CHAPTER 10
Elizabeth and Darcy were bundled out of the cart and into the increasingly freezing cold night.
By the conversation amongst the captors, Elizabeth had learned that lanterns that could be seen moving along the road perhaps a quarter mile off, and voices carrying thin and broken shouts across the cold air.
Elizabeth thought she could hear, for half a second, the unmistakable sound of her own name carried faint across the distance, “Miss Elizabeth,” and the sound of it, however briefly caught was quickly lost again under the wind, gave her some small, fierce hope to hold to, in a predicament that had otherwise offered her very little worth holding.
She thought the voice sounded like it might have been one of the Longbourn grooms, though it was too far off to know for certain.
As the voice died down, she felt Cobb's hand closed hard over her arm and dragged her toward the trees at the barn's far side, away from the road, away from the lights, and away from anyone who might yet have found them in time.
Elizbeth very nearly screamed regardless.
She felt the sound rise in her, hot and desperate, at the sound of her own name carried so near and so uselessly close, and it was only the memory of Cobb's flat warning, and her own fear that told her a scream now would end matters far more quickly than it would save them.
And so, she kept her scream locked behind her teeth.
She bit down on the inside of her cheek, hard enough to taste blood, and let the pain stand in the place the sound would otherwise have cried out, and stumbled on through undergrowth she could not see, Cobb's grip still merciless on her arm.
Darcy was behind her, hands still bound, Bill's fist knotted in the back of his coat to hurry him along, and she heard, once, a low grunt behind her, catching himself against a root or a low branch he could not see to avoid.
Elizabeth wanted, with a fierceness, to turn back for him and offer some arm to steady him.
And yet, she could do nothing to help at all.
It was a strange realization that she saw Mr. Darcy as a source of comfort, and knowing him to be behind her, even under such circumstances, gave her something of a reassurance that she was not alone. She kept walking, dragged forward by a stranger's hand, and trusted that he kept his feet.
For some minutes there was nothing in the world but the effort of not falling on ground she could not see, and the terror of a shout rising fresh in her throat each time a voice carried through the trees, and the strange, disordered feeling that fear brings, that she should hold her tongue.
It was stranger still having her senses sharpened through the ordeal.
She could smell a faint hint of tobacco on Cobb's breadth; and, she thought his coat smelled of wet wool and pipe-smoke.
She noticed the way the moon, when it showed at all through the branches, lit the ground in patches too far apart to be any use for seeing by; she felt the sound of her own heart, absurdly loud, and beating more rapidly than she had ever felt before.
They did not stop until the sounds of the search had thinned to nothing behind them. They were swallowed by distance and by trees grown thick enough to close out the last of the moon, and came at last to a second shelter.
It was not a barn this time but the ruin of some old mill; its roof half fallen in, the wheel long since rotted from its axle and standing black and skeletal against what sky showed through the gap above it.
Cobb pushed them both down against the driest of the walls and stood a moment, breathing hard, listening for a pursuit that did not, for the present, appear to be coming.
Elizabeth's legs, once she was permitted to stop using them, discovered all at once how little strength remained in them, and she sat harder against the stone than she had intended, and found Darcy, a moment later, lowering himself beside her, moving down slowly with his bounded hands.
He moved close enough that his shoulder nearly touched hers, though neither of them closed the last small distance to make it certain.
"You are unhurt?" he whispered, very lowly, under the sound of Cobb and his men still catching their breath a few feet off.
"Unhurt," she said, nodding her head slightly in assurance.
Well, it was not quite, strictly, true, as her ankle had turned once, in the dark, and ached now, but it was true enough for the moment's purpose, and she did not think either of them had leisure just then for anything less than the essential accounting. "You?"
"Well enough," he said in a grave, vexed sounding tone. She did not blame him for it, as she was vexed herself.
"That's twice tonight I've near lost the whole business to bad luck," Cobb said, when he had breath enough for it, turning back to face them, "and I'll tell you plain, I don't know as my luck holds for a third."
"Then end it," Bill said urgently, glancing toward the door.
"You heard them calling her name not two hundred yards off.
Whoever they are, they know where to look, and they'll keep looking till they find something, and I'd rather they found nothing at all than found the two of them able to swear to our faces in a courtroom. "
"And what would you have me do with two bodies, Bill, that wouldn't want twice the digging and twice the danger?"
"I'd have you decide it, Cobb. Every hour we sit on this is an hour closer to a rope for the lot of us, and I'll not hang for a job that was meant to be plate and nothing more," Bill said unceremoniously.
It was the grey-haired man, Tam, who had been hit by Mr. Darcy and had stayed outside with the horses, and behind the group, that stirred from where he stood apart and said, quietly, that Bill was not wrong to want it settled, whatever else might be said of how he wanted it settled, for a decision deferred was still a decision, and generally the worse one.
It was here, into the pause that followed, Cobb thinking of the growing predicament, Bill's jaw working, Ned white-faced and silent by the door, his pistol held now in both hands as though the extra grip might steady something in him, that Elizabeth felt the whole situation coming to its head.
And, she knew she must do something. Elizabeth had watched her own words move Cobb once already, in the barn; she had watched Darcy's stillness deny the man any purchase.
And, she did not, in the moment, consider the wisdom of speaking so much as felt the necessity of it pressing against her throat.
"You are thinking of this the wrong way entirely," she said, and heard her own voice come out. "You speak of us as a danger to be disposed of, but we are worth a great deal more to you alive."
The entire party’s eyes came upon her, including Cobb's. He eyed her with the same sharp assessing attention she had won from him in the barn. "Go on, then."
She was aware, even as she gathered breath to continue, of Darcy going very still beside her, and likely even more upset that she had decided on a course, without his knowledge or consent.
