CHAPTER 13
Elizabeth did not sleep, or slept so little and so poorly that it was difficult to know if she had truly slept at all, and when Thatcher's voice roused the household before the sun had properly cleared the horizon, Elizabeth rose from the narrow settee she had been given near the kitchen fire.
She was still and sore all over, and she suspected her fall had been great indeed.
All that night, since her quarrel with Darcy, she had lain silent, listening to the darkness of the house settle and creak around her. She turned thought over the events of the evening time and time again, unable to leave it be, though no good could come of the probing.
It was not the crash itself that kept her awake, or even the fear of it, but of the confessions of her companion that undid her.
She was cross with herself, mostly. Elizabeth had asked him a plain question and he had given her a plain answer, and there was no crime in either.
And yet, she lay awake regardless, and did not care for what that suggested of her, and was not in a humour, this early and this tired, to consider it further.
Elizabeth had thought, before that night, that she understood Mr. Darcy tolerably well.
He was proud, exacting, better pleased with his own opinions than with the general run of company, a man she could dislike with a clear conscience and no particular effort, and had, until very recently, done so with something approaching satisfaction.
However, it was proving considerably more difficult to dislike a man who had drawn her out of a wrecked carriage with an arm that was bleeding and said nothing of it until she made him; who had walked a mile through a black wood with a pistol he no longer had, and a hand that went, all the same, to where it should have been every time a branch stirred.
And there was the other matter besides. He had told her he loved her.
Not gracefully, but there, in the dark, with his sleeve soaked through and his voice unsteadied by something that did not sound like a wound.
In truth, she did not know what to do with his confession.
She struggled to determine whether to credit it the more for having been wrung from him against his own better judgment, or the less, as the kind of thing men say when they are frightened and tired and uncertain whether morning would come.
Drawing her knees up against the cold of the settee and pulling up the wool blanket more firmly around her, Elizabeth had all but given up on sleep.
She thought, I have a very great deal handed to me for one night.
Mr. Darcy’s declaration was something she had neither asked for nor, reflecting in the dark kitchen around her, entirely certain she wished undone.
Meanwhile, Darcy had not slept either, though he would have called what he had done thinking rather than lying awake.
His arm ached, which accounted for some part of it. The wound was not serious, and he had told Elizabeth so. He had not lied, though he was aware he had not told her the whole of it either, which he supposed some men would call the same thing.
Darcy’s wound throbbed with a dull persistence that made sleep, when it came at all, thin and unsatisfying, easily broken by the least shift of his weight against the low cot he had been given.
And thus, he lay a long while staring up at the dark beams of the ceiling, turning the events of the night over, refusing to look in the direction of the woman who bound his wound, and broke his heart.
It did not help that she had not laughed at him when he spoke love to her.
He had half expected her to laugh, and he braced for it, even, in the instant after he had spoken, certain she would seize on so plain an admission and turn it into something to be teased, some small witticism she could hold up between them like a shield against what he had just laid at her feet. And yet, she had not.
What she had done instead was, in its way, considerably worse, or so it had seemed to him at the time, lying now in the dark and turning it over.
She had gone very still, and very quiet, and had asked him, in a voice stripped of its usual quickness, whether he expected her to be grateful for it; whether he supposed a confession, however sincerely meant had been offered under circumstances neither of them had chosen and both of them had been too frightened to comprehend their situation fully.
Darcy knew he had not handled the situation well.
He could admit that much to himself now, in the dark, admit that he had been bitter, and perhaps still was.
He had answered her coldness with something nearer to anger; had told her, in words he did not entirely care to recall, that he had not spoken in expectation of gratitude, nor of anything else, and that she might have simply said as much without troubling to make a lesson of it. It was not what he had meant to say.
He was not perfectly certain, lying there, what he had meant to say, only that it had not been that, and that her face, in the last moment before he turned from her, had worn an expression that seemed proud, and he had wanted to ask her to explain, but did not have the heart nor the stamina, and so retreated feebly to the opposite side of the room.
Of her own state of mind he could form no clear picture at all.
She had said little enough since, and what she had said had given nothing away, whether she regretted the sharpness of her question, or stood by it; whether the coldness had been armor thrown up in haste against a declaration she had not wanted, or something else entirely.
He knew his own bitterness intimately; hers remained, to him, a country without a map.
***
That morning, Darcy rose before the sun, and went to see what could be done, this early, about Reeves' condition, and getting Miss Elizabeth Bennet safely away from a night that had shown him considerably more of himself than he had gone into it prepared to see.
As soon as Darcy sat up, he saw Thatcher, along with Reeves and Elizabeth.
Thatcher noticed him, and said, "Morning, Mr. Darcy.” He nodded his head out the small window to Darcy’s left.
“There's a rider come through," Thatcher was saying, low and urgent.
"Peddler, on his way to market says word's gone round three farms already that the gang what took the Dunstable road last night are still about, and meaning to finish what they started, having heard, same as everyone else by now, that there was a gentleman among the party carrying more than the usual traveller's purse. "
Darcy’s eyebrows lifted at the news, and Elizabeth gasped to herself. "They know we survived, then," he finally said.
Thatcher turned to look at Darcy. "They know someone did, sir, and that's enough for men of that stamp to go looking, especially with a wounded man among you slowing your progress.
I'll not have you caught here, nor my own family put at risk for the harbouring of you, begging your pardon for the plainness of it.
You'd best be away before full light, and by a road they'll not think to watch. "
Reeves, weakened but insistent upon rising, was helped into a coat too large for him, borrowed from Thatcher's own store, and pronounced fit enough to travel slowly.
Thatcher himself proposed, offering his own son to drive them the back way toward the Aylesbury road, where a coaching inn might furnish proper transport onward, while he and Martha remained behind to give whatever account of the night's visitors seemed likeliest to send any further trouble in the wrong direction.
