CHAPTER 10
The road had been narrowing for some while, the open fields that had accompanied them out of Dunstable giving way to a country of close-grown trees that crowded the verges and met, in places, overhead, so that the last grey light of the evening reached the carriage only in broken pieces, filtered and increasingly dark.
"How much further do you suppose, to clear the wood?" She asked, more to break the silence than from any real anxiety.
"Reeves reckoned two miles of it, perhaps three, before we come out onto open ground again.
" Darcy had not resumed the ease of conversation they had found somewhere past Dunstable; she saw him instead sitting rather more upright than the jolting of the carriage required, one hand resting near a case beneath his own seat.
"It is not a great distance. We shall be through it within the half hour. "
Elizabeth’s brows joined together, as she heard his tone. "You do not sound entirely easy about it."
"I am not in the habit of being easy about roads I do not know, after dark, in a country I have had no occasion to travel before this month. It is a reasonable caution, Miss Bennet, and no more than that."
She might have pressed him further, upon another evening, merely for the pleasure of drawing out whatever lay beneath so careful an answer; but something in the quality of the silence outside the carriage kept her, upon this occasion, from any further teasing.
She found herself instead watching the trees pass, close and dark and featureless, one very like another, until she could not have said whether they had covered a quarter mile or two in the time she had spent watching them.
The carriage lamps, lit some while before at the last posting-house, threw a thin and shifting light against the nearest trunks, illuminating little beyond the immediate verge and leaving everything beyond it in a darkness that seemed, to Elizabeth's now thoroughly unsettled imagination, to press rather more closely against the glass than darkness generally troubled to do.
Elizabeth watched Darcy reach beneath the seat and draw out the pistol-case.
"Mr. Darcy?"
He did not look at her, but asked, “Yes, Miss Bennet?”
"You brought a pistol, sir," she said, feeling an increasing alarm, spreading through her chest.
"I bring one whenever I travel any distance from home, and have done since I was one-and-twenty. I have never before had occasion to use it, and I had hoped this journey would furnish no exception to that record. I begin to think it will not oblige me."
Above them, faint at first and then unmistakable, came the sound of the coachman's voice with some note of query directed at the darkness of the road ahead that made Darcy's hand close, fully now, about the pistol's grip.
"Reeves!" Darcy had begun to lean toward the window, one hand braced against the frame, when the world outside the carriage broke apart entirely.
The shot came first; fortunately, it was not aimed at the carriage, but into the air to sound the alarm.
She had not been prepared for it, and upon hearing the shot, Elizabeth's whole body flinched, as her mind had properly registered what it was.
The team screamed, high and terrible, and the carriage lurched sideways with violence, throwing her hard against the door.
A loud, clear masculine voice shouted from outside the carriage, "Stand and deliver!"
She thought the voice came from somewhere close on the left, and was answered, an instant later, by another from the right, and Elizabeth, righting herself with hands that had already begun, she noticed with a strange detachment, to tremble, saw through the carriage window a shape on horseback drawing alongside them, a scarf drawn up across the lower half of a face she would never afterward be able to describe with any confidence, a pistol already levelled toward the box where Reeves sat.
"Get down, Miss Bennet." Darcy's voice had lost every trace of the grave, measured quality she had grown accustomed to; it was lower now, and harder, and it carried an authority that left no room whatsoever for question. "Down, onto the floor. Now!"
She obeyed without pausing, folding herself down into the narrow space between the seats as the carriage rocked again, harder, and above her she heard Reeves's voice raised in some final, defiant command to the horses; a decision, she understood only much later, to drive through the ambush rather than surrender to it, and then the crack of a second shot, closer than the first, and a cry that was unmistakably a man's cry of pain, and the sickening, particular sound of a body striking wood and then ground.
Mr. Darcy instantly shouted out in alarm, "Reeves!"
Then, Darcy threw the door open before the carriage had properly stopped rocking, one hand still closed about the pistol, the other braced against the frame, and for one suspended instant Elizabeth saw him silhouetted against the last grey light of the evening, entirely still, taking in whatever the road now showed him with an expression she could not read and would not, for many days afterward, be able to stop imagining.
"Stay down," he said, without turning, "whatever happens, stay down and do not come out until I tell you."
She did not stay down. She would tell herself, afterward, that she had meant to obey him, and had fully intended to remain exactly where he had placed her; but some instinct stronger than obedience brought her up far enough to see through the open door, and what she saw there she would carry with her a very long time.
Reeves down in the road, one arm working feebly against the ground while the other lay entirely still; a horseman wheeling his mount to bring a pistol to bear upon the fallen man a second time; and Darcy, already moving, already between them, his own pistol coming level with a steadiness that seemed, in that terrible instant, the only steady thing left in the whole of the world.
The second shot, his, came almost too fast to properly hear as a separate report from the first, and the horseman's cry that followed it was not triumph but pain, his mount rearing and wheeling away into the trees with its rider clinging low over its neck.
But there were others. Elizabeth counted, in the chaos, at least two more shapes closing from the darkness on either side of the road, and she understood, with a clarity that arrived entirely apart from fear, as though some separate and more practical part of her mind had taken command of the situation while the rest of her remained frozen with horror, that Darcy could not hold them all, that the pistol in his hand had been fired and would want reloading, that Reeves lay helpless in the road, and that whatever came next would happen very quickly and would not wait upon anyone's readiness for it.
"Mr. Darcy! The traces!" Elizabeth heard herself say.
The horses were still screaming, when she heard them released.
