Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
CAROLINE COMING AROUND THE MUD
Elizabeth
“Lizzy!” Georgiana’s voice carried over the squelching sounds of boots slipping through the mud. She reached me—hatless, her riding habit spattered with mud to the waist, and her dark hair coming loose from its pins in a way that Darcy’s programme of improvement would most certainly disapprove of.
She caught my hands, breathless. “Miss Bennet. Caroline fell. She dismounted, but her foot caught, and she twisted her ankle. Then her horse shied, and Mr. Bingley rode off for help. And I didn’t tie the horses, and now they’re gone.”
“Georgiana.” I held her arms steady and looked into eyes so like her brother’s that it constituted a small, personal inconvenience. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “But the horses.”
“Are on their way back to the stable and their oats, but how is Caroline?”
“She’s hurt,” she said, her voice wavering. “But she’s still alive.”
“That’s good to know, I suppose.” Fortifying myself for the mess of broken bones, I held Georgiana by the hand as if she were a baby Lydia and led her toward the bright-orange riding habit sprawled on the muddy, freshly plowed field.
My heart was hammering hard enough to hear, and the closer we drew, the more my imagination supplied—a leg bent at an impossible angle, blood gushing from a gaping wound, a collarbone sticking out of her neck, and perhaps, a ghastly gash across her skull or worse.
The wind corrected this impression before we arrived.
“—absolutely criminal, a rabbit hole the size of a crater! I shall have words with whoever is responsible for maintaining this wasteland. And my habit is utterly beyond salvage—if you think for one moment that I intend to sit in this filth while Charles takes his own sweet time—”
I shook my head and turned to Georgiana, who was still gripping my hand with the intensity of a girl imagining the worst.
“Fear not. She will recover. Nobody with a truly serious injury possesses that volume or that vocabulary.”
Georgiana giggled, her face flushed and open. “Mr. Bingley told her not to dismount. Said we should stay on our horses.”
“A wise decision, no doubt, but sisters rarely heed their brother’s warnings, do they?”
A flicker crossed her face—quickly suppressed, not quickly enough. “I heed my brother’s warnings. Nearly all of them.”
Nearly. I tucked the word away like a coin found in a pocket.
“Caroline was the one who insisted we stop,” Georgiana continued. “She wanted to admire the view. She said the prospect from this slope was the only tolerable feature of the entire county.”
“How generous of her.”
“She says things like that quite often. I have not yet determined whether she means them or whether she enjoys the sound of her disdain.”
This was, I reflected, the most perceptive thing I had heard Georgiana say in days, and I rewarded it with the only currency I had—honesty. “A question I have asked about many people, Miss Darcy, and the answer is almost always both.”
We were close enough now to see the full picture. Caroline sat upright in the mud with one leg extended, and her hands pressed flat against the earth as though the field owed her a personal apology, which, in fairness, it rather did.
“Should I have stayed with her?” Georgiana asked, quieter now. “Mr. Bingley said to stay put, but she was—she was crying, Lizzy, and I thought if I could reach the lane, someone would see me.”
“You did exactly right.” I squeezed her hand. “You went for help. That is what sensible people do.”
“Fitzwilliam would say I should have stayed.”
“Your brother is not here, and I am, and I say you were brave.” I caught her eye and held it. “You dismounted to help her and ran across a field alone. Those are not the actions of a girl who needs to be told what to do.”
“What do we do now?” she asked, although a smile briefly flitted across her face from my words.
Then Caroline spotted us.
“Miss Bennet.” She greeted me with the warmth one reserves for a bad debt that has turned up at a party. “What are you doing here?”
“Walking, Miss Bingley. It is, as I understand, what one does when one prefers not to fall off a horse. What did you hurt?”
“My ankle,” she replied tersely.
I knelt, not that I wanted to, but it was the right thing to do. “May I see it?”
“You may not,” Caroline snapped. “Where is that gig my brother went to fetch? The sun is unbearable, and I shall be freckled beyond recognition.”
“Then we will need to walk back to the house, as there are no trees out here in the field. Can you stand?”
Caroline’s lips thinned into a line of displeasure. “I can stand. It is the walking that presents the difficulty.”
“Then we shall carry you.”
