CHAPTER 8
She stopped, feeling quite alarmed at the use of her name, so intimately spoken from his lips. While she stopped, she would not turn around, determined not give him the luxury of seeing her spent from their heated exchange.
"I have had the whole of what I came out for," she said, to the dark hedge in front of her rather than to him. "You need not follow me to finish it."
"I am not come to finish it." He had closed half the distance between them, his boots loud on the gravel in a silence that seemed, all at once, very complete; the noise of the house behind them gone thin and far off, swallowed by the yew screen he had passed through.
"I could not let it stand as it was left. That is the whole of my errand."
"Then perhaps you might have waited patiently until I returned, rather than run me down in the garden,” she said accusingly, still looking towards the hedge.
"I have waited a great deal already, Miss Bennet." He bit out, then stopped some feet from her, near enough that she could see, even in the poor light, the set of his shoulders, if she would only turn to look ar him.
She did not answer at once. Only stayed in place, staring out into the silence of the cold garden, everything unresolved between them still hanging in the air, charged and quite unfinished, when she heard a sound from across the way.
Elizabeth heard it again, a low scrape of wood against stone, quickly muffled.
She could not help but turn toward the sound, distracted for a moment from everything that had passed between them by its sheer strangeness, half wondering whether some servant of the house stood near enough to have overheard the whole of their quarrel.
The thought brought with it, close upon its heels, a sudden and acute consciousness of the impropriety of their situation; she and Mr. Darcy alone in a dark garden, at an hour when neither had any proper business being there, and she very nearly said as much aloud, before the thought was driven entirely from her mind by what came after.
Elizabeth turned all the more, seeking to determine the source of the noise, when she saw Mr. Darcy’s eyes fixed on the dark screen of yew between them and whatever lay beyond it.
There was a murmur beneath the scrape now, low voices, more than one, and Mr. Darcy moved an inch closer to have a better look at the situation not far off from where they stood.
She heard the voices subtly speaking, and beneath it the unmistakable murmur of more than one man's voice, pitched too low for words and entirely wrong for the hour, and wrong, too, for the direction it came from, which was not the kitchen door with its ordinary evening traffic but the stillroom and the stores beyond it, dark now, the household's business there long since concluded for the night.
Elizabeth went still, and then quickly flinched, as Darcy's hand came out and closed around her arm, not roughly, but suddenly and seriously. "Stay here," he said, very low, and then released her, and turned, and began to move toward the sound with the effort of a man who did not wish to be heard.
She did not stay, as she had never in her life been given to staying where she was told, and that habit, on this particular night, very nearly cost them both everything; but in the moment she thought only that she would not be left standing alone in a dark garden while he walked toward whatever the sound portended, and she followed him, quiet as she could manage in skirts never designed for stealth, to the gap in the yew where the working garden opened out before them.
There was more moon now than there had been minutes before, a thin cold sliver come clear of the cloud, and by its light she saw, before her mind had properly assembled what she was seeing, three men at the stillroom door.
One crouched at the lock with some tool, one stood back with a sack already half filled slung across his shoulder, and a third turned half away, toward the lane beyond the garden's rear gate, where a fourth figure held the heads of two dark horses harnessed to a low cart drawn up close against the hedge.
She understood, in perhaps two seconds, that this was not any ordinary household disturbance, and in the third second, before she had finished understanding it, the man at the lock looked up. She let out a gasp, and Mr. Dary turned to see her, not ten feet behind him.
The man saw them both plainly. There was no mistaking the fact of it; his head came round, and stopped, and for one suspended instant the whole tableau held perfectly still, four men and two witnesses regarding one another across twenty feet of moonlit kitchen garden, and Elizabeth felt, in that instant, a cold quite unlike the evening's chill settle into her, for she understood exactly what had just been made irreversible.
"The deuce!" Exclaimed the man at the lock, low and vicious, straightening. "They've seen us."
