CHAPTER 9
The cart did not travel far before it stopped, perhaps twenty minutes, perhaps less, Elizabeth thought, although she had no clear means of judging beneath the sacking, the jolting dark, and her erratic nerves.
When the sack was at last pulled from her head, she found that she was not in any open country she might have used to orient herself, but inside a building.
It had a low, close space that smelt of old hay and damp stone.
It was lit by a single lantern turned down to little more than a coal.
It was cold enough that her breath showed in it.
A disused barn, she judged, or some outbuilding long fallen from any farm's regular use. The walls hung with the ghost-shapes of harness and tools nobody had troubled to remove when whatever use the place once served was abandoned.
Darcy was some feet from her; his hands bound before him with some sort of rope that had been improvised into fist cuffs.
She could barely see his swollen lip and a dark mark rising along one of his cheekbones.
The moment his eyes found hers, she quickly understood, from the look alone, that he was worried for her; she gave him a brief, small nod, and turned her head, but feeling an acute fear that the guards would notice them communicating in silence, she turned her head from him.
They were still in the cart, and seated, as she looked carefully around the room. Elizabeth noticed there were four of them. She had time, now, to look properly, and did.
The one who had spoken first in the garden was a lean, sharp-faced man, perhaps forty.
He stood nearest the lantern, and it was to him the others looked.
The others called him Cobb. A second man, heavier, with a broken-veined face that suggested a fondness for drink he had not lately been able to indulge, paced near the door with restless energy.
A third, younger than the rest, could not have been above eighteen, and stood apart with his hands shoved into his coat and his eyes moving constantly between his companions and the two captives, while the fourth remained outside with the horses, his voice occasionally audible through the door.
It sounded low and urgent, but Elizabeth could not make out the words.
"Well," Cobb said, crouching to bring himself level with them both, "here's a fine mess, and no mistake. You'll forgive me if I don't apologise for the manner of your invitation. Wasn't my first choice of evening's work either."
"Then let us make it a short one," Elizabeth said, before Darcy had drawn breath to answer.
She felt a flutter of nerves fly through her stomach, but she tried to keep her voice calm.
She told herself to be diplomatic, and to speak as she had a hundred times to talk her father out of a black mood or her mother down from a fit of nerves.
"You have what you came for, or near enough.
You have no quarrel with either of us beyond the accident of our having walked where we oughtn't. Let us go, and we will say nothing."
Cobb offered a smirk. "Very prettily put.
" He stared at her a moment, then said, "And if I believed you'd hold to it, miss, we might be having a shorter conversation than the one we're like to have.
But I've been at this trade longer than you've been out of the schoolroom, and I never yet met the gentry that didn't sing a different tune once they'd a magistrate's ear to sing it into. "
"Sir you have not met me. And, I assure you of our silence" she said, lifting her chin ever so slightly, attempting to hide her growing fear.
The heavier man, still pacing, made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "She's got nerve, I'll give her that. Won't do her much good, but she's got it."
"Bill," said Cobb, without turning, in a tone that ended whatever else Bill had meant to add.
It was Darcy's turn under that patient, assessing stare a moment later, and Elizabeth watched, with dread, as Cobb studied him with narrowed eyes.
"And you, sir. Not much to say for yourself. I reckon we might earn a small fortune from you, seeing as you are dressed in such a manner.” Cobb looked over Mr. Darcy, and had guessed correctly that he was indeed a man of fortune.
Darcy said nothing to Cobb’s remark.
"Cat got your tongue?" Bill said, coming nearer, raising his voice slightly, "or is it that you think yourself too fine to answer a plain question from the likes of us?"
Still Darcy said nothing, only looked at the man, level and unhurried, with an expression that gave away nothing.
He knew well that the man Bill, had wanted some reaction and been denied it twice now, took the silence for contempt it did not intend, and closed the last few feet between them with his hand already drawing back.
"Wait!" Elizabeth said, too late, and the blow caught Darcy across the same cheekbone already darkening from the garden, snapping his head sideways, but he made no sound at all, which seemed, if anything, to enrage Bill further.
"He's tied and he's answering nothing, Cobb, what use is he to us at all? I say we're better shot of him entire and take our chances on the girl alone being manageable," Bill bellowed to his companion.
