Chapter 2
THE STORM
Darcy had ridden out that morning with no destination in mind, only a desperate need to escape.
His horse, a black gelding named Atlas, had sensed his mood from the moment he swung into the saddle.
The animal moved now with ears pricked forward, alert to his master's tension.
Darcy loosened his grip on the reins and forced his shoulders to drop.
It was not the horse's fault that Miss Bingley had spent the better part of an hour expounding upon Italian silk versus French, nor that she had hinted, with all the subtlety of a cavalry charge, that Pemberley's mistress would require extensive knowledge of such things.
He had excused himself with a curtness that would fuel her complaints for days.
He did not care.
The gray sky pressed low over the Hertfordshire countryside, heavy clouds threatening weather he ought to have heeded.
Atlas snorted and tossed his head as a gust of wind cut across the lane, carrying the sharp scent of coming snow.
Darcy patted the horse's neck, his mind already wandering where it would.
To her. It always wandered to her now.
Elizabeth Bennet, with her fine eyes and her sharp tongue and her laughter, that reminded him of everything he had lost.
Atlas stumbled on a frozen rut, and Darcy gathered the reins, steadying them both.
The lane had grown rougher here, winding along the edge of a winter-bare copse where skeletal branches creaked in the wind.
He should turn back. The sky had darkened since he set out, and even his foul mood did not warrant catching his death on a Hertfordshire back road.
He did not turn back.
Instead, he let Atlas find his own pace while the memory of the Meryton assembly stabbed at him without warning, as it did a dozen times a day.
Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.
He flinched from his remembered words the way one flinches from a burn. He had not meant it. God help him, he had not meant a single syllable. But the reasons he had said it, those he was not yet prepared to examine.
He thought instead of Georgiana. Her last letter had arrived two days ago, written in the careful hand she was still perfecting, full of news about her progress on a new sonata and a tentative request to visit London before Christmas.
She had seemed brighter in recent weeks, steadier.
The shadow that Ramsgate had cast over her was lifting at last, and he clung to that as evidence that wounds could heal, that time could do its quiet work even on the deepest cuts.
He ought to write to her tonight. He had been neglecting his correspondence shamefully.
A crow launched itself from a nearby oak, its harsh cry cutting through his thoughts. Atlas shied sideways, and Darcy steadied him with his knees, murmuring low reassurance until the horse settled. The wind was picking up now, biting through his greatcoat, but he made no move toward shelter.
His thoughts drifted, unbidden, to the militia officers who had descended upon Meryton like a plague of redcoats.
Most were harmless enough, young men with more charm than sense, content to dance and flirt their way through the winter.
But one among them made Darcy's jaw tighten every time their paths crossed.
He had said nothing to anyone. There was nothing to say that would not expose Georgiana's ordeal, and he would cut out his own tongue before he allowed that.
Still, it was some small mercy that Wickham's particular brand of charm seemed directed at the younger Bennet sisters rather than anyone Darcy was obliged to protect.
Let the man make himself agreeable to Miss Lydia and Miss Kitty. Let him be their problem.
It was not a generous thought. He did not feel generous.
The first snowflakes caught him by surprise, pulling him from his brooding reverie with the sharp awareness of a man who had grown up in Derbyshire's unpredictable weather.
He looked up at the sky and cursed under his breath.
The clouds had thickened while he rode, transforming from gray to an ominous greenish-white that spoke of serious snow.
He should turn back.
Atlas stamped and blew, shaking his mane against the flakes settling on his neck.
Darcy gathered the reins, already calculating the distance to Netherfield.
A quarter-hour's hard ride, perhaps less if he pushed.
The snow was still light, scattered flakes drifting downward, more nuisance than danger. He had time.
He turned Atlas toward home.
But the wind shifted as he did, gusting hard from the north, and the lazy flakes became something else.
Within moments, the air thickened. What had been a gentle drift transformed into a driving curtain of white, stinging his face and obscuring the lane ahead.
Atlas balked, tossing his head against the sudden assault, and Darcy had to fight to keep his seat as the horse danced sideways.
