch, with my board, and the drinkers’ loose coin besides. Which is more than the two of us can show between us tonight, and I am considering it.”

“You are not.”

“I said that I am considering it.”

“Elizabeth. No.”

And there it was — the whole of his position laid bare in the one syllable. He might forbid her in their own tongue until the candles burned out, and not a word of it would reach the innkeeper’s ear. To refuse the man — to end the thing — he needed her mouth to do it for him. He could forbid her and hope she chose to obey him. That was the whole of his power here, and they both knew it.

It was the most galling position she had ever seen him put in, and she was a little ashamed of how much she enjoyed it.

“Give me one reason,” she said, and turned a sweet and social smile upon the innkeeper as she said it, “that is not your pride. You carried grain all day yesterday and wool for half of the day today. You let a boatman hire your back by the hour, and came away bleeding for it, and I held my tongue and let you, because we needed the crossing. I can pour wine without bleeding. Tell me the difference.”

“You know the difference. A muleteer does not lay hands on the back that carries his grain. Pour his wine and smile for his coin, and you will learn the difference inside a week. And then I shall have to kill a man in a country where I cannot speak the language well enough to be hanged in it.”

“I have handled muleteers.”

“Across a table, with me at your side and a door at your back. This is a counter, with a cellar behind it and me nowhere near it, because he will not hire the husband who glowers, only the wife who pours.” He leaned in. “I will not buy our bread with your face or your body, paid to be where that man can reach across his own counter and help himself to what he is very plainly intending to take. Do not ask it of me.”

She held Darcy’s eye past the point the argument required. Then she turned to the innkeeper and told him, in the Portuguese she had been bending into Spanish since Tudela, that he was very good, that she was sensible of the honour he did her, and that she must regretfully decline — her husband, she added, permitting herself the one small revenge, was of a jealous and ungovernable temper, and unable to spare her of an evening.

The innkeeper’s eyes shifted, taking in the size of the husband and the set of his stubborn jaw. He bowed graciously and declared that he understood the matter completely. He went to attend to his other tables.

And Elizabeth — who had not, in any corner of her heart, wished to pour wine for muleteers, who had raised the thing half to spite him and half because the figure on the table was real and they were hungry — finished the cold remains of her broth out of temper. Not because he had forbidden her; she had, in the end, refused of her own accord.

Because when it came to it, she had refused less for her own good sense than for the look on his face when he said, “Do not ask it of me.” And that was a thing she did not care to look at too nearly.

He had got paper somewhere. She did not ask where, or what it had cost — not because she was not curious, but because she would spare him the recitation of their penury. He set a single sheet before her, a pen that had been mended too many times, and trimmed the candle so the light fell on the page and not in her eyes.

“Estella has a post that runs when the roads allow. They could not tell me how often, and I’ve no way of knowing whether the letter or we ourselves will reach the coast first. We may as well hedge our bets. Your aunt will be counting the days.”

So, she wrote to her aunt.

The ink had half dried in the pot and wanted coaxing; the nib caught on the coarse paper and threw a spatter she took up with her thumb.

My dear Aunt,