"Gentry," said the one with the sack, already backing toward the gate. "Look at them. That's Netherfield's own gentry, that is, out walking of a night!"
"Doesn't matter whose they are, they've seen us, they can put a name to this house and a face to the lot of us before the constable's had his breakfast."
Darcy had already began to move to her side, his arm returning and tightening on Elizabeth's arm, pulling her back toward the yew and the lit windows beyond it.
"Go," he said, low and urgent, no trace left in his voice of anything that had passed between them minutes before. "Now! Run, quickly, back toward the."
He did not finish it. The man who had spoken of the constable was already moving, fast, cutting across the garden's width to close the gap before they could reach the screen, and behind him the other two abandoned whatever remained of their original purpose entire, the sack dropped where it stood, all three converging with the particular speed of men who risked the certainty of the noose.
"Don't scream." The foremost one said, low and fast, closing the last of the distance before either Darcy or Elizabeth had gone three steps. "Don't scream and nothing happens to you, but you're not walking back into that house to point us out to every magistrate in the county, so you can just."
Darcy put himself between the man and Elizabeth with speed and struck out instantly.
She heard the blow land, heard the man's breath go out of him in a grunt, but there were three of them and the odds resolved themselves with brutal efficiency, one man seizing Darcy's arms from behind while another drove a fist into his stomach that folded him half over, and she was screaming now, or trying to, before a broad rough hand closed over her mouth from behind and a voice close against her ear told her that she had best be quiet if she valued her own skin, for he had no particular wish to hurt a lady but would do what the night required regardless.
She fought back. She had driven an elbow back hard enough to earn a curse, had twisted against the arm locked round her waist, but the hand across her mouth did not loosen, and beyond it she could see Darcy still struggling, blood at his lip, three men's worth of weight bearing down to keep him from breaking free, and one of them saying, “There’s no time for this! The cart; get them to the cart, before some fool servant comes out to see what the noise is!”
"You cannot!" she got out, the hand slipping for half a word before it clamped down again, "...my family will know, they will search!"
"That's rather the trouble, isn't it," said the man nearest her, not unkindly, dragging her back toward the gate and the waiting cart. "Everyone knowing. Should've thought of that before you came walking where you weren't wanted."
She saw Darcy wrenched upright between his two captors, and saw him twist half free for one instant and take a blow across the face; it snapped his head sideways and left him swaying.
She then saw him found again by rough hands and hauled, half stumbling, toward the same cart she was being dragged to.
Their eyes met once, across the churned dark earth of the kitchen garden; his, above the blood at his mouth, holding hers intensely, his eyes held only a fierce, before a sack, rough and reeking of grain, came down over his head from behind him, and then soon after hers.
And, the last thing she heard clearly, before the world narrowed to darkness and the jolt of being lifted bodily off her feet, was Darcy's voice, raw and furious, shouting her name.
Inside Netherfield, at that same moment, the evening was proceeding with a great deal of noise signifying very little, and no one troubled themselves to remark that either of the two people presently being dragged toward a waiting cart was not, at that precise instant, in the room.
The trouble in the kitchen had begun some twenty minutes before, when a scullery maid, hurrying with more haste than care to clear the fish course, had caught her apron against an unattended lamp and sent it toppling into a basket of linen set too near the hearth for anyone's later comfort.
The flame had caught quickly, and been smothered quickly besides, the cook having had the presence of mind to douse the whole business with a jug of standing water before it could progress beyond a great deal of smoke and a ruined tablecloth; but the smoke itself had found its way up the back stair and into the passage behind the drawing-room, and it was this, rather more than the fire, that had drawn Caroline Bingley from her guests at the precise moment her absence would prove most costly.
She had gone below in a state of considerable irritation, more concerned for what a whiff of scorched linen might suggest to her assembled company about the general competence of her household than for any real danger the fire had posed, and had spent a full quarter hour, by the time all was accounted for, alternately scolding the unfortunate maid and instructing the housekeeper on how the whole unfortunate business was to be kept from reaching the ears of anyone upstairs, lest it become, by morning, another piece of gossip for Meryton to enjoy at Netherfield's expense.
