Chapter 9 Tracks
TRACKS
Darcy woke, reaching for her.
His hand found cold wool and empty air, and for one disoriented heartbeat he could not understand why the warmth was gone, why the shape of her was missing from the space his body had curved around in the night.
Then consciousness arrived like a blow, and he was sitting upright on the floor of the cottage, staring at the rumpled blankets beside him, at the hollow where her body had been.
The fire was nearly dead. Gray ash and a single ember, pulsing.
He knew before he stood. Before he checked the storeroom or the conservatory or called her name into the silence. He knew by the quality of the emptiness, the absence not just of a person but of their intention to return.
She had run.
He stood. His body moved through the motions, putting on his boots, greatcoat, and gloves while his mind worked with the cold efficiency of a man accustomed to crisis.
He had managed an estate since the age of two-and-twenty.
He knew how to set aside feeling when feelings were an impediment to action.
But his hands shook as he pulled on his boots, and the shaking was not from the cold.
He opened the cottage door. Her footprints led away across the clearing, straight and purposeful, the stride of a woman who knew where she was going.
They were perhaps an hour old. The edges had blurred, but the depressions were still readable.
She had headed south toward the hedgerow that marked the boundary of Netherfield's grounds.
Toward Longbourn.
She had run from him. From this. From the blankets on the floor and the way their bodies had found each other in sleep, and the knowledge of what they had done in the dark, his mouth on her breast, her voice saying his name, the raw terrible honesty of wanting that had cracked them both open.
She had run because she was afraid, and he understood her fear with a clarity that made him want to put his fist through the cottage wall, because it was the same fear he had carried his entire adult life.
The fear of feeling too much. The fear of building a life on love and having death or disillusion tear it down.
She was not running from him. She was running from the possibility that loving him might destroy her.
He understood. And the understanding gutted him worse than contempt ever could.
But understanding would not keep her warm. Understanding would not find her when the bright morning turned, as bright mornings after heavy snow so often did in the country, when the fog rose from the warming snow and swallowed the world whole.
He rounded the cottage to the stable.
Atlas stood where he had been settled the day before, his dark head lifting at Darcy's approach.
The hay was eaten, though a few stalks remained, trampled into the frozen ground.
The horse looked rested, thankfully, alert, ears pricked forward.
Darcy ran a hand along the animal's neck and felt the solid warmth of a horse ready to work.
“One more ride,” he murmured. “Then we can both rest.”
He tacked Atlas with hands that moved from memory — bridle, saddle, girth — and swung up before the last buckle was set. The horse stepped out of the stable into the snow and Darcy turned him south, following the line of footprints that led away from the cottage.
Her stride had been long at first, confident.
He could read her in the prints. But within a quarter mile the stride shortened.
Wavered. The snow was deeper than she had expected, and she was wading now rather than walking, each print a deep plunge that spoke of effort, of clothing growing heavy with wet, of a body working harder than it should.
The hedgerow ended and her tracks veered east. Away from Longbourn. She had lost the path.
He urged Atlas faster.
The fog caught him ten minutes later, rolling in from the south like smoke, thick and pale and disorienting.
Within moments the world compressed to a gray sphere, the hedgerows and trees reduced to dark suggestions at the edge of vision.
He could still see her tracks, but they were growing harder to read, the fog softening every edge, and he realized with a sickening lurch that the fog had caught her too.
She was out there somewhere in this, alone, soaked through, with no landmarks and no bearings and the cold that killed by degrees, while its victims grew drowsy and warm.
He thought of Georgiana.
The thought arrived unbidden, sharp as a blade between his ribs.
If Elizabeth died in this fog, if he rode in circles while she froze, there would be no one to explain it to.
Not to Bingley, who would be bewildered and then guilty and then grieving for the sister of the lady he wished to wed.
Not to her family, who would never know how she had spent her last night or who had held her.
And not to Georgiana, who would receive a letter from a brother too shattered to write clearly, and who would never understand why Hertfordshire had broken him.
He would become his father. Hollowed out by a loss he could never speak of, haunting the halls of Pemberley with a grief that had no name because the woman who inspired it had died before she could be claimed.
He would not allow it.
“Elizabeth!” His voice cracked against the fog and fell flat, swallowed by the white. He called again. And again. Atlas plodded forward, ears swiveling, trusting his rider's urgency.
The tracks grew fainter. Shorter. She was stumbling now. He could see where she had fallen, a body-shaped depression in the snow, and where she had dragged herself upright and staggered on. The sight of that depression, that outline of her in the snow, made his vision blur.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his glove and kept riding.
The stone wall appeared as a dark line in the fog, and Atlas stopped of his own accord, ears pointed. The snow had drifted deep against the stones, too deep for the horse, who balked and blew and would not go further.
Darcy was out of the saddle before the animal had fully stopped.
He waded into the drift. The snow came almost to his thighs, soaking through his breeches, the cold so vicious it stole his breath. He pushed forward with his arms as much as his legs, his eyes fixed on the place where the wall curved and a dark shape moved against its base.
She was on her feet. Barely. One hand on the wall, the other pressed against her ribs, dragging herself forward through the snow with the dogged, mechanical determination of someone operating on will alone.
Her pelisse was dark with wet. Her hair had come undone and hung in lank strands around her face.
She was shivering. He could see the tremors from twenty feet away, violent, uncontrollable. But she was moving.
She was moving, and the sight of her, so diminished from the woman who had kissed him with such ferocity only hours ago and still refusing to stop, cracked something inside along a fault line he had not known existed. “Elizabeth.”
Her head turned, slow and effortful, the response of a body spending its last reserves. Her eyes found his through the fog, and he watched recognition arrive. Not quickly. Not with the sharp intelligence he was accustomed to. Gradually, as if she were surfacing from deep water.
"You c-c-came," she managed against his chest, her teeth chattering so violently the words were barely words. Her lips were blue. "I kn-knew you would c-come."
Her grip on the wall loosened. Her knees buckled.
He caught her before she hit the snow, gathered her against his chest and stood, lifting her as he had done once before in a storm that felt like a lifetime ago.
She was lighter than she should have been, or he was stronger than he knew, or desperation had lent him something beyond his ordinary capability.
Her head fell against his shoulder. Her hand found the lapel of his greatcoat and gripped it with a strength that surprised him, a drowning woman's grip, fierce and instinctive.
“I am sorry,” she said against his neck. The words were slurred, half-lost to the cold. “I am sorry I ran.”
“I know.” He turned and waded back toward Atlas, carrying her through the snow.
The horse stood where he had left him, patient and steady, watching his master's approach with ears pricked forward.
“I know why you ran. And you are going to tell me everything, but not now. Now you are going to be quiet and let me take you home.”
She made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob. Her grip on his lapel did not loosen.
“Home,” she repeated, the word muffled against his collar. “Where is home?”
He did not answer. He reached Atlas and shifted her weight, lifting her into the saddle with an effort that cost him more than he showed.
She slumped forward over the horse's neck, her fingers finding the mane, and he saw her body curl into the animal's warmth the way she had done in the first storm.
He took the reins and turned Atlas north.
Toward the cottage. Toward the conversation they would have when she was warm enough to have it, and the truth they would both speak.
The fog pressed in around them, close and white and directionless, but Darcy did not falter. The cottage was less than a mile away. He walked. Atlas followed. Elizabeth shivered against the horse's neck.
He did not look back. He did not slow down. He listened to her breathing, shallow and rapid against the horse's mane, and he walked faster.