Chapter Five
“Look what you’ve done,” said Elizabeth.
I turned to her, absolutely flummoxed. “What I’ve done.”
“Well, yes,” she said.
“You’re not blaming me for this, are you?”
“You were obviously too heavy for the steps,” she said. “I had no issues climbing them. You broke them with your great, heavy, massively large shoulders and all of… that.” She gestured at me.
“Madam,” I said in disbelief, “I am not the person who insisted upon coming into this house.”
“Well,” she said, sitting up straight, “I believe I told you more than once not to follow me.”
I glared at her.
She glared at me.
I sighed. “All right, never mind. It doesn’t matter whose fault it is that we are in this predicament, we are in it.
We need to get down.” I crawled back over to the edge, where the stairs had once been, and I looked down at the floor.
“I think it’s all right. It’s not that long of a drop.
I shall just scoot off here and go for help. You stay up there.”
“You are going to leave me all alone here?”
“Have I gone mad, madam, or is that not what you have wished for all along?” I said, more sharply than I might have meant to say it.
“You’re right, of course,” she said. “Yes, I shall be absolutely fine here, and you will not be gone ever so long, will you? You wouldn’t leave me here, trapped here, until dark?”
“No, of course not. I shall go up to the main house and find Bingley and we shall come and get you down,” I said. “All it wants is a ladder. It’s a simple solution.”
“All right,” she said in a small voice.
I glanced back at her. “I could offer to stay, but that seems foolish. No one knows where we are.”
“No, of course,” she said. “You know, perhaps I can simply jump down too.” She scooted up next to me, carefully dangling her legs over the side, and she looked down.
“No,” I said, immediately. “The wood there, it’s broken into splinters. They’re standing up like shards. It’s not safe.”
“If it’s not safe for me, it’s not safe for you.”
I looked down at the broken pieces of stairs. “I have… better shoes than you.”
“I don’t think you do!” she cried.
“I’m fine,” I said firmly, resolving to push myself right off the edge now. I took a deep breath and…
Did not scoot off.
The splinters of wood looked sharp and I could just imagine one of them piercing through my clothing, right into the flesh of my calf or my inner thigh or—well, anyway, if I were going feet first, there were a number of tender areas that might be harmed.
“Don’t do it, Mr. Darcy,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t want you to. What if you break your leg, and then you are just down there, in pain, and I can’t get to you, and you are bleeding and the blood brings wolves—”
“There are no wild wolves in England anymore, I don’t warrant, Miss Bennet,” I interrupted.
“Well, then, dogs,” she said. “Wild dogs. Ones that have gotten free from their masters or ones who are trained by highwaymen to fight in dog fights—”
“Highwaymen train wild dogs to fight?” I said. “Where are you getting these ideas?”
“I’m only saying—”
“What are you saying?”
“Don’t,” she said, cringing. “Stay here. I don’t think it’s safe.”
I let out a breath. “All right, perhaps this part of the landing, it’s not the right part.” I got up, got to my feet.
“Don’t!” she cried, reaching up for me. “You’ll topple over.”
“I shan’t!” I said, but I moved over closer to the wall.
The landing here ran across about ten feet or so, and here, in the space next to where the stairs had been, there was a railing.
I walked down and leaned over the railing.
“Perhaps what I shall do is to climb over the railing, and then leap down here. Because there’s nothing there, you see. Just the floor.”
“You might go straight through it,” said Elizabeth, breathless, still sitting next to the place where the stairs had fallen off.
“Well, look, we can’t stay here and simply wait for someone to come for us.” I hooked a leg over the railing.
“Don’t!” she cried.
I felt dizzy. I clutched at the railing and stood with one foot on either side of it. The railing was a little longer than my legs, and so I was up on tiptoe. The dizziness increased, and I realized that this was impossible.
It was one thing to scoot off the ledge over there from a seated position, down onto where the stairs were, and it was another thing entirely to leap, from a standing position, all the way down to the floor. It was simply too far. My body rebelled.
She was probably right.
I should break a bone if I did it.
But what were we to do?
I hesitated, staring down, unsure of anything, and then I pulled my leg back and backed up against the wall.
Up here, on either side of this landing, there were two rooms, likely bedchambers or something of that nature. I peered through the open doorway of the one closest to me to see that there was a bed frame in there, but that it was broken in two, no mattress.
On the other side, the door was closed.
I started in that direction.