Mrs. Hurst had gone down after her, drawn by much the same anxiety, and between the two of them and the housekeeper and the cook and the still-trembling maid, the kitchen passage had absorbed a very great deal of the household's attention for a stretch of time.
Above stairs, the drawing-room noticed none of it.
Sir William, planted near the fire with a glass he had refilled rather more often than not, was engaged in a lengthy and largely uninterrupted account of his presentation at St. James's some years before, a story his present audience, Mrs. Philips, and Mary, who had had heard often enough to anticipate its every turn, and bore with a glazed patience.
Mrs. Bennet held forth at the card table with a triumph that suggested she had finally earned a good hand, and Kitty at her elbow offering opinions on the play that nobody had solicited and everybody good-naturedly ignored.
Jane and Bingley sat somewhat apart, near enough to the general company to satisfy every requirement of propriety and far enough from it, in the particular manner of two people newly and happily attached, to have noticed very little beyond each other for the better part of the last half hour.
It was Jane, in fact, who first thought to wonder where her sister had got to, though even this thought arrived without alarm, some considerable time after Elizabeth had gone out onto the terrace and rather longer still after she had gone beyond it.
"I have not seen Lizzy this quarter hour," she said to Bingley, glancing about the room. "Nor Mr. Darcy, now I think of it."
"Gone for air, I expect," Bingley said, comfortably, "or fallen into some argument in a corner, which I collect is rather their habit of an evening these last weeks.
" He said it with fond amusement, and Jane, finding nothing in his easy answer to contradict her own inclination toward the same comfortable reading, let the matter rest, and returned her attention to whatever pleasant nothing he had been saying to her before the thought had occurred to her at all.
It was another quarter hour before the thought recurred, and was prompted by nothing more than the ordinary business of the tea tray being brought round and the natural inclination of a hostess's absence to be remarked upon once refreshment required someone to pour it.
Caroline, returned at last from below with her composure carefully restored and no visible trace of the crisis she had just concluded managing, took up the duty herself, and it was in the course of counting heads to determine how many cups the tray would want that she found, with mild and not yet alarmed surprise, that her brother's particular friend was nowhere present among them.
"Has anyone seen Mr. Darcy?" she asked, to the room in general, and was met with the kind of vague, unhelpful murmur such questions generally produce when no one has, in fact, been paying the smallest attention to the matter.
"Nor Lizzy," Jane said again, and this time something in her own voice carried enough of a question that Bingley, catching it, looked properly around the room himself for the first time that evening with anything like real attention.
"They cannot have gone far," he said, though he rose as he said it. "Darcy does not care for close rooms. He has very likely stepped out onto the terrace, and Miss Elizabeth with him, arguing about something or other as they generally do."
He went to look, expecting to find exactly what he had described, two figures on the dark terrace, deep in one of their habitual disputes, easily fetched back in for tea with nothing more serious to answer for than having missed the tray's arrival, and it was the particular quality of his silence, returning some minutes later, considerably less easy than he had gone out, that first told the room something had gone properly wrong.
"The terrace is empty," he said. "I called. I do not think either of them can be very near, for I should have heard an answer by now, if there were one to be had."
It was not yet fear, in that first moment, only a small, spreading unease, but it was enough to draw Mrs. Bennet's attention at last from her cards, and Mr. Bennet's from whatever quiet corner he had retreated to for the evening's duration, and within a few minutes more the whole drawing-room had abandoned its separate small businesses entirely, gathered instead around the single, unwelcome question of where two people could have got to, on a cold winter night, in the better part of an hour, without a single soul among a houseful of guests having troubled to notice the going.
It would be the better part of another hour still, candles fetched, the gardens searched by lamplight, the stillroom door found forced and the sack of stolen plates abandoned beside it before anyone properly understood that something was dreadfully wrong.