CHAPTER 12
The light belonged to a farmhouse, low and sturdy, set back from what proved to be a proper lane after all.
The farmer, a broad man named Thatcher, who looked to be in his early fifties, opened his door to find Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, looking worse for wear.
Thatcher, with his lamp held high, wore an expression that passed from wariness to alarm and then to concern, as Mr. Darcy explained their predicament.
"Highwaymen, you say! On the Dunstable road? Lord above!” The man began, before turning over his shoulder and yelling, “Martha!
Martha, fetch blankets, and put the kettle on!
" He had already taken in Darcy's bloodied sleeve and Elizabeth's disordered hair and torn hem.
"You'd best come in, both of you, before you take a chill on top of everything else. "
It was Darcy who spoke first upon the delicate matter of what account to give, drawing Thatcher aside for a moment before either of them crossed the threshold, and Elizabeth heard enough of the low exchange to understand that her own reputation had not escaped his notice even in the middle of so disordered a night.
Elizabeth was quickly presented to Mrs. Thatcher, as Mr. Darcy's cousin, waylaid together upon a family journey to relations in town; it was a fiction delivered by Darcy with such grave and convincing steadiness that Elizabeth, warming her hands at last before a fire, found herself almost believing it herself.
"And your coachman?" Thatcher asked. "You say he was hurt on the road?"
"Shot," said Darcy, "and left behind when the horses bolted. I do not know how badly. If your son could be spared to ride out with a lantern."
Thatcher's son, a quiet young man of perhaps twenty, was dispatched within minutes, and it was the longest quarter hour of the whole evening, Elizabeth thought, sitting by the fire with a blanket about her shoulders and her eyes fixed upon the door, waiting to learn what that ride would bring back.
At last, the farmer’s son brought back Reeves. The coachman was pale and unsteady but alive and conscious, having not been shot at all, in the end, but had a large cut on his head, where he had fallen from his seat, according to Thatcher's own rough experience of farm injuries.
Reeves' cut was cleaned, and he was soon settled by the fire with his head wound bound and a cup of something Martha Thatcher swore by. “It’ll take the pain away I swear it,” she said kindly and pressed the cup into his good hand.
Within a very few minutes of its contents being finished, the exhaustion of the night overtook Reeves, and he slept, his breathing slow and even, in the chair nearest the hearth.
With Reeves settled and the Thatchers withdrawn to their own end of the house, Martha having pressed upon them water, cloth, and a salt of her own devising for cleaning wounds, with the brisk instruction that she'd be back directly to see it properly done if the gentleman's cousin hadn't the stomach for it.
“There is no need, my dear, to try to be brave, if it is too much; I shall attend to him right away,” the greying woman said encouragingly.
Elizabeth, feeling all the need to play the act, reassured her kind host that she was quite able to attend to Mr. Darcy.
Hence, Elizabeth soon found herself alone with Darcy in the low firelight, a basin of warm water between them and his coat already shed, his shirt-sleeve rolled back to expose a wound that looked, in the better light of the hearth, worse than the "graze" he had insisted upon in the dark.
"Sit closer, Mr. Darcy," she told him, unwilling to admit that her heart was beating out of proportion, "and let me see to it properly, since you have plainly been lying to me about the severity of it since the moment we left the carriage."
He grumbled a reply, feeling the sting of it now that he was settled and had seen to the safety of his coachman and Elizabeth."I did not think it worth alarming you further."
She lifted her eyes to him, narrowing them as she peered into his slowly whitening face. "I am considerably more alarmed by the prospect of a fever from a wound neglected half the night than I would have been by the truth of it hours ago."
She helped him unbutton his shirt, her cheeks coloring despite her best effort to attend to the task with a nurse's brisk indifference, and eased the sleeve down from his shoulder to uncover the wound beneath, a bloodied mess that proved, on closer look, a deeply lodged splinter, driven in by the force of the fall.
Elizabeth began, with hands that had steadied considerably since their walk through the wood, to clean the wound as Martha had described to her, and if her touch was not entirely practised, it was careful, and Darcy, watching her work by the low fire with an attention he made no effort to disguise.
"You are very capable," he said at last.
She returned a nervous sort of chuckle. "I have four sisters and a mother inclined to nerves, Mr. Darcy. One learns a great deal of practical usefulness in such a household, whatever else it may want in refinement."
He paused a moment before replying. "I did not say it wanted refinement."
"No," she agreed, tying off the binding with care, "you did not.” She kept her voice light, almost teasing. “Though, I begin to think you have grown rather more careful with your words this evening than you were upon our first acquaintance."
"I have had a great deal of occasion, this evening, to consider how carelessly I have used them at other times."
