Chapter Twenty-Five
He went down to the meadow with Hadley.
He stayed exactly as long as judgment required and not one minute more, which was not many minutes, because Ashby’s account of the south wall concluded Hadley’s errand more efficiently than a dozen reasoned consultations.
He told Hadley he would return within the hour with his own eyes on the hatch.
He did not go back. He started up toward the house at a pace neither hurried nor concealed, and came in by the south door with the walk of a man who had come in innumerable times by that particular door.
Mrs Reeves was at the foot of the passage. Her face told him before her words did.
“The parlour’s empty, sir.”
“How long?”
“I cannot say, sir. I looked in a quarter-hour after you left. The bed was made and Miss Bennet was not in it. I did not wish to alarm Mrs Marsden before I had spoken to you.”
He went into the parlour. The bed had been made. The crutches stood in their place against the wall. The book she had claimed an interest in was open on the table at a page that did not match the place her finger had held when he had left the room.
He bent to look under the bed.
The bag was gone.
He had known before bending. Bending was for confirmation, not discovery. He straightened, went out by the south door without his hat and without any explanation for Mrs Reeves, who did not require one, and started down the lane.
The rain had thinned to a fine cold mist that silvered the gravel and reduced distances to within the eyesight of a man accustomed to the valley.
The crutch-marks on the path showed where she had gone—narrow and definite where the leg had held her, wider and uncertain where she had recovered a stagger.
The pattern told him, without having to be told, that she was already in pain and had gone on regardless, and that he had perhaps six minutes and no more in which to come up with her before her body ended her errand for her.
He saw her a hundred yards past the south gate. She was half-bent against the stone wall of the lane, her forehead to the stone.
“Elizabeth!”
It came out of him loud enough to lift rooks from the elms. Her head did not come up.
He was already running—at a pace neither training nor upbringing would have endorsed, because training and upbringing had no province in a lane where a woman he was trying not to name to himself was about to fall for the second time in ten days.
She was pale. There was a dampness at the hem of her cloak that was not rain. She looked him in the face with the dignity of a woman who had known, as she turned, that she had nothing left with which to argue and had decided to conduct the conversation nonetheless.
“You should not have come, Mr Darcy.”
“Should not have come? Elizabeth, you are bleeding into a lane!”
“It is only the wound. It has opened. It will close again. Let me on my way.”
“Are you bleeding mad? I will do no such thing. You are hardly fit to be out of your bed!”
He stopped a pace from her. His eyes went first to her face, then to the set of the crutch, then to the fold of the cloak over the leg she was plainly unable to keep straight beneath it. Dark blood showed at the cloak’s inner edge.
He moved to take her elbow.
“Do not, sir!” Her hand came up—not the one on the left crutch, which she could not spare, but the other—a small flat frantic gesture in the air between them. “Do not touch me. If you touch me, I shall not be able to stand again. Do not ask me how I know that. I only know I shall not stand again.”
His hand stopped. “Then sit, for Heaven’s sake.”
“No.”
“Sit in the lane, Elizabeth. Take my coat —”
“No. I cannot, sir.”
Footsteps came up the lane from below. Hadley, twenty paces off, his head down, his coat over his arm, spoke before he had looked up.
“Ah, there you are, sir. I was coming up to say the lower run’s gone queer again.
Bank’s giving where the lay turned wrong, and I thought to drop a hurdle across before dark if you —”
“Hadley. Not now.”
Hadley stopped. He looked up. His eyes went past Darcy to what was behind him, and his face changed. “Shall I fetch… someone, sir?”
Darcy glanced back in annoyance. “No. I will bring Miss Bennet back to the house myself.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “No.”
“Do not make me say it twice.”
“Then do not say it once in that tone! I am neither servant nor child to be ordered home because you dislike my direction!”
“I dislike your collapse in it!”
She winced. He took a breath that was not a help to him and brought his voice down to where he could trust it.
“You are hurt. Your leg is bleeding again.”
“Only because I came farther than I am used to. I only need to rest.”
“Stop, Elizabeth. I cannot pretend to understand, but there is something binding you and me and this place. This healing—this miraculous healing of yours is not real Elizabeth. It cannot last apart from here. You and the water—it defies all reason and sense, but you cannot go!”
