Chapter Nineteen #2
He could not bear to think of Miss Bennet in their hands, far from her family, far from any friend, out upon the road with no one to stand between her and whatever purpose they might have.
A man who had nothing more at stake than common decency would have gone after her. A man who felt what he was feeling—
He cut that thought off before it formed. He would not examine it. Not now. Not while there was work to be done.
“Sir?” Anders called from the box.
“Now,” he said, raising his voice to be heard. He rapped the coach roof with his knuckles.
The wheels found the frozen ruts, bumped, settled. The inn yard fell away behind them. They passed out into the narrow street that would take them back onto the main road.
Darcy’s gaze was drawn to the strip of pale winter sky above the roofs. He spoke to himself in a hoarse growl. “They cannot know the roads as Johnson knows them. If they think an hour’s start will serve them, they are mistaken.”
The carriage turned onto the Great North Road and the fields opened out to either side. A thin skin of snow lay upon the hedges and the ditches. Mud, frozen and refrozen, made ridges like iron. The horses leaned into the traces. Steam rose from their flanks.
The carriage rocked and jolted. Darcy braced his boots against the floor and his shoulders against the squabs, letting the familiar rhythm of wheels and harness work upon his mind. The worst of the stupor had gone, but the remainder of heaviness yet clung to him.
Laudanum. He swallowed, the word as bitter in his mouth as the drug had been in his tea. His heart thudded, unpleasantly aware how a few more swallows would have had him waking not at nine but past noon, to find Miss Bennet already halfway to London under their protection—or their control.
The carriage wheel struck a ridge of frozen mud and came down with a jolt that jarred his teeth. Outside, Anders called out to the horses, steadying them with his voice as much as his hands. The horses settled into their pull again.
Darcy dragged off one glove and pressed thumb and forefinger hard against the bridge of his nose. Think. There must be some reason, some plan. People did not dose gentlemen and abscond with a young lady merely for the novelty of it.
Money was the simplest answer.
But why her? There were any number of foolish young women in England. Why fix upon her? Unless they also believed what she had been told. Unless they truly imagined Thurnian gold at the end of their plan.
Or, he thought, his head pounding, unless it was never about the Bennets at all. The carriage swayed; the leather straps creaked. He found his hand had clenched upon his knee. He forced the fingers to uncurl.
Despite her stubborn insistence on a royal birthright, Miss Bennet was not a fool. She did not follow blindly. She questioned, argued, resisted. He had felt the full force of that resistance more than once.
Darcy blinked. The edges of his vision blurred for a moment, then sharpened again.
He cursed the laudanum silently and with all the fluency of a man who rarely cursed at all.
Had his head been clear the previous night, he might have observed some sign, heard some careless phrase that betrayed their intention.
Had he not allowed temper and irritation to govern him, he might have persuaded her, calmly, rationally, to put herself under his protection rather than theirs.
He could not recall when he had last felt so entirely unequal to his own feelings.
They carried on for an hour and a half before the carriage slowed. He became aware of a subtle change in its motion and then the sound of Johnson’s voice, calling back through the small sliding panel above the front window.
“Tollgate ahead, sir. The first on this road. There’s a bit of a queue.”
Darcy’s pulse leapt. The first toll would be their earliest certain measure.
Any carriage bound for London on this road must pass here.
He glanced at his watch. The hand had crept further than he liked, but not so far as he had feared.
If Sir Reginald’s coach had indeed left an hour before his own, and if they had travelled at a more moderate pace, not wishing to stand out, they might already have begun to make up the lost distance.
“Get us through as quick as you may,” he said. “I must speak to the keeper.”
“Yes, sir.”
The carriage rolled forward at a walk. Darcy looked out the window to see the low white tollhouse by the side of the road, its small windows staring out upon the traffic.
A pole-bar, striped black and white, barred the way across the turnpike.
Before it stood a waggon piled high with bales.
Behind that, a light gig waited, its driver stamping his feet upon the ground as he spoke to the man at the gate.
When it was near their turn, he flung the door open before Anders even knew what he was about and swung himself to the ground.
His legs protested at being so abruptly required; the road came up harder than it ought.
He caught himself against the side of the carriage and straightened, forcing his body to obey him.
The air cut at his lungs, sharp with the mingled scents of horse, mud, and wood smoke from the toll-house chimney. He strode past the waggon, ignoring the driver’s muttered complaint, and came up to the small hatch where the tollkeeper sat ensconced, like some gnome at his treasure.
The man looked up, startled, as Darcy’s shadow fell across the little opening.
“Your toll, sir,” he said, his voice wary. “Your carriage must come up in its turn.”
“It will,” Darcy said shortly. “I shall pay for it. But first, answer me: has a small coach passed this way this morning?” He described Sir Reginald.
The man’s eyes widened in the gloom. “Why, now, that is a particular gentleman if ever I heard one.” He scratched his cheek beneath a week’s growth of beard, squinting past Darcy as if the coach might yet be visible upon the road.
“Aye. Aye, there was such a turn-out. Had the impudence to toss the toll at me as they went.”
“When?” The word came out sharper than he intended.
The tollkeeper jerked back slightly, then peered at the small clock behind him on a desk as if it might assist his memory.
“Now, let me see. The London mail went through just afore sunrise. This one came after the York stage, but before old Jacobs’s waggon.
” He craned out of the hatch and shouted, “Jacobs! What time was you here before?”
The waggoner, who had been listening with every appearance of indifference, grunted. “Half after nine, Jem. You know it, for you was complainin’ as how I was late and would have all the world comin’ at once.”
“There, you have it,” Jem said, turning back to Darcy. “The other coach was through a good three-quarters of an hour ago.”
Three-quarters of an hour.
Darcy’s heart, which had leapt at the first confirmation, now eased into a steadier beat. An hour’s start at the inn; forty-five minutes here. They had taken back a quarter of an hour in scarcely ten miles.
“Did you note the company?” he asked. “The occupants of the coach?”
“One gentleman, one lady, that I saw plain. There might have been another woman inside; I cannot swear to it.” The man’s brow creased as he searched his recollection.
Elizabeth.
“You will take my toll now,” he said more evenly.
“Another officious gentleman,” the man muttered, rummaging in his drawer for the toll-book. “That will be—”
Darcy paid him without really listening to the amount. Johnson had brought the coach up by then; the pole rose, the heavy bar swung aside. Steam puffed from the horses’ nostrils as they stamped, eager to be gone.
He turned back as Anders jumped down to open the door.
“Well, sir?” Anders asked in a low voice.
“They passed here not long before nine,” Darcy said, climbing in. “We have gained upon them.”
Anders’s eyes narrowed with grim satisfaction. “Yes sir.”
They had made up time. Fact. Measurable.
Yet the laudanum still lay like lead at the base of his skull.
His muscles still ached with a slight heaviness.
His thoughts, though clearer, were still not what they ought to be.
And however ill Sir Reginald managed his team, he had the advantage of that first hour, and of Miss Bennet in his carriage.
Darcy closed his eyes for a moment, feeling each jolt travel up his spine. He would ride this carriage into the ground if need be. He would spend every horse on the road between here and London. He would strip himself to the bone before he allowed them to carry her beyond his reach.
They were gaining.
But was it fast enough?