Indignities to Spare #3
The thing cracked the way she had gambled it would, along the seam she had found.
And she pressed, quickly, while it was cracking.
“And my gown, Senor. Only the one gown, there in the dirt, it is no use to you to sell. No one would want it, but it might keep me warm. Please, let me keep the one gown.”
The one called Mateo had been crouching to sort through their papers, holding one after the other up to decide if any of them might be worth selling to the right person, or if the names on them would only convict him of robbery.
He moved to the gown, turned it over with his boot and scoffed, shaking his head.
“Let her have the rag,” he said to Elizabeth’s young champion.
Slowly, she got up, keeping her eyes on the man with his gun at Darcy’s head.
He was the one she least wished to frighten.
She moved to the gown, her steps slow and unthreatening, and gathered the worn fabric up out of the dust. But, while Mateo looked over the mules and decided which to leave for them — the smallest, the weakest, naturally — and the man holding the gun to Darcy’s head argued about whether to switch the saddles to take the more valuable one, Elizabeth’s hands were busier than they saw.
She was still bent, still pulling the wreck of her gown into her arms, but she was also folding into it as she gathered the loose papers, the marriage lines, the salvoconducto, the Vitoria receipt, Darcy’s letter of credit — which, mercifully, they could not read — all of it bundled into the dress against her body while she wept and thanked them and made herself small.
She waited for the hand on her shoulder. For one of them to say, “What is that? Shake it out. Where are you hiding the money?” She could feel the papers against her ribs like a second heartbeat, and she kept her expression morose and waited to be caught.
She was not caught. Because at that moment, the leader hissed and jerked his chin down the road.
Elizabeth looked and saw it too — dust, far off but coming, riders or a cart, a party on the road below climbing toward the pass.
And three men who had killed enough in the war did not want to be standing over a beaten foreigner and a weeping woman when strangers came round the bend.
They moved fast. They took the larger two mules and the pack and the purse, and all but a hard heel of bread and one blanket and Elizabeth’s mule. They went up and over the slope into the pines the way they had come, and were gone, as quickly as that, as if the whole of it had taken no time at all.
The road was eerily quiet.
Elizabeth stood with her ruined gown clutched to her chest with the papers inside it, and the far-off party still too distant to be anything yet.
Darcy was pushing himself up out of the dust — to his knees, to his feet, swaying, his lip split and his eye already darkening and his knuckles raw and bloody.
He got upright by pure will, bent to collect her wedding ring still shining in the dirt, then he was already moving towards her, opening his mouth to ask if she was hurt.
And everything she had held gave way at once.
She could not later recall rushing into his arms. She was simply against him, the gown and papers tumbled at her feet, for both her arms were around him, her face buried in his filthy, bloodied shirt, and the sob that shook out of her tore, heaved, and took her whole body.
All of it came up, weeks of it, all the terror she had swallowed on this mountain and every mountain before it gurgling forth, now that it was finally, finally safe to let it.
She had wept before this. When her feet were blistered and her body betrayed her, and all was exhaustion and humiliation.
When she woke to find him dying beside her.
Through the fever and the crash and the long nights of keeping him.
But even in the weeping, she had held, and held, and held, never letting herself completely shatter.
This, this final indignity, at last broke her.
The fear of seeing the man she loved nearly lose his life trying to defend her, then finding them both alive at the end of it and so nearly ruined that she could still not believe it was over, finally unleashed the torrent she had kept back, and kept back.
Her gasps turned to sobs, which fractured into howls and grasping hands and flooded cheeks. She clung to him and shook, and could not seem to stop.
“I have you,” Darcy said. His arms had come round her, and he was just holding her with all the strength left in his arms. He could barely stand, but he held her up anyway, held her together, his split mouth against her hair.
“I have you. You are safe. You were — God, Elizabeth — you were magnificent. My clever girl! I have you, and you are safe. There now. There.” His hand moved on the back of her head, and his voice was not steady either.
“I have you. Weep if you like. I shall hold you as long as it takes. We have nowhere at all to be.”
And she wept, in the middle of the empty road, in the arms of the man she had sworn to let go, with the proof still shaking through her that she never, ever could.