Whether a blade found the traces, cut by one of the highwaymen in some effort to seize the team for himself, or whether the leather simply gave way at last under the horses' own frantic strength, Elizabeth never learned; she knew only that the carriage lurched forward and threw her hard back into the seat; the door swinging wild on its hinges, Darcy's voice shouting something she could not make out over the sudden thunder of hooves and wood and her own pulse loud in her ears, and then his arm was across her, bracing her back before she had even understood she was falling, and the world became nothing but speed and darkness and the carriage groaning beneath a strain no coachbuilder had ever designed it to survive.
She began to blink, still unable to see anything but blackness. However, Elizabeth heard a command, "Hold on!"
And, she held on. There was nothing else, in the whole of that wild, unlit passage through the wood, that she could do; no window from which to judge their direction, no voice to call for help that could possibly be heard over the horses' own terror, nothing but the violent, jarring rhythm of wheels finding every root and rut the darkness concealed, and Darcy's arm braced hard across her, and his voice, close to her ear, repeating some low and steady assurance she could not afterward recall the words of, only the sound, which she clung to as she clung to everything else in that endless, ungovernable minute.
She heard shouting behind them at first, pursuit, or only the highwaymen's own cries of alarm at the team's sudden bolt, she could not tell, and then, she heard it no longer, whether because they had outpaced it or because the wood itself had swallowed them whole.
Finally, the end, when it came, was due to one wheel that struck something in the darkness. It might have been a stone, a root, the stump of some long-felled tree, she would never learn which, and the carriage, already labouring under a backbreaking speed, tipped.
She felt it happen with a peculiar slowness quite unlike the chaos that had preceded it, as the whole world tilted until the carriage went over entirely, and the last thing Elizabeth registered was Darcy's arm tightening around her, pulling her in against him as though he might, by sheer will and physical strength together, shield her from a fall that had already begun and could no longer be stopped by anyone.
Then there was only impact, and darkness, and, for a period of time, nothing at all.
***
She came back to herself, for a second time that evening, though not all at once.
It began first with recognizing a ringing in her ears, dull and continuous, and then the cold, damp press of the carriage floor beneath her cheek, tilted at an angle that made no sense to her mind still gathering itself; then, last of all, a voice, close by, saying her name with a note of urgency that cut through the ringing more effectively than anything else had managed.
Then, she heard a strong, masculine-type of voice almost shouting in alarm. "Elizabeth. Elizabeth, can you hear me?"
It was the first time she had heard a man use her Christian name, and she realized, rather embarrassingly, even through the sharp ringing in her ears and the general disorder of her senses.
Elizabeth felt slightly upside down, and it took some moments for her to feel that she was right-side up again.
The carriage turning over had been quite a shock.
"I am here," she managed, feeling rather helpless. "I am. I think I am not badly hurt. Are you?"
"I am well enough." He was already working at the door above them, which now hung where a window ought to have been, forcing it open against its own weight with an effort that spoke to some injury of his own he had not yet troubled to mention.
"Give me your hand. We cannot stay in here; if the horses are still entangled in the traces they may yet do the whole thing further damage, and I do not know how far behind us those men may be. "
She did not take his hand right away, and Darcy’s voice cut through the stillness of the night."Can you move?"
Her senses still a bit rattled, Elizabeth did not respond for a moment, as she tried to think about her limbs and whether or not she could, in fact, move. After a time, she registered that her limbs seemed to be intact, and she replied, "I believe so. Help me, if you can."
She reached her his hand, and he took hers, helping her stand. And then, he took hold of her waist, and lifted her upwards through where the carriage door now hung open above them like a trapdoor into the night sky.
Elizabeth could sense the tightening about his jaw, and a breath drawn carefully. Then, Darcy moved one arm from her side and braced it against the wrecked frame and drew her up and out with the other, his grip closing about her with a strength she did not possess.
It was only once she stood beside him on solid ground, her legs unsteady beneath her and the whole world still tilting faintly, that she saw it, a dark stain spreading along his sleeve, just below the shoulder, black in the moonlight where it should have shown red.
"Oh, Mr. Darcy, you are hurt," she cried in concern.
He shook his head immediately, attempting to deny the accusation. "It is nothing; I am well.” Her tone was tight, and she swallowed hard the bile that rose to her throat.
No, she thought, Mr. Darcy is not well at all. She could see a rather large red spot on his forearm that had the unmistakable look and smell of fresh blood.
Elizabeth moved from his embrace to grab ahold of the arm that was bleeding, trying as she might to see through the linen. “No, it is plainly not nothing. You are bleeding." Her voice was firm, and taught.
"I think it only a graze from the fall, or perhaps from the second shot, I could not say which." He said this with briskness. He sighed."It does not trouble my arm's use, which is the only thing that presently signifies. We have a great deal more to consider than one scratch, Miss Elizabeth."
She wanted to press him further; she wanted to see the wound properly and satisfy herself it was truly as slight as he claimed, but she yielded unwillingly to the practical urgency of their situation, and she turned, as he had, to take stock of the wreck around them.
The horses, she saw now, had torn themselves free of the wreckage, and were nowhere to be seen or heard. And, Reeves was nowhere to be seen either. She imagined he was left behind upon the road with a wound.
They stood together beside the ruin of the carriage, by now recounting that she had been traveling with Mr. Darcy in his carriage bound to London to take care of her aunt and sick uncle.
But now, they were in a wood neither of them knew, with the last of the daylight entirely gone and nothing between them and whatever lay ahead but each other.
"Mr. Darcy," said Elizabeth, her voice coming out more steadier than she had imagined it would, "what do we do now?"
He was silent for a time, surveying what little could be made out of their situation in the dark. It was clear that the carriage was broken, and there was an empty road somewhere behind them that neither could presently locate with any confidence, as the trees closed on every side.
When he answered her, he sounded as if he were attempting to avoid any alarm. "We find shelter," he finally said, "before anything else. And we do not, under any circumstance, separate."