Fight
LII
Darcy rode at Elizabeth’s right hand. Once, when the way dropped steeply, and her mare took the descent with more spirit than comfort, his hand came out to the bridle before he appeared conscious of having moved. She steadied the horse herself, and he let go at once. Neither of them spoke of it.
The road north had not improved with the failing light.
The storm of the preceding night had torn at the lower bank and left one section half-slid into the ditch, so that they were obliged to leave the proper road for a field-track that had frozen and thawed and frozen again into ridges which declared their opinions of every horse’s hoof with unpleasant force.
Fitzwilliam ranged ahead in the intervals where the country opened and fell back beside them where it narrowed, his body carrying the old professional wariness of his trade.
Roads had long ago ceased to be innocent things to him.
There was too much in the air for speech, and what filled it was not quite silence but something denser — the kind of knowledge three people already held in common and had no need to speak aloud.
An hour before Inverurie, they turned into a farmyard to water the horses under cover of a wall.
The farmer accepted Darcy’s coin, examined none of their faces, and directed them to a trough with the incuriosity of a Scot who had survived long enough to understand that strangers upon winter roads were very seldom improved by questioning.
The horses drank steaming in the cold. Elizabeth stood between Darcy and the stone wall with her cloak pulled close and the marriage document flat against her ribs inside it. Somewhere in the byre, a cow shifted her weight and settled again.
Only then did she remember Falstaff.
The dog had remained at Auchengray.
Not from indifference. From speed. From the fact that life, when broken open quickly enough, did not always permit the proper sequence of loyalties.
Something sharp moved through her chest at the thought of him lying before the Great Hall fire or searching the passage for footsteps that had gone from the house too fast for farewell. There was no place to set it down.
Darcy’s arm came round her shoulders very briefly, drawing her nearer against the cold while the horses drank.
She let herself lean the smallest possible degree, enough to feel the breadth of him through wet wool and leather, enough to understand that the body could grieve even while the mind went on keeping accounts.
When they reached Inverurie, it was past midnight.
The inn yard lay still under a crust of old snow.
No wagon stood there. No late coach. The ostler who emerged at Fitzwilliam’s knock had the bleared expression of being dragged unwillingly from sleep and the grateful one of receiving more coin than the service deserved.
He took the horses without interest. Colonel Fitzwilliam went through first as he had done at every stop from Auchengray onward.
He came back almost at once.
Not alarmed. Not calm.
“Four soldiers in the front room,” he said under his breath. “Drinking little. Talking less. They are not on ordinary road duty.”
The air changed around them.
Elizabeth felt it not as fear at first but as sharpened arrangement, the swift inner gathering of mind and nerve she had known on the steps in Cheapside, in the parlour at Longbourn after her father’s death, at every turn this year where a thing had to be borne because there had proved no other person available to bear it.
She looked at Darcy. Every lighted room she had ever feared in her life seemed suddenly contained in that one inn beyond the door.
“Even if they are here looking for me, they do not know my face,” he reassured her. “And they would not expect me to be travelling with a woman and a colonel of the Fifth. Act naturally, and they will have no reason to suspect us.”
She made herself look at him as a wife looked at a husband on an ordinary January night, and he made himself look at her the same way, and they went into the inn together.
The innkeeper was a thick-set man with cautious eyes.
Richard asked for a parlour and two chambers above for himself and the gentleman and his lady.
The innkeeper said that they had only one chamber free upstairs, and a smaller one over the stable for the gentleman who would not mind it.
Richard said the gentleman would not mind it, and Elizabeth understood, even before he had said it, that Richard meant himself.
They were shown through to the parlour. The four soldiers in the front room did not look up as they passed. Elizabeth registered them only as four heads of hair, four shoulders, four cups on a scarred table, and a fire that had been allowed to burn down further than it ought.
In the parlour, the innkeeper’s daughter brought soup and bread and a jug of wine, and Elizabeth made herself eat what was put in front of her because to leave it untouched would have been to invite notice.
Darcy ate beside her at the small table.
Richard ate quickly, glanced once at the doorway, and then said, in the same idle tone, that he believed he would step into the taproom and warm his bones at the public fire for a while before he turned in.
Darcy did not look up. He only said, very well, and asked the girl for another cup of wine.
The girl went out. The room was quiet but for the soft popping of the parlour fire.
“He means to watch them,” Elizabeth said quietly.
Darcy nodded. “He will drink ale enough to make friends and keep himself warm, and little enough to stay upright.”
She put her hand on his under the table. He turned his and laced his fingers through hers and held there.
“Eat,” he said. “We have a long day tomorrow.”
She ate. She did not taste any of it. She watched him eat instead, the small ordinary motions of his hand and his jaw, and something small in her tore a little. She could not lose him, this man who had become her everything.
When she had finished, he stood and held out his hand, and she rose with him, and they went up the dim stair behind the innkeeper’s daughter who carried their single candle.
The chamber she showed them into was small and clean and cold, with a deep bed against the far wall and a narrow window looking out onto the inn yard.
The girl set the candle on the chest, made a small curtsey, and went out, and the latch fell, and they were alone.
Elizabeth crossed at once to the window and looked down into the yard. Three horses at a manger. No others. She could see the corner of the stable roof. Somewhere beneath it, Richard would have his pallet over the stable. She drew the curtain.
“Come here.” Darcy’s voice was very low.
She came. He had taken off his coat and was unbuckling his belt and laying his pistol on the chest beside the candle.
He drew her in against him and held her there a long moment without saying anything, his chin against the top of her head, his hand at the small of her back.
She could feel his heart through the wool of his waistcoat. It was steadier than hers.
“Are you frightened?” he murmured into her hair.
“I am a great many things at the moment. Frightened is among them.”
“It was a quiet entry. We were not noticed.”
“I know.”
“Sleep. We are away at first light. Richard will be in the yard before us.”
She nodded against his shoulder. She did not move for a few seconds, and then she stepped back and unbuttoned the front of her travelling gown with hands that did not entirely cooperate, and Darcy turned away to give her the small privacy that mattered to neither of them in any other circumstance, and she got into the bed in her shift and pulled the covers up.
He banked the fire and blew out the candle.
He came to bed in his shirt with his coat folded over the chair by the bed and the pistol within reach of his hand, and she felt the bed dip and his weight come down beside her, and his arm draw her in against him under the covers.
She put her face against his throat and her hand against his chest, where she could feel his pulse, and she lay there listening to him breathe.
“Fitzwilliam?”
“Mm.”
“If anything happens —”
“Sleep, Elizabeth.”
“If anything —”
“Sleep. Please. I cannot if you do not.”
She closed her eyes against his throat and made herself slow her breathing to match his, and after a long time of listening to the inn settle around them — a board creaking in the corridor, the murmur of the taproom voices growing fewer, the soft crack of the parlour fire dying through the floor — she slipped without meaning to into sleep.
She woke to a man shouting in the inn below — not a word, only the shape of a command — and a chair going over, and feet, several pairs of them at once, hard on the boards beneath her.
She turned in the bed for him without opening her eyes. Her hand went where his chest had been.
The sheet was warm. He was not in it.
She came up onto her elbow. The room was dark.
The fire had burned down to embers. His coat was gone from the chair.
The pistol was gone from the chest. The chamber door stood slightly open, the catch not quite caught, the way a man left a door who had wanted to slip out without the click of the latch waking his wife.
Below, the shouting continued. A voice she did not know was saying something she could not make out, and then, very clearly, cutting through the boards:
Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy.
She was out of the bed before she had decided to be. Her feet were on the cold floor, and her hand was on the door, and she was in the corridor in her shift with her hair down her back and no shoes. The back stair was three strides away in the dim, and she went down it.
She reached the half-landing when an arm came round her from behind and hauled her back off the next step so hard her feet left the floor, and a hand clamped over her mouth before the cry could leave it.