The look Caroline gave me at this announcement—traveling from my face to Georgiana’s face to the freshly plowed October mud between Netherfield and us—was the look of a woman doing rapid, unfavorable arithmetic.
“You cannot be serious,” she protested. “I will not be dragged like a sack of grain.”
“I’m afraid the gig would be stuck in this mud before it reached you. Perhaps a donkey would have been more practical, but the moment for that particular arrangement has unfortunately passed.”
“Miss Bingley,” Georgiana said, her voice small but steady. “We ought to try. The ground is cold, and if we wait here, the ankle will swell further. My brother’s physician always says elevation and warmth, and neither is available in this field.”
Caroline shifted on her seat in the mud and attempted to flick dung off her riding habit. Flies buzzed, landing on her, and her skin was already blotching, reddening alarmingly.
“Very well,” she said, extending her arms with the imperious grace of a woman accepting a hand into a barouche rather than being hauled off the ground by the younger sister of a man she pinned her hat for and a woman she had no use for.
We lifted her, or rather, Georgiana lifted her right side with the advantage of being nearly Caroline’s height, and I lifted her left side with the disadvantage of being five inches shorter, which meant that Caroline’s arm lay across my shoulders at an angle that put my face level with her armpit.
She smelled of horse, mud, sheep, and jasmine toilet water, this last ingredient notably failing at its assignment.
“Lean on me,” I said through my teeth.
“I am leaning on you. You are shorter than expected.”
“I am precisely the height I have always been. It is your expectations that require adjustment.” I braced my feet and took a step.
Georgiana matched me on the other side, and Caroline, suspended between us, hopped on her good foot with the reluctant, ungainly progress of a woman who understood that dignity was no longer available.
We managed perhaps twenty yards before she announced that she required a rest.
“Already?” I adjusted my grip, which had been slipping down Caroline’s waist toward her hip in a manner that would have scandalized Mrs. Bennet, who believed that physical contact between unmarried women should be limited to the linking of arms and the pressing of hands.
“My ankle is in considerable pain, Miss Bennet, and your pace is not helping.”
“My pace,” I retorted, unable to keep the edge from my voice, “is the pace of a woman carrying someone across a field. If you would prefer a sedan chair and four liveried footmen, I regret that Hertfordshire has failed to extend to such luxuries.”
Georgiana made a sound—half cough, half something else—and turned her face away so that Caroline could not see it.
Caroline did not respond, although the pressure of her arm across my shoulders increased in a way that might have been an involuntary spasm of pain or a very controlled attempt to strangle me by degrees.
Her riding habit trailed through the mud behind us like the train of a very orange and now brown wedding gown.
We paused our journey after a mere twenty minutes, not only due to Caroline’s injured ankle but also because I had discovered that bearing a woman five inches taller than oneself across uneven terrain was akin to translating Homer—a task both Herculean and seemingly interminable.
With gentle care, I eased Caroline onto a grassy bank beside the path, where Georgiana promptly joined her.
From this vantage point, we were afforded a view of the western fields—the very ones whose drainage would have a direct impact on Longbourn’s lower fields.
“What are they doing over there?” Georgiana asked.
“Digging a channel,” I replied. “I believe Mr. Darcy is overseeing it to divert the water from the waterlogged fields above. Do you see where the channel leads?”
Georgiana studied the terrain with more attention than I had expected—the girl was not unintelligent, merely inexperienced, and something in my tone had alerted her to the fact that this was not a lesson in geography but an observation with consequences. “It slopes… southward?”
“Southward. Past the boundary stream and into the lower fields of the next estate.” I paused. “My father’s estate.”
Georgiana’s eyes widened. “You mean the water will—”
“Go where water goes, which is downhill, into the winter wheat field where our tenants are ploughing at this very moment.”
“Will you tell my brother? Or do you want me to?”
“I shall inform him,” I replied, my voice tight.
“Although he should be aware of the consequences before commencing the work.” I stood and brushed the grass off my skirt.
“And now, Miss Bingley, shall we continue? Netherfield is not growing any closer, and I fear your ankle is not improving with our delay.”
“Yes, the ground is damp, and I believe something is crawling up my riding habit.”