Page 68 of Homeless

The evening cold was in her fingers, and the letters came cramped and small, nothing like the easy hand she had spent on this same woman across a hundred idle pages, by a fire at Longbourn that had never once wanted feeding.

She told, in the mildest terms possible, what had befallen her uncle. She was assured that the matter was only a pecuniary one, and would be settled sensibly by men in London and was probably already being brokered. Her uncle was a valuable man, and would be kept valuable until paid for. There was only the mild inconvenience to herself. She promised she was well. She was in safe company, she said, having fallen in with a party who was likewise travelling towards the northern coast to return to England. She did not elaborate on the quantity, nor the nature of that company, but she did write it in the plural, “we” and “the party” and “our”, a whole brave company conjured out of two ruined travellers.

I am coming home.

That, she wrote last, and pressed hardest, until the ink nearly bled through the back side of the paper. She folded the sheet before it was well dry and held it out to him.

“It makes no mention of you,” she said.

“I had supposed it must not. Nor did I mention you in my letter to my sister, which, naturally, will be read by my uncle and my cousin.” He took the letter and folded it away inside his breast, against the bound ribs, and got to his feet. “Perhaps we would have done better to at least mention one another’s names in passing, so some other party might know there was another stranded subject of the crown here.”

“I dare not. Your name is too well known to my aunt, which might lead to speculation on her part. And any mention of an inconvenienced female in your letter might lead to fancies your sister must not be taught to entertain.”

“Quite right. It was the right letter to have written, then.”

“It was.”

XXVI

As Long As It Takes

“Papeles.”

Elizabeth put into his hand the only thing they owned that answered to the word. The salvoconducto, the marriage document, and some coin to buy a clerk’s patience — everything that might prove them travellers of the respectable kind.

It had taken two full days and part of a third to reach Vitoria by mule. Darcy had bartered away the spoons taken from the Estella money changer — a quick, one-sided bit of thievery for which they had acquired the dubious ownership of three servicably sound mules. The trade apparently did not include their saddles and gear, a catch for which Elizabeth herself supplied the answer — her own travelling trunk, which was too large to manage along with Darcy’s, in exchange for the mules’ tackle.

By the time they stood at the checkpoint outside Vitoria, Darcy’s injury from the barge had scabbed over, or at least, he had ceased permitting her to bandage it. The blisters on her feet had begun to firm into calluses, and she had developed a rather shocking tenderness for a creature that complained in obnoxious brays whenever he determined he was fatigued.

The mule she rode was not such a bad sort, either.

She had been chuckling to herself over her private joke when the town came into view. There was no road north or west that did not run through this gate, and there would have been no passing it at all, if she did not have the paper setting her name down beside Darcy’s. She would have been treated with every suspicion available, the sort of trouble a garrison keeps in a back room until it decided what to do with her.

Married, she was a wife to a man with a salvoconducto, and a wife was waved through. The lieutenant who read their papers was young for the coat and not yet easy in the authority of it, and he had a whole morning to spend. He held it to the light, turned it, and found the place near the fold where a seal should have sat and did not.

“There is no seal.”

“The church that married us lost its roof to the war a year before we came to it. The seal went the way of the saints. A great deal was wanting in Tudela by then, but you will see that the checkpoint in Calahorra found the document satisfactory.”

His eyes went past her to Darcy. “Your husband lets you be his tongue?”

“His tongue, his wits, and occasionally, his conscience. But I cannot vouch for his temper, for that is his alone.”

His mouth twitched, and still he laid the paper on his own side of the table and squared its edges. “It will be verified before you are permitted into the gates of Vitoria.”

“By whom?”

“By the proper office.”

“Which sits where, since the French burned it? You will keep that paper in your drawer, teniente, until they find you a bishop who outlived the occupation. And until they do, you will have unmarried me at your own gate, in front of your own men. A foreign woman with no husband and no one to answer for her is a great deal more trouble to hold than to wave past, and you would be making that trouble on purpose.” She let her eyes go to the two soldiers who had drifted nearer in the yard. “I cannot think it is the order you were left to keep.”

He glanced at his men, then slid the paper back across the table, stopping it short, so that she came the last of the way to it herself.

She took it up. “You are very good, sir.”

He waved a bored hand. “Next.”

No one had any word of Don Ibarra.