Nevertheless, in the narrow space between their shoulders, she could sense he held his breath.
She wondered, in the half-second before she spoke again, whether he meant to stop her or not.
But, as he did nothing to restrain her, she continued her persuasion.
"This gentleman," she said, with a small nod toward him, "is Mr. Darcy of Pemberley in Derbyshire, ten thousand a year, with an estate and a family that would empty half its coffers before they let harm come to him, and would do a great deal more besides to see him returned quietly, without magistrates.
You need only a ransom note, delivered with care, to the right person, and you be paid a sum you would not earn in a lifetime of plates and stores, and see you gone from this county before anyone had troubled to look for you at all.
Kill us, and you have nothing but a hanging offence and no profit in it whatsoever.
Keep us, manage this properly, and you might yet walk away from tonight considerably richer than you came to it. "
She felt the change, as her words worked in the room. Cobb's stillness moving into something closer to real interest, the grey-haired man's head coming up, even Ned's frightened eyes going, for a moment, thinking rather than merely afraid, the pistol's barrel dipping, forgotten, toward the floor.
She felt, too, in the same instant, Darcy's steady exhale; she knew it was an exhale filled with irritation; for, she offered them the cards he aimed to keep hiding as long as possible.
"Ten thousand a year," Bill repeated, slowly, and something ugly moved behind his eyes.
"Ten thousand a year." He said it again, and Elizabeth watched, with a sinking feeling that reached all the way to her turned ankle.
"And you'd have us believe a family with that kind of money is going to pay quiet and ask no questions after, is that it?
No. No, I'll tell you what a family with that kind of money does; it sets every runner in London on us, it doesn't stop till every last one of us swings, and it does it with a fortune behind the doing.” He turned to Cobb and said in an accusatory tone.
“There now, Cobb. She's just told us, plain as day, exactly how much trouble we're sitting on.
I say that's argument for finishing it now, not for waiting on some fool notion of ransom that'll have the whole county's worth of lawmen down on us before the ink's dry. "
"He’s right," said the grey-haired man, and it was somehow worse coming from him than from Bill, for there was no cruelty in it at all.
"A poor man's hostage, you might trade quietly, and no one comes looking past the county line.
Ten thousand a year doesn't stay quiet, Cobb.
Money like that buys noise. Buys men who don't stop at the county line, or the next one either. "
Elizabeth felt the floor of her own reasoning give way beneath her, all at once, the very leverage she had reached for turning in her hand to point back at her own throat, and she watched Bill's face and the grey-haired man's terrible calm agreement, that she had handed the argument for their deaths its most persuasive shape, dressed it in her own words, and delivered it directly into the hands of the one man in the room least inclined to mercy.
She looked, without meaning to, at Darcy, and found him already looking at her, and read in his face, not anger, though she had braced herself for anger, but something that frightened her a great deal more; he looked altogether worried, perhaps not for himself but unmistakably, for her.
It was a naked sort of look that she had never seen on his face in their whole acquaintance.
The cold, brooding gentleman now looked to be someone else entirely.
For a moment longer, he held her gaze, then moved from her to look at Bill, and his voice, when it came, was pitched to carry over Bill's, and utterly without the fear she had just seen beneath it.
"My family will indeed spend a great deal of money and a great deal of effort to see us returned, and they will not stop asking questions because they are asked to.
But a man dead by your hands buys you nothing at all but certain hanging, whereas a man returned unharmed by some arrangement your leader is clever enough to manage carefully, buys you the one thing money from a frightened family reliably purchases in these matters, which is silence bought at the family's own request, because a family that has its own returned safe wants the business over and buried a great deal more than it wants revenge that risks the hostage's name being dragged through every newspaper in London along with yours.
I do not say it is without risk. I say the risk of killing us is certain, and the risk of returning us is merely large. "
The room’s silence was taut with consideration, and Elizabeth did not dare breathe. She watched Cobb's face move through the same thoughts Bill's had, and then Darcy’s convincing words, then arriving, she could not tell, at which conclusion
"Nobody's killing anybody tonight," Cobb said at last, and Elizabeth felt the breath go out of her in a rush of relief, "not while I'm the one deciding it, and I am the one deciding it, Bill, whatever your opinion of the sum owed.
We move again before first light, further off, somewhere with no search party like to stumble past it by accident, and I'll think on the gentleman's offer with a clearer head than I've got at this hour.
But hear me plain, both of you," this to Darcy and Elizabeth together, his voice gone hard, "you've bought yourselves a stay of it, not a pardon, and if either notion of yours proves worth less than the trouble of keeping you, I'll not stand between you and Bill's opinion a second time. "
Bill said nothing further, but the look he turned on Elizabeth as Cobb moved to rouse the others for the next stage of their flight was not one she thought she would soon forget.
She realized, watching it, that she had bought them a night's reprieve at the cost of having shewn this man exactly how much reason he now had to want them dead before morning regardless.
Beside her, Darcy had not moved, and when at last he spoke it was so low she nearly missed it beneath the general commotion of the others gathering themselves to move.
"You must not do that again," he said in a serious whisper, "however well it answers. I would rather take every blow Bill has to give than watch you hand him a better reason to give one to you instead."
She looked at him directly, and spoke near his ear. "And I would rather do something than sit and be governed by a man's fists whether I speak or no. I could not simply."
She stopped, aware of how near her own voice had come to breaking, and did not finish it, and he did not ask her to, only looked at her a moment longer with that same unguarded concern she had glimpsed at a moment earlier, and could not now unsee it.
And then, in the next moment, Cobb's hand closed on her arm once more and hauled her to her feet, and there was no more time, that night, for either of them to say or argue anything further at all.