Chapter 4 #3
He brought the horse to a standstill, chest heaving beneath his coat. He stared at her, his eyes dark in a pale, unshaven face. For a heartbeat, a terrible hope leapt there, so intense it burnt like heat.
Then it went out. “No,” he said, the word low and sharp. “Not her.”
He straightened in the saddle. The violence of the check drained away, leaving only exhaustion, stark and alarming.
He looked nothing like a charming, smiling Mr. Wickham.
This man was severe. His coat of good broadcloth was spattered with road dirt, his neckcloth askew.
He looked like a man who had ridden farther and faster than was wise, and had found no rest at the end of it.
Elizabeth straightened, her trembling limbs locking into place. Anger rose to meet her fear. “Sir, you might have taken more care. You came quite near to knocking me down.”
He blinked, as if only now recalling her danger. He did not apologise. He leant a little from the saddle, his height and the horse’s bulk together making her feel uncomfortably small. “You are not she,” he said again, voice harsh. “You wear the same colour cloak—but you are not she.”
“I am myself, sir,” Elizabeth replied, “and I possess the right to walk this road without being ridden over.”
He took no notice of the reproof. His gaze swept past her, searching the empty curve of the lane. “Have you seen a carriage? A post-chaise? Or a girl on foot?” he demanded. “She is young. Fifteen. Fair-haired. She would look—lost.”
The air in Elizabeth’s lungs turned to ice. Young. Fair. Lost.
Anne sat in the nursery at this very moment. This man described her with knowing accuracy, as if he repeated a description that had been dwelt on, again and again.
“Many people travel this road,” Elizabeth said, her voice even though her pulse beat wildly against her collar. “There are carriages enough between the town and the main road.”
He stripped off a glove and ran a hand over his face, leaving a faint streak of grime along his jaw.
“She is not—she cannot be out in this. It is too cold.” The imperious set of his features wavered.
His eyes, dark and intelligent, came back to Elizabeth’s, and for the first time she saw, unmasked, a flash of pure terror.
“If she is out here, she will freeze. She has no experience, no sense how the world deals with a girl by herself.”
The brother, then?—or an uncommonly skilled deceiver. He spoke like a man who knew the habits of a particular girl, not like a stranger inventing a tale. Yet Mr. Wickham, too, conjured concern when it served him.
Elizabeth studied him. The fine clothes, the assurance that held even in desperation, the blunt expectation that she must answer him—all suited what little Anne had said of her brother: strict, formidable, accustomed to obedience. But Anne had also spoken of fear, of silence, of disappointment.
He thinks he may find her in a ditch, Elizabeth realised. He has already imagined it.
“You are not from Meryton,” she said, to gain a little time.
“I am from Derbyshire,” he returned impatiently, gathering his reins as if to move on at once.
“I have no leisure for conversation. If you have seen anything that answers to what I have described, you must tell me. If not,” the restraint in his voice more alarming than his earlier shout — “stand aside.”
Elizabeth gripped her basket. To speak plainly would be to betray a sanctuary.
To deny him might be to keep a girl from rescue—or to deliver her back into the hands of a man she feared.
She looked up into his face, tracing the fatigue carved about his eyes and the hard line of his mouth.
He did not look like a libertine, nor like a man exulting in pursuit.
But she could not stake a child’s safety upon the reading of a stranger’s expression.
“I have met no one on this road today, sir,” she said at last, her voice cool and steady. “I have walked from the boundary stone.”
It was a truth, sliced terribly thin. She had not met Anne on the road. She had left her by the fire.
The stranger studied her for a heartbeat longer, his gaze searching her face as if some answer might be forced from it. Then, with a muttered oath she could not quite catch, he turned the horse. “Then I waste my time here.”
He did not look back. He put his heel to the animal’s side, and it sprang forward, sending a fresh spray of icy slush over Elizabeth’s cloak as it plunged away toward Meryton.
She pressed herself against the oak, her heart hammering, and listened until the sound of hoofbeats dwindled and was swallowed by the wind.
She waited.
She forced herself to count to twenty, whilst the dark shape of horse and rider crested the rise and vanish into the grey. Only when the lane lay empty, when nothing remained but the silence of the winter fields and the harsh caw of a solitary crow, did she move.
Her knees shook so that she could scarcely trust them.
She abandoned all pretence of a sedate walk.
