CHAPTER 12
Ned, long before the light had gone, dispatched toward the nearest town with Cobb's careful instructions.
He was to go to an inn, secure paper and ink, along with a quill, and then return to the cottage.
Ned was instructed not to say anything to anyone; Cobb was certain that if anyone thought to question a boy alone on the road, it would be only for directions.
It was Cobb who fetched, from some place he had evidently thought to bring or to secure on the road, a strip of clean linen and a little salve in a stoppered jar, and set them down beside Elizabeth, saying only that a ransom worth collecting wanted a hostage that could still walk to collect it.
He added that she had best let the gentleman next to her see to the ankle properly rather than let it stiffen further on her. It was a mercenary kindness, she thought, offered for the sake of Cobb's own bargain rather than for her comfort.
With the strip of cloth in her bound hands, she did not much care what motive had produced it; and was only grateful that it had been produced at all, and that Darcy, when Cobb had moved off again toward the fire, took the linen from her, even without asking.
He continued to surprise her, being willing to help bind her ankle, without a biting word.
"You will have to trust me, Miss Bennet," said Darcy, moving towards her ankle. She realized that he was not prepared to lift her skirt, and was quick to pull the clothes above her boot, so he could help her remove her swollen ankle from its position.
Once the obstacle of clothing was pushed aside, he began to loosen her boot, and added, more softly this time, "Unpractised as I am, I have set a horse's leg before; though I have never bound a woman’s ankle before.” She noticed a red hue spread across his cheeks as he said the last part, then he quickly added, “I am sure the two are not perfectly incomparable arts.”
Elizabeth thought Mr. Darcy sounded altogether embarrassed, having gently removed her boot and stocking and finding himself now obliged to stare rather fixedly at her bare ankle in order to see to it properly.
She was not free of the same embarrassment herself; and she dared not look at him, as he worked her ankle, for the task had such an intimacy to it that no shared danger these past days could quite prepare her to receive it.
However, despite the discomfort, she felt more than anything that she would much rather bear it at his hands than anyone else's presently available to her. And, she tried her best to reassure him while breaking the silence that had spilled over. "I am sure I shall survive."
He looked at her, just then, and she noticed the subtle hint of a ghost smile upon his lips, before he lifted his eyebrows slightly and said, “We certainly shall see.”
Elizabeth was glad to hear that his dryness had returned somewhat, and he moved slightly, somewhat awkwardly, his bound wrists making the whole business considerably more difficult than it would otherwise have been, and turned the ankle in the firelight to examine it closely.
When his hands, warm despite their roughness, first closed carefully around her foot, she let out an involuntary gasp; it was not entirely from the pain, though the pain was real enough, but from a different sort of sensation that ran up through her at the touch and left her rather more unsettled than a bruised ankle.
He stopped at once, and looked up at her with real concern. "Are you well?"
Elizabeth nodded, and said only that it still hurt, which was true enough, as far as it went, though not, in this particular instance, the whole of the truth she might have offered him.
"Swollen," he said, "but the joint moves as it should, which is more than I feared, watching you go down in that meadow." He wrapped the linen with slow, deliberate turns, tight enough to give the joint some support and no tighter.
Elizabeth found herself watching his hands rather than the ankle itself; they were large hands, and she could feel the warmth of them as he worked to bind her ankle.
As he worked to bind her ankle, Elizabeth decided she could not sort out Mr. Darcy at all, however many hours she had lately spent attempting it.
He had shewn her, across the whole of their acquaintance, little beyond a brooding, a man seemingly determined to give the world no more of himself than civility strictly required.
And yet here he knelt, in a cold and comfortless room, tending her hurt ankle with a gentleness she would have never credited him with, watching over her with unhesitating attention; he had willingly appointed himself her protector without troubling to ask.
Which version of him am I meant to believe? She asked herself. She was beginning to suspect, uneasily, that both were perhaps true at once, and that she had simply never before been permitted to see the second.
Sensing that he was near to being finished with his task, Elizabeth said, "You seem to be quite good at this for a man who claims himself unpractised.” She offered him a demure smile in place of the confusion she felt, and tried not to colour at the thought of a man's hand still upon her ankle.
It was alarming, the more she considered it, alarming enough that she resolved not to think of it further, but she owned, privately, that of anyone present, that she was beginning to think that there was much more to Mr. Darcy then the man initially let on.
"I am very motivated, and I suppose that answers for want of a great deal of practice," he said, without looking up from the linen.
She did not ask him to elaborate, and he did not offer to, and the silence that followed was not the taut sound of their earlier acquaintance but something more comfortable, perhaps driven by two days of shared danger and care; or, perhaps something different entirely.
***
It was some while later, the fire burned low and Bill gone out to walk along some restless circuit of the cottage's perimeter, Cobb dozing upright against the wall, that Elizabeth found herself speaking of the quarrel, the one that had sent her out into Netherfield's garden two nights before, into the very dark that had delivered them both to this cottage, a lifetime and an eternity ago at once.
Elizabeth let out the words she was thinking rather bluntly, before she could say it better. "I felt wounded, I think, as I heard your words about my family; the night of our taking."
He turned to look at her, and replied without hesitation. "I do not think either of us managed to say anything that evening that was purely true or purely cruel. It was a great deal of both, I believe.”
It was not quite an apology, but Mr. Darcy’s speech was much softer, and he spoke in such a kind tone that felt almost opposite to his sentiments that night at Netherfield Park.
She shook her head a little, as she stared into the burning coals within the hearth.
"What you said was not untrue. My mother and my younger sisters are a wild sort; they are boisterous and trying in a manner I have long since ceased managing.
I was not prepared, I think, for someone so little acquainted with them to be so honest with their account.
But, honesty obliges me to say those scruples were not unfamiliar.
I had thought the same, on more than one occasion, and held my tongue where you did not. "
“I acted unpardonably, Miss Bennet; I am well acquainted with the truth, but I recognize there is a difference between a thought and saying it.
A man may privately hold an opinion of another's family and still owe that family the courtesy of keeping it to himself, unless asked for it plainly.
" He paused. "You did not ask me for it, and I gave it regardless.”
His tone was more frank than kind. He did not retract what he had said, for he did not believe it untrue, but he allowed that he had wanted the forethought to hold his tongue in the saying of it.
It was rather surprising, hearing such a confession from a man she had always taken for someone who would sooner defend a wrong opinion to the last than admit any fault in the manner of its delivering.
Before she could reply, he continued. "You are a gentlewoman, and my equal.
I should have spoken to you, from the very first, in a manner that reflected as much, rather than in whatever careless or unkind fashion my own temper has too often permitted me to indulge; and I admire you, besides, for a kindness you extend not only to your family, but to all who cross your path. "
Elizabeth sat quite still. She was aware of the fire settling in its bed of ash, of the cold air pressing in. For the length of several breaths, Elizabeth tried as she may to to understand what Mr. Darcy had just told her.
Careless or unkind fashion? She repeated the words to herself, thinking them so very strange to hear.
Does he not know that he has always treated me thus?
His speech left her utterly at a loss. She could not fathom what he meant by any of it; how his actions this past hour had run so entirely counter to the manner she had always known him by, nor how he could speak to her now, so plainly, as though she had always been his equal, when she could recall a great many occasions on which his own conduct had suggested he believed nothing of the kind.
"I confess I cannot know your meaning, sir,” she said, in a tone that suggested she was somewhat confused.
"I find there is a clarity that comes from believing oneself may die, Miss Bennet. It does not leave a great deal of patience for maintaining opinions one no longer believes, merely because one has held them a long while and finds them comfortable in their familiarity," he admitted.
Elizabeth studied him in the low firelight, and found herself, for perhaps the first time in the whole of their difficult acquaintance, entirely uncertain what to say to him.
It was not from any want of feeling on the subject, but from the strange, disorienting sensation of believing that a man might change his character overnight, and still hesitate to know whether to believe it or not.
"I do not know what to do with this version of you," she said, at last, with more honesty than she generally permitted herself in his hearing.
"I had grown rather attached to my list of your faults.
It answered a great many questions for me, and required very little further thought once it was assembled. "
"I am sorry to have inconvenienced so tidy an arrangement," he said, and there was, beneath the dryness of it, something that was very nearly a smile.
He looked up at her then, in the low firelight, his face marked still with the fading bruise from the garden and the exhaustion of two days' hardship, and for a moment she thought he meant to answer her fully, to say whatever was on his mind.
But then, his eyes moved, involuntarily, toward the cottage door, toward Bill's returning footsteps audible now on the frozen ground outside, and whatever he had meant to say folded itself back into the folds of his mind.
"I believe," he said, low and even, withdrawing his hands at last and settling back against the wall beside her, "that this is neither the time nor the place to say anything more.”
Elizabeth did not press Darcy further, as Bill's shadow filled the doorway and the cottage's small stock of quiet dissolved back into its ordinary tension.
She was glad, upon reflection, of his restraint.
Some part of her wanted, as much as he plainly did, to hear whatever he had nearly said delivered somewhere the words could be trusted.
Cobb woke fully at Bill's entrance, and there was a quiet conference between the two of them near the door that Elizabeth could not entirely follow, though she caught enough of it: too long, if the boy's not back by morning, and can't sit here indefinite waiting on a letter that might never be answered at all.
From their discussion, she understood that whatever patience their captors had brought to the cottage was wearing thinner than Cobb's earlier confidence had suggested, and that the ground beneath their fragile stay of execution was considerably less stable than either she or Darcy had allowed themselves to believe.
It was near midnight, the cottage quite dark, that Ned came back, alone, breathless, and paper and pen.
Cobb quickly had Darcy write a small part of the letter, which Cobb then took and wrote his demands.
Then, he had Ned go back to town. Apparently, the boy had gotten lost, and took much longer than he had anticipated to return to the cottage.
Nevertheless, before Ned left, he explained that the town he had gone to was crawling with searchers, magistrates' men and gentlemen both, offering reward money loud enough that half the inn's common room had been talking of little else, and that a description had gone round already, close enough to the mark that Ned had not dared linger long enough to purchase the supplies, for fear of being marked himself as the boy who matched a description of his own.
Cobb's face, hearing it, went very still, and it was in that stillness, more than in anything Bill had said or threatened across the whole of the preceding two days, that she understood that the ground had shifted beneath all of them at once, and that whatever came next would not wait upon anyone's patience to be ready for it.