She closed her eyes, breath hissing between her teeth. “You are a rational man, Mr Darcy. Your kindness has lead you to assume nonsense because you cannot bear it to be otherwise.”
“You heard what Hadley just said. The valley is already answering. Do you think I cannot see what your leaving in this condition would do—to my sister, to this house, to every creature already taking its temper from ours? If you have any justice in you, Elizabeth, come back before you do more damage to yourself and to everyone else.”
She shook her head. “Everyone else will be safer if I go.”
“You do not know that.”
“I know enough.”
“Then tell me this much, Elizabeth—for I cannot get it out of you any other way! You drew the line in the parlour last week. I observed it. I have not crossed it. I have not crowded it. I have not asked you for one thing you had asked me not to ask. And still you keep stepping back. You set the distance further than the line you said you needed. Tell me why. Tell me why a woman who asked me for thickness between charge and guest has spent the days since moving further from a man who has given her exactly that.”
“Because the line was not enough.”
“Not enough for what?”
“Not enough to keep what was becoming between us from becoming further.” She did not lower her eyes. “I drew it because I thought it would be sufficient. It is not. I cannot stay in your house, Mr Darcy. I am protecting you. Do you not see that I am protecting you?”
“From what? From the use of my own judgement? From the choice of a man old enough to make it? Elizabeth, you cannot make that decision for me by walking out of my gate on a torn leg! Whatever you imagine you are saving me from is mine to refuse—not yours to refuse on my behalf!”
“You do not know what you are refusing!”
“Then tell me!”
“I cannot —”
“No. You know fear.“ His voice came up rough.
“And there is something for you to fear—I am not blind to it, I have not played the fool with you—which is why I will not see you crawl into it half-healed and alone! You are letting fear choose the hour, the road, and the cost for every one of us, and I will not—I will not—bear it!”
“Fear is not always false reasoning, sir! Sometimes it is merely speedier than hope.”
“Then let hope lag behind as it pleases! I will not debate philosophy with you in a lane while you stand on a torn leg and the carrier misbehaves below us!”
“Of course not. You prefer to decide and let the rest of us be grateful afterward.”
He could not—he tried, and could not—get the next sentence past his teeth. He put his hand against the stone of the lane wall because his hand had to go somewhere, and there was nowhere on her he could put it. The cold of the stone went into him. It did not steady him.
“Elizabeth.”
She closed her eyes.
“Don’t. Don’t say it again. Please, sir, don’t say it again.”
“I will say it until you tell me one true thing.”
“I cannot—”
“You will! Or I will carry you back to that house against your wishes for the second time and call it the only kindness left to me! I am at the end of my civility, Elizabeth—at the end of it! If there is a man, give me his name! If there is danger, tell me what it is! I have given you my sister, and this house, and every hour of my care, and I have not asked you for one sentence I could not bear to hear—give me one!”
Her hand had not come down. The trembling had gone further into her arm and into the crutch, which had gone wrong under her again. There was a sound from the lower meadow—water in a channel it had not yet found, looking for one.
“You cannot help me, Mr Darcy. There is no help. There is only—” She could not finish.
“There is only what, Elizabeth?”
She shook her head, once, hard, and the crutch went out from under her, and he had her before her shoulder reached the stone.
He did not answer at once, because her instinct for the line that would cost him had not dulled in three weeks of a sickbed, and she had used it now with the full force of a woman at the end of her reserves.
The quarrel had briefly shown what it was under the surface—whether either of them could bear the other exercising a will where something neither had yet named had begun to grow.
“At present”—and the control he gave the words was more dangerous for being control—”I prefer to keep you from falling into the road and bleeding through the dressings. If that appears tyranny, madam, I shall have to survive the charge.”
She moved her weight in anger.
A sound broke from her—short, involuntary, the breath driven out of her by a pain she had underestimated—and her hand flew to the wall.
Then the leg went.
“Elizabeth—”
He was there before the wall could take her a second time, one arm around her back, the other under her good elbow. He brought her upright with the swiftness of a man who had imagined this need more often in the preceding week than he was prepared to admit to any living soul.