It was, none of them said aloud, considerably more danger than any of them had bargained for when the journey began; but there was no leisure, in the grey urgency of that hour, for anyone to remark upon it beyond the practical business of readying themselves to go.
Elizabeth and Darcy had not exchanged a single word beyond what the morning's necessity required since the fire had burned down the night before, and the silence between them, as they climbed into the back of Thatcher's cart alongside Reeves and a quantity of borrowed blankets, was better served for the journey ahead.
That said, Elizabeth watched him, when she believed herself unobserved, and did not like what she saw.
His countenance had taken on, since the previous evening, a pallor that the low light of dawn did nothing to flatter, and when the cart lurched over a rut deep enough to jar them all, she saw him catch his breath and press his good hand hard against the wounded arm, which spoke to her of rather considerable pain.
She said nothing of it, as she had said, the night before, everything she had permitted herself to feel entitled to say, and found, in the grey light of a morning that offered no comfort for either of them, that she could not summon the courage to breach the silence again, whatever concern of him and his injury pressed at her to do so.
It was Reeves, in the end, who broke it, some hour into the journey, his own voice thin with the exertion of simply remaining upright against the cart's jolting, his head hurting him considerably.
"Beg pardon, sir, Miss, but I don't like the colour of Mr. Darcy's face, and I don't think either of you ought to go on pretending you haven't noticed it neither. "
"Reeves," Darcy began, with what authority his evident weakness could still furnish.
"Begging your pardon again, sir, but you near fainted just now over that rut, and I'll not sit here silent about it out of respect for whatever's passed between the two of you that's left you not speaking.
A wound left untended and a body pushed past its strength makes for fever, and fever on a road like this, with men who mean us harm somewhere behind, is a danger worse than any highwayman. "
Elizabeth felt something in her chest tighten at this plain, unadorned truth, spoken by a man with every reason to think of his own suffering first and none whatsoever to spend his remaining strength on smoothing the difficulty between his employer and a lady he barely knew.
She looked at Darcy properly, for the first time since last evening, and saw an exhaustion that frightened her rather more than she was prepared to admit.
"Let me see it," she said, and the quietness of her own voice surprised her.
He shook his head on impulse, "It is no worse than it was."
"I did not ask whether it was worse. I asked to see it, and I think, after everything Reeves has just said, you have very little ground left to refuse me."
He did not refuse her. He drew back the borrowed coat, wincing as the movement pulled at the wound beneath, and Elizabeth, examining the binding she had set the night before, felt her own alarm sharpen at what she found; a heat radiating from the skin around it that had not been there hours before, a redness spreading beyond the wound's edge that spoke, even to her limited understanding of such things, of trouble beginning to take hold.
"This wants proper attention, and soon." She said it plainly, without the anger of the night before. She turned to look at the back of young Thatcher, and raised her voice, aimed to get the young man’s attention. "How far to this inn, Mr. Thatcher?"
He called out from behind the bench. "Another hour, if the roads hold, Miss. Perhaps less.”
"You must make faster time," Elizabeth replied, with a voice strong with emotion. “We have not a moment to lose! Mr. Darcy’s wound is getting worse.”
The young man looked backwards at Mr. Darcy, and told Elizabeth that he would try to hurry along.
What passed between them, in the hour that followed, was not reconciliation, as neither of them was yet prepared for that.
However, it was an anxious attention and an unspoken agreement that the danger to Darcy, which now faced them all, mattered more than the wounds each had given the other the night before.
She held his good arm steady against the cart's worst jolting without being asked.
He, in turn, when the road narrowed and the cart tipped alarmingly close to a ditch on one side, threw his own weight instinctively toward her, bracing her against the fall before either of them had time to think better of the gesture.
Neither acknowledged it, but neither moved away from it, either.
Although a full minute passed, and the cart righted itself, and there was no longer any excuse of necessity to justify the nearness that remained between them, they stayed glued to one another.
Elizabeth kept her eyes fixed on the road ahead, or on what passed for a road, and told herself she was watching for the next rut, the next place the wheel might catch, and not for any other reason at all.
She was aware, all the same, of the solid warmth of him along her side, and the careful stillness with which he held himself.
Darcy, for his part, kept his gaze fixed with equal determination on the horse's ears, and reflected that a man who had spent the better part of the night rehearsing, with some bitterness, every reason he had to regret the confession he had made in the dark wood, ought not to find himself, some few hours later, quite so reluctant to shift six inches to his left merely because it would put a proper distance between his own arm and Miss Elizabeth Bennet's shoulder. He did not shift.
He told himself this was owing to the state of the road, which remained genuinely treacherous, and not to any weakness of resolve on his own part, and was aware, even as he told himself so, that it was not a claim he much believed.
The cart jolted again, less violently, and this time neither of them so much as pretended to be startled by it.
Once, when the cart slowed to navigate a stretch of road gone soft with recent rain, Elizabeth heard, or thought she heard, the distant sound of hoofbeats on harder ground somewhere behind them.
She then saw two horses, perhaps three, moving at quite a pace, and saw young Thatcher's shoulders go rigid at the box. He suddenly urged the horse to whatever speed the poor road would permit.
"Is it them?" she asked, low, and found her hand still closed tight about Darcy's uninjured arm.
"I do not know," he said, equally low, and did not draw the arm away. "But I think we had better not slow down to inquire."
Fortunately, the sound eventually faded, likely because its source had turned off toward some other errand, and Elizabeth could not have said, when it was gone, whether the trembling that ran through her afterward came from fear of what might have been following, or from the sudden and unguarded realization of how tightly she had been holding on, and how entirely unwilling, even now, even after everything said the night before, she had been to let go.