“What are you doing?” she cried.
I tried that door, and it opened onto a room that looked in much better shape than the rest of the house, likely because it had been shut up.
There was a bed here, no bedding, of course, but the mattress looked intact and not entirely filthy.
There was only one window here. The other was the one that had been boarded up.
“They won’t know where we are,” I said. “They will have no idea where to look. If we cannot get out of here, we may have to stay the night.”
She came into the room behind me and looked around. “I can’t be away overnight with…”
“Under the circumstances, Miss Bennet, no one will think anything untoward. I shall explain what happened, of course, and—”
“Oh, yes, what will you say? ‘I pursued a young woman, against her will, into an abandoned house, and then destroyed the only way out and trapped us both there and then opened a door and said, “Oh, look a bed!”’”
I turned to face her, eyebrows raised. “You have not just said that.”
She licked her lips.
I walked out of the room. “Well, go in there and shut the door on me, then?”
She hesitated.
I gestured for her to enter.
She cringed. “I am out of sorts, sir. This… this has been a trying afternoon.”
“By all means, if you are frightened I have engineered this as a means to trespass against your honor, please put some barrier between us,” I said.
She glared at me, entered the room, and slammed the door.
The entire house trembled.
I cringed. “Not so forcefully, if you don’t mind.”
“Apologies,” came her voice from within.
I sat down on the floor and looked down at the ruined steps below and tried to convince myself to jump down on them. Maybe if I aimed myself properly, I’d avoid the worst of the wooden shards?
“Obviously, I know you have no interest in trespassing against my honor.”
“I am happy to hear that,” I said.
“Because I am the ugly joke between you and Miss Bingley. Which should not have hurt my feelings so deeply, I suppose, but I have been so worried about my sister, and Miss Bingley has made it quite obvious she does not like it that I am here, and I would leave, of course, but Jane is ill, and why must Miss Bingley be so terrible to call me ugly on top of everything else, and why must you play those games with her, sir, why, when you are a man, and it is nothing to you whether some girl like me is plain or pretty, really?”
I shook my head at all of that, rather confused. “Miss Bennet, no one thinks you’re ugly.”
She scoffed from within.
“Miss Bingley is jealous of you,” I said.
She scoffed again.
Why was I telling her this?
I took a deep breath. “All right, here it is. I am going to jump, and if I am hurt, what I wish you to do—”
She opened the door. “You shall not jump.”
I licked my lips. “I must do something.”
“Why would she be jealous?”
I looked up at her through the space between the wall and the door where she had opened it. I was sitting on the edge still, trying to find the courage to jump down. I found that I couldn’t look at her. I looked down instead. “I have given her an impression of me, on accident, I suppose.”
“Yes, well, that’s obvious,” she said.
I looked up at her. “Is it?”
She smirked. “‘I mend pens remarkably well.’”
I smirked, too. “Yes, all right.”
“‘How can you write so evenly?’” she gushed, giving her head a little toss.
I chuckled. “We should not. She deserves it, in all truth, but I have sworn not to be unkind in this way. Of course, you caught me earlier saying that thing about…” I cleared my throat.
“It was cruel, but it wasn’t meant to be cruel to you, only to her.
I have never given her any real reason to suspect I had any intentions toward her.
She does not like it that I find you fetching, but she has no claim on me. ”
Elizabeth slammed the door again.
What?
I let out a heavy sigh and glared up at the door. “All right, we shan’t talk. I am sorry. I’ve said it before, but I shall say it again and again, I imagine. I shall not tire of saying it. I promise.”
Nothing from her.
“If I am hurt, however, after I jump, we should have another plan held back in reserve, and let us plan that now.”
She opened the door. “You must promise not to leap down, sir.”
“What should I do, then? Sit here and do nothing? Simply make sure to stay on this side of the door and not to violate you?”
“I know you’re not going to violate me,” she said, sitting down inside the open door. “Leave off saying that, if you don’t mind.”
I nodded. “Of course.”
“Now, let us also leave off discussing the leaping,” she said. “That’s mad, and you will injure yourself. Tell me you agree.”
“No, I don’t agree, though,” I said. “I think I must jump. You know, Caroline doesn’t even know this, but I am sort of betrothed, anyway.”
“How is one ‘sort of’ betrothed?”
“Well, everyone talks about it as if it’s just decided, but there’s no real agreement or binding papers or anything like that. So, I suppose I don’t have to do it.”