"Nobody is being shot of anybody," Cobb said, sharp now, "not till I've decided what's to be done, and I'll not have you deciding it for me with your fists, Bill, not when a dead gentleman's worth considerably more trouble hanging round our necks than a live one ever was."
Bill was not one to remain silent, and replied to Cobb in an argument. "He struck Tam in the garden. Cracked his head near open!"
"And I dare say Tam struck first, going by the way this whole business was managed.
" Cobb straightened, dragging a hand down his face.
"I want them quiet and I want them whole, the both of them, until I've had a chance to think what's to be done with them, and I'll not have either notion spoiled because you can't abide a man who won't flinch for you. Outside! I'll set Ned to watch them."
Bill went, muttering, and the boy, Ned, evidently, remained, looking considerably less pleased with the arrangement than his elders, standing near the door with a pistol he held as though it might go off of its own accord.
The moment Cobb and Bill went outside, through the large opening behind them, Elizabeth turned what attention she could spare toward Darcy, whose jaw she could see already swelling darker where the blow had landed.
She said in a tight whisper, "You might have answered him, and save yourself another hit to your face. These men are serious, Mr. Darcy. We must negotiate with them, if we are to keep our heads.”
"I think not,” he exhaled. “It would have cost me the only advantage I have to give," he said, equally low, not looking at her but at the opening Cobb had gone through, his voice entirely steady despite the visible damage to his face. "A man who gives nothing away cannot be read, and a man who cannot be read is harder to threaten usefully. I do not intend to hand Cobb a map of who I am. One blow won’t hurt me.”
"That is very rational," she bit back, "and very nearly got you killed just now, or had you not noticed. Must you be this way?"
"A knock won’t kill me, Miss Bennet," he replied, with some flatness. "Cobb is the one deciding our fate, not Bill, and I take Cobb to be a calculating man, which means Cobb can be reasoned with in a way Bill cannot."
"And in the meantime you mean to let him strike you until Cobb arrives at whatever conclusion he is judging toward? That is unreasonable."
He ignored her last statement. "I aim to do as I see best, and ensure your safety."
Elizabeth had no ready answer to that, and did not attempt one, only sat with the cold of the stone floor coming up through her skirts and watched Ned, across the barn, shift his weight from foot to foot and check the door twice in as many minutes.
He looked to be considerably more frightened of his own company than of the two he had been set to guard.
Seeing his uncertainty, Elizabeth turned her attention to Ned.
As she watched him, she noticed that he was certainly the softest link in whatever chain bound the four of them together, and she was not, whatever Darcy's philosophy of withholding, disposed to let an advantage sit unused merely because it frightened her to reach for it.
"You do not much like this work," she said to Ned conversationally, as though they sat together at some ordinary evening party rather than a cold barn with a pistol between them. "What is your name?"
He did not answer at once, glancing toward the opening, as though Cobb might materialise through it at the first word. "I’s not meant to talk to ye," he said at last.
She offered him a kind smile. "I have not asked you to help us. I am only curious of your name, which can hardly be treason."
He shifted his eyes between the two captives, and then, after several moments of silence, he finally said, "Ned.” He looked, immediately after, as though he wished he had not.
"Well, Ned. I do not think you signed on tonight expecting to end with two hostages. I think you would be rather finished with this business, and I promise you, so would we."
"Can't help ye," he said, but his eyes had gone, despite himself, to the large opening again, and to the pistol in his own hand.
Elizabeth thought the boy must be even younger than she first suspected, for the look he gave her, a sort of helplessness, made him look to be barely sixteen.
How could he have ended up with this sort, she wondered.
Despite her fear and anxiety, she found herself feeling more sorry than upset about the situation Ned found himself in.
It was during this reflection that Elizabeth heard Bill's cold voice rise again outside; it was sharp with alarm, as he called for Cobb. She could not hear what they discussed, but she could hear voices rising in anger.
A moment later, Cobb came through the opening, white-faced and furious, saying that there were lights moving on the road not a quarter mile off, and lanterns, and voices calling.
They all knew that clearly a search had already begun, and that Cobb would have to make a decision soon, as he had his ruffians had no more time to sit here deciding anything at all.
"Up," Cobb said, hauling Elizabeth to her feet by the arm with none of the careful consideration he had shewn her minutes before. "Both of you. We're moving, and you will not make a sound before I say you may,” he added harshly.