Gathering her heavy skirts in one hand, heedless of the mud, she scrambled up the verge and set off as rapidly as the ruts would allow.
She must reach Longbourn before he found the village empty and turned back upon his steps.
He would ask at the inn. He would ask at the shops.
In time, someone would send him to the houses of consequence in the immediate neighbourhood.
The frozen ruts wrenched at her ankles. The wind bit through her woollens, stinging her cheeks. Every snap of a twig sounded like returning hoofbeats. He is desperate, she thought, the image of his hollowed eyes burnt upon her mind. Desperate men are dangerous—whether they seek to harm or to save.
The chimneys of Longbourn rose above the bare elms, sending plumes of smoke into the leaden sky.
Never had the sight of her father’s house appeared so like a fortress.
She hurried through the back gate, slipped on the wet cobblestones of the stable-yard, and burst in by the kitchen door, startling the scullery-maid into dropping a ladle with a clang.
Elizabeth did not pause to explain. She swept past the servants, her breath coming sharp and painful, and made for the main stairs. She must find Jane. Together they must determine whether the man on the black horse was the sanctuary Anne had been torn from—or the danger she had escaped.
She slammed the nursery door behind her and leant back against it as if her weight could keep the world at bay. Her chest heaved. The cold air burnt in her lungs. She did not stop to remove pattens or sodden cloak.
She found them in the nursery, near the hearth. Jane sat in the low rocking-chair, mending a tear in a muslin gown. The quiet of the little room, the soft click of the needle, struck Elizabeth as jarringly fragile.
“Lizzy?” Jane looked up, her needle arrested. “All colour has left your face. What has happened?”
Elizabeth did not waste a word. She crossed the room in a great hurry and dropped to her knees before the girl on the footstool, taking her small, cold hands between her own.
“There is a man on the road.” Elizabeth said, low and urgent. “Tall, dark, riding a great black horse as if nothing could be allowed to stand in his way. He says he is from Derbyshire.”
The ball of wool rolled from Anne’s lap. All colour left her face. “Fitzwilliam,” she whispered, the name catching on her lips. “He is here.”
“Is he your brother?”
Anne nodded, a jerky, spasmodic motion. She began to tremble, a shivering that seemed to shake her whole slight frame.
Elizabeth chafed her hands. She waited until the girl’s wide, frightened eyes met hers. “I must know what manner of man he is. I saw anger in him—great anger. If he finds you, what will he do?”
“He will—,” Anne gasped, tears spilling over. “He will look at me with silence, disappointment.”
“Will he strike you?” Elizabeth pressed. “Will he do you any bodily harm? If there is the least danger of violence, I will go to my father this instant and we will lock the doors. He shall not pass the threshold.”
“No!” Anne clutched at Elizabeth’s fingers. “No, he is—he is proud, and he is stern, and he expects—so much—but he is good. He would never lift a hand to a woman. He is the most honourable man in England, and I have—” Her voice broke. “I have shamed him.”
Elizabeth sat back on her heels. She met Jane’s eyes over Anne’s bowed head. Jane’s expression was all pity and concern, but she gave a small, resolute nod.
“He is frantic,” Elizabeth said more gently. “He stopped me on the road. He looked like a man undone by fear. He believes you are dead, or lying somewhere in this cold without shelter.”
Anne gave a wretched sob and hid her face in Jane’s lap. “I cannot face him,” she whispered. “I cannot.”
“You must,” Elizabeth said, firm but not unkind. “But you need not do it alone.” She rose. The wildness of the encounter was settling into a steadier resolve. “He is on the Meryton road. He will soon discover there are very few houses where a lady might be received.”
“We must tell Papa,” Jane said, smoothing Anne’s fair hair. “He will know how to manage the introduction.”
“Not yet,” Elizabeth said, unfastening her damp cloak with fingers that still shook a little.
“We must be prepared. When Anne’s brother arrives, he must not find a terrified runaway.
He must find a young girl received and protected by this family.
” She looked down at the weeping figure.
“We will not allow him to crush you, Anne. We shall see how formidable this gentleman remains when he finds himself opposed by five sisters.”
News from Meryton
They spoke at once, all three, when Anne’s sobs had subsided a little. But it was Jane who first found words that could be of any use.
“If he is here,” she said, “and if he is as you say—proud and severe, but not cruel—then it must be better that he should know you are safe than go on believing you are in danger.”