“Easy,” he murmured, though his own heart had begun to pound. “Easy, boy.”
He had seen storms like this in Derbyshire, had been caught in one as a boy of twelve, when a clear morning turned deadly in less than an hour.
His father's groom had found him huddled against a stone wall, half-frozen and terrified, and the memory of that helpless cold had never quite left him.
A man on horseback had some chance in weather like this. A man on foot had very little.
A person on foot, alone, far from shelter—
The thought seized him with sudden, irrational force.
He twisted in the saddle, scanning the white-shrouded landscape.
Visibility had dropped to perhaps thirty yards, the familiar countryside rendered strange and formless by the driving snow.
He could see the dark smudge of the copse to his left, the pale suggestion of a stone wall to his right, and beyond that—
Movement.
Atlas felt his master's tension and stilled, ears straining forward.
Darcy narrowed his eyes against the snow, not quite believing what he saw.
A figure struggled through the accumulating white, small and dark against the landscape, moving with the desperate determination of someone who knew they were in trouble.
Even at this distance, even through the thickening curtain of falling snow, Darcy recognized her.
He would have recognized her anywhere, in any weather, at any distance. The way she moved, the stubborn set of her shoulders, the dark hair escaping from beneath her bonnet. It was Elizabeth, and she was in great trouble indeed.
He kicked his horse into motion before conscious thought could catch up with instinct, urging the animal through deepening drifts with a recklessness that would have appalled his stable master.
The wind had risen to a howl, driving snow into his face with stinging force, but he barely felt it.
All he could see was Elizabeth, growing larger as he closed the distance between them, and all he could think was that he could not abandon her to the elements.
She turned at the sound of hoofbeats, her face pale and pinched with cold, snowflakes caught in her dark lashes.
Even half-frozen, she managed to look at him with something like defiance, as if daring him to comment on her predicament.
It was so infuriatingly Miss Elizabeth that Darcy felt something twist in his chest, something that might have been relief or might have been something far more dangerous.
“Miss Elizabeth.” He reined in beside her, fighting to keep his voice steady when every nerve screamed at him to snatch her up and carry her to safety by force. “What in God's name are you doing out here?”
“Walking,” she replied, and even through the chattering of her teeth, he could hear the dry humor that had first captivated him. “Though I confess the weather has rather exceeded my expectations.”
Darcy wanted to shake her, to demand what madness had driven her out into a storm that could kill her, and he wanted to kiss her until neither of them could remember their own names.
Instead, he swung down from his horse and faced her with all the composure he could muster, which was less than he would have liked.
“You will freeze to death if you remain out here. There is a cottage nearby, on the edge of the Netherfield grounds. We must reach it as soon as we can.”
Her chin lifted, that stubborn chin he had memorized without meaning to. “I can find my own way back to Longbourn, thank you.”
The sheer absurdity of her pride in this moment would have made him laugh if he had not been so terrified. “Can you? Which direction is Longbourn, Miss Elizabeth? Point to it, if you please.”
He watched her falter, watched the realization dawn in those fine dark eyes that she was lost. The snow had erased the landscape, transforming familiar paths into featureless white expanses that offered no guidance whatsoever.
She could wander for hours in this storm and never find her way home, could stumble into a ditch or a frozen pond, or collapse from exhaustion and cold.
The thought made his stomach clench with something very close to panic.
“That is what I thought.” Her hand was ice-cold even through her gloves, and he could feel the tremors running through her body with increasing violence.
They had very little time. “The cottage is less than a quarter mile from here. I know the way. Will you come, or will you stand here arguing until we both succumb to the cold?”
Something shifted in her expression. Some internal battle between pride and practicality that he recognized because he fought it himself every time he looked at her.
Pride had kept him silent when he should have spoken. Had made him cruel when he longed to be kind.
But pride would not save either of them now.
When she finally gave a small, tight nod, Darcy did not hesitate. He stepped forward, placed his hands at her waist, and lifted her into Atlas's saddle.