Something in his voice drew her eyes up from the binding to his face, and what she found there was a rawness; his look removed every thought from her mind, and her ordinary readiness of her wit failed her entirely.
"I have been thinking," he went on, before she could recover it, "of a great many things, upon that walk, that I mistook you for a servant, and never properly begged your pardon for the manner of it, only argued my way around it.
That I withdrew from you, a fortnight past, for reasons I told myself were reasonable, and have since had ample occasion with very little else to occupy my mind, to recognise as considerably less reasonable than my pride wished to allow. "
"Mr. Darcy," she started, but he shook his head and cut her off.
"Let me finish, Miss Bennet, while I have found the courage.” He stared at her, a look of seriousness, yet openness.
“I do not know what account of it I can properly give you, beyond the truth, which is that I found myself, some weeks ago with a feeling I did not know how to govern, and that I chose, in my alarm at it, to retreat rather than to examine it honestly.
It is a choice I have had a great deal of leisure, tonight, to regret. "
Elizabeth's hands had gone still over the half-finished binding, and she found, searching for some answer equal to the moment, that her own composure, so reliable in every other circumstance, offered her nothing at all.
"I do not know what to say to that," she admitted, low. "I had thought. I had believed you found me tiresome. That whatever had passed between us before had simply run its course, as such things do."
She saw a look of pain in his eyes, as they looked intently into her own. "Then you believed something entirely opposite to the truth, and I am sorry for it, since I understand now that the fault in the believing was mine to prevent and I did not trouble myself to prevent it."
It was, she would think later, the nearest either of them had come, in the whole of their acquaintance, to speaking without armour; and, it was into this fragile and unfamiliar honesty, that the night's accumulated strain chose at last to break.
"I am glad you regret it," Elizabeth said, and meant it; but some exhausted, overwrought part of her, still raw from the night's violence and Reeves's and Darcy’s blood and her own terror on the wood floor of the overturned carriage, could not let the admission rest there entirely.
"Though I confess, sir, it does not undo the fortnight itself, nor everything that came before it.
You speak of regret very easily, now that circumstance has thrown us together and left you little choice but to speak plainly.
I wonder whether you would have found the courage for it in an ordinary drawing-room, with no highwaymen to frighten it out of you. "
Darcy's countenance, so open a moment before, closed as she watched it. "That is not a generous reading of what I have just told you."
She sighed, as she bent her head to finish up her binding work.
"Perhaps I am tired of being generous, Mr. Darcy.
I have been generous a great deal this fortnight, in private, to myself, making every excuse for your silence that my own pride would permit.
And, now, I find that you have finally troubled to explain it, that the explanation amounts to little more than that you were frightened of your own feelings, and chose, rather than face them, to treat me as though I had ceased to signify at all. "
“I have told you I regret it." He sounded hurt, she thought, though his voice took on a more curt nature.
Elizabeth felt her own voice growing in agitation.
"You have told me you regret the manner of it, but, in truth, I am not certain you regret the substance; that you weighed my situation, my family, my connections, against whatever you felt, and found the weighing came out against me, and only tonight, with death close enough to concentrate your mind upon it, have you found reason to reconsider the sum. "
He sat up straighter now, and pushed back at her attempt to so easily calculate his feelings. "That is unjust, and you know it to be unjust."
Having finished his bindings, Elizabeth rose from her seat, and crossed her arms, as she replied to Mr. Darcy, all the fear and agitation of the evening, pouring into her speech.
"Do I? I do not know what I know any longer.
Mr. Darcy, I begin to wonder whether that habit of weighing is not simply what you are, beneath whatever gentler face tonight has shown me.
From the very beginning, from the first moment, I may almost say, of our acquaintance, your manner has impressed me with nothing so much as your arrogance, your certainty of your own correctness, and a selfish disdain for the feelings of anyone who dared to disagree with you.
I had not known you a month before I understood you to be the very last man whose good opinion I ought to have troubled myself to want. "
The words fell into the quiet room with a violence force, though it was delivered in a low voice, mindful, even in her anger, of Reeves asleep by the fire not six feet distant.
Darcy went very still, and Elizabeth, watched the raw openness she had glimpsed only minutes before shutter itself away behind a hardened and altogether more familiar exterior.
"I see," he said, very quietly, when he spoke again. "Then I have been mistaken, Miss Bennet, in a great many things tonight, and I will not trouble you further with any of them."
He rose, gathering his coat though the wound beneath its sleeve could not have welcomed the movement, and withdrew to his cot at the far side of the hearth without another word, leaving Elizabeth alone with the basin of water, the dying fire, and a silence into which she could not, for a long time afterward, bring herself to speak.