PROLOGUE #2
The road was good and dry and the horses made easy progress.
The moor stretched wide on either side, unhurried under the late afternoon light, and the sky above it had deepened from pale gold to something richer toward the west. Darcy knew this road well.
He had travelled it in both directions more times than he could readily account.
It had never felt as it felt at present.
It was remarkable, he reflected, what the events of a single morning might alter.
Clara had fallen quiet beside him, her eyes drifting closed, not in sleep but in the easy repose of a woman who is content.
She did this sometimes, in the carriage, when she was at ease.
He had observed it on the journey north three days since and had said nothing of it and had no intention of doing so.
He watched the rise and fall of her breath.
The way a loose curl had come to rest against her jaw. The small, unguarded peace of her face.
He had not known, before Clara, that happiness could feel like this. Quiet. Undemanding. Like something that had always been there, waiting for him to stop moving long enough to find it.
He was watching the light lie long and amber across the far hills when he heard it.
A knock. Low and rhythmic, beneath the body of the carriage, keeping irregular time with the turning of the wheels.
He frowned and listened. It came again, and then again, slightly more pronounced than before, with the dull, patient insistence of something working itself loose by degrees.
He was on the point of raising his hand to knock upon the roof and call up to the coachman when the wheel gave.
There was no further warning. The knocking ceased.
In its place came a crack, felt through the boards beneath his feet before it reached his ears.
The world tilted violently to the left. Clara's eyes flew open.
She turned to him, his name already on her lips, and he reached for her, his hand closing on nothing but air.
The carriage went over.
The horses screamed. Timber cracked and splintered. The road was where the sky ought to have been. Then silence came down, absolute and complete, and he was on his back in the grass of the verge. Above him the sky was very blue. Altogether still. As though nothing had happened at all.
Darcy grunted, biting back the pain that shot through him. He tried to rise. His legs would not oblige him.
He turned his head. Clara lay in the grass beside him, near enough that he might have taken her hand without fully extending his arm.
Her eyes were closed. Her hair had come entirely loose and lay dark against the pallor of her face.
One hand rested open upon the ground between them, the fingers loosely curled.
A splinter of timber, no longer than a man's hand, protruded from just below her left shoulder.
The grass beneath her was dark and wet and growing darker.
“Clara.”
The horses were still crying somewhere at his back. He could hear the coachman shouting, and further along the road the second carriage drawing up, and the sound of boots upon gravel. Every sound reached him with complete and useless precision. None of it mattered. None of it was her.
He dragged himself forward. His legs were dead weight behind him, useless, trailing.
He did not care. He clawed at the grass with both hands and pulled himself to her side, the pain in his body a distant and irrelevant thing, and when he reached her he hauled himself upright and took her face in his hands.
“Clara.”
He held it and spoke her name again, and again after that, his voice measured and deliberate, as though maintaining calm alone might keep the matter within reach of remedy.
Her chest rose once, very slightly. Beneath his hand, her fingers tightened around his, only once, and then loosened.
His eyes did not leave her chest. It did not rise again.
Darcy did not hear the coachman arrive. The man fell to his knees in the grass nearby, his face cut and bleeding, his hat gone, his whole bearing still stunned from having been thrown such a distance and not yet fully comprehending it himself.
He looked at Clara. Then at Darcy. Something collapsed in his expression at once.
Marsh arrived next, on foot from the second carriage, breathing hard. He took one look at Clara. Then he looked at Darcy, and dropped to his knees beside him in the grass, and said nothing at all. There was nothing to say. They both knew it.
Darcy looked back at Clara. Her hand was warm still in his. The sky above was wide and blue. The light upon the hills to the west was gold. The road was quite empty in both directions. Nothing in the world was as it had been an hour before.
He did not know how long he sat there. Long enough for the light to begin to leave the hills.
Long enough for voices to gather on the road behind him, and for someone to send for help, and for help to come.
Long enough that when they finally, gently, compelled him to relinquish her hand, he had to be asked more than once.
He did not let go easily.
He did not let go at all, until he had no choice.