CHAPTER 14
She did not know how long they remained on the bank before Darcy said, "Elizabeth, we cannot lie here.” His words echoed what she had been thinking before she said them herself.
Elizabeth could tell that his voice had gone thick and slow with a cold that had claimed him no less thoroughly than it had claimed her.
"Wet through, in this wind, we will take a worse harm from the cold, if we do not find some shelter directly. "
It took her a moment, in the confusion of cold and exhaustion, to realize what he had called her. He had not addressed her as Miss Bennet or Miss Elizabeth, as had been his like. He had called her Elizabeth; it was entirely improper, and so unlike Mr. Darcy’s refined ways.
Elizabeth knew she ought to remark upon it, or at least resent it, but the thought arrived and dissolved almost in the same instant; she was far too tired to correct him, and told herself thus.
Instead, she replied directly to his suggestion. "I do not think I can walk far." Her teeth were chattering, and she felt herself growing more cold from her wet clothes and the frozen ground around them.
"Nor do I," he said frankly, revealing how spent he was, "but we cannot stop moving, not yet. Not while we are still wet and the wind still has us. Come, let us start moving before we freeze."
He got himself up first, unsteady, one hand braced against a fallen tree's tangled roots, and reached the other down to her.
She took it and let him haul her up, and for a moment they only swayed together in the wind's last, weakening gusts, neither quite certain their legs would hold, before they attempted to move through the muck at their feet.
Fortunately, the storm had begun to lighten, and the rain thinned from its violent torrents to a miserable sheen.
The lightning also began to fall away to a distance, and Elizabeth saw only intermittent flickers somewhere behind them, toward whatever country they had left their captors and the river both to fight over.
They moved slowly, from the cold and weight of their soaked clothing. And yet, not a quarter of an hour into their walk, Darcy spotted, along the bank a little further down, a darker shape that seemed to look like an old sort of fishing shelter.
As they moved closer, Elizabeth saw that its roof was mostly intact, and its outer walls looked like rough planks that had gone silver with age. It looks sound enough, she judged, to keep out at least the worst of the wind.
They reached it by a route that took them a good deal longer than the short distance warranted, as her ankle was unwilling to bear weight. Although, she also noticed that his own steps carried a stiffness about the ribs; though, he bore it without complaint.
It was only once they had gained the shelter's dubious cover, and sunk down together onto a floor of old, dry leaves blown in through some gap in the boarding, that they both felt the growing cold and exhaustion seep deep into their bones.
They had not sat down a minute, before Darcy noticed her fingers and body clattering in a way that alarmed him.
"Your hands," Darcy said, looking at her through the darkness, and reaching for her hands. Once he found them, he turned them palm-up in the grey light. "You are shaking."
"I am," she said, and found the sentence difficult to say, feeling all the pangs of cold and fear rush through her.
"I cannot stop it.” She was, in truth, chilled to the bone, and perhaps a little shocked at the river they had just survived.
And yet, she added, her teeth clacking from her shivers, "You are shaking too. "
He swore under his breath; it was the first ungoverned word she had ever heard him use, and then he began, without asking leave, to chafe her hands hard between his own, and then her arms, working some rough warmth back into her by main force.
His own hands were shaking rather worse than hers by the time he was done, though he said nothing of it and did not stop until some dull prickling sensation returned to her fingers; she winced at it, which he seemed to take, oddly, as good news.
"You may hurt," he explained, "but I am glad of it; it means you are coming back," he said, feeling some relief, as she seemed to be shaking much less than before.
Elizabeth looked at him through the haze of darkness, feeling all the cold and exhaustion in her being. She could see that he was still pale; his hair wet against his forehead, his breathing still uneven from the effort of the river. Yet, his attention remained fixed entirely upon her.
She did not reply at once. He did not release her hands, and she did not draw.
For a moment they simply remained there staring at the other, his thumbs moving almost unconsciously across her knuckles as though the motion had become necessary to him, until he seemed to realize what he was doing and loosened his hold.
“How badly are you hurt?” Elizabeth asked, feeling a little strength return to her.
“Well enough,” Darcy said matter-of-factly, while feigning off a shiver.
She looked at him, and Elizabeth realized that well enough was his particular manner of saying not well at all. And, she decided to tell him as much. “I hardly think that is true, Mr. Darcy.”
He looked down to his chest. “I’m bruised, I think, though not broken.” He shifted carefully, and the effort was enough to make his jaw tighten. “I have felt worse from a fall off a horse and thought little of it. It is not the ribs themselves that trouble me so much as taking a deep breath.”
Elizabeth opened her mouth to protest, but his attention had already moved beyond her. He was looking toward the boarded wall behind them, toward the river still raging somewhere beyond it.
“We ought not remain here,” he said, and she heard a subtle shiver in his speech, as he said it.
She followed his gaze, but still did not reply.
He continued. “This shelter sits too near the bank. Once Cobb and his men have gathered themselves enough to search, this will be one of the first places they look.”
Elizabeth did not disagree with the logic, but the thought of putting any weight at all upon her swollen ankle was enough to make her stomach turn. However, she, more than anything, wanted to be rid of Cobb and his party, and she did not argue.
Darcy got himself upright again first. And, then, for one alarming moment he swayed, and Elizabeth instinctively tried to catch his arm, but he caught the side of the hut and steady himself. Once he was more firm on his feet, he offered Elizabeth his hand, and he lifted her up.
They went slowly again, and he looked intently into the night, searching for some place to settle and attempt to get warm. Scarcely twenty yards up the rise behind the shelter, he spotted a fallen tree that had thrown its roots into the earth and formed a shallow hollow beneath it.
He urged Elizabeth over to inspect the tree with him, and they saw that the tree’s roots had been deep against a hill, and resulted in a screened hollow on three sides that was hidden from the river below.
While the inspection was little enough distance, by the time they reached it, both were breathing hard, from the exertion and growing cold.
Darcy quickly judged the hollow to be sufficient, believing that it was enough to reach without killing them both in the attempt. And, it was far enough away from the bank that anyone searching the riverbank would be unlikely to glance beneath the roots.
Only when they entered the hollow and had sunk down against its walls, this time upon drier ground, did he address the next matter of concern, their clothing.
“We must get out of these wet things,” he said. “Both of us. Nothing else we do tonight will matter if we remain soaked.”
Elizabeth looked down at herself, only slightly able to see the soak gown she wore. A few days ago, the suggestion would have been enough to send every modest instinct she possessed into revolt.
But now, in the grim of winter, escaping captives that sought them harm, she looked at the freezing water still dripping from her sleeves and felt only an unshakable cold.
Here, beneath the roots of a fallen tree, Elizabeth had a swollen ankle, wet clothes, and a man beside her whose ribs had been injured hauling her out of a river.
She told herself that was why she did not object in the slightest to removing her soaked clothing; she did not even allow herself to consider that she had already grown accustomed to trusting him.
For, in that moment, survival was the most certain course forward than any manner of propriety.
She told him that he was right, and he explained that he would look the opposite way, and moved to the other wall of the small hollow to begin to remove his winter coat.
They worked on opposite sides of the hollow, in the darkness, and by feel more than sight, wringing what water they could from their clothing. Darcy took to hanging the worst-soaked pieces over the broken branches above them.
Elizabeth kept her shift on, and Darcy, his drawers and undershirt, and they stared everywhere but each other.
Once Darcy had rung as much water as he could out of his coat, he reached out and gave her his coat despite her objections.
“Please, you must have this; you will surely suffer more.” He insisted, still looking away, as he held the coat out to her.
Elizabeth might have argued further, but she found that she no longer had the energy, and fumbled to take the coat from his outstretched arm, before wrapping it around her to cover as much of herself as she could. Fortunately, Darcy was a tall man, and the coat, though wet, offered a shield.
Still freezing, the question of a fire occupied them longer. Darcy was firmly against it, even though he remained shivering. He argued that the shelter was still too near the river, and any light might draw attention from men searching the banks.
However, Elizabeth, whose teeth had begun to chatter again, refuted his claim and insisted that a fire small enough and well enough screened could scarcely be seen beyond the roots, and that the alternative was to remain wet and cold until morning.
It was the return of her teeth clattering that settled the matter. Darcy looked at her white face for several seconds, then down at his own hands. “Very well, a small fire,” he said at last. “And the moment we hear anything beyond the river, we put it out.”
Elizabeth nodded. He found dry wood where she would not have thought to look for it, breaking open the heart of a fallen branch where the outer wood had been soaked through.
From within his coat he produced a small tin containing flint and steel and a scrap of charred linen. It was not exactly dry, but he would try nonetheless.
Elizabeth watched him work. His hands betrayed him at first. The cold had made them clumsy, and more than once the steel slipped. The first spark died almost immediately.
He tried again, and Elizabeth leaned closer, instinctively shielding his hands from the draft that crept through the roots. She did not think about the impropriety of it. She only knew that his fingers were trembling, and that hers were too, and that somehow the two of them seemed warmer together.
The next spark caught. Darcy bent over it, breathing carefully until the ember held, then fed it into the nest of dry shavings.
A thin thread of smoke rose, followed at last by a small flame.
It was a miserable little fire, no larger than two cupped hands, but when it steadied, Elizabeth felt something inside her loosen.
“We shall survive the night,” Darcy said quietly. He glanced at her, and for a moment there was something almost warm in his expression. Then the silence returned.
Neither had much left to say, as the fire demanded tending, the cold demanded endurance, and the darkness beyond them demanded caution. Darcy remained beside the flames, feeding them occasionally, while Elizabeth watched him from beneath his coat, still cold but slightly less so.
While he worked, she found herself thinking again of the things he had said. I have you. And, most troubling of all, the knowledge that when he had thought she might be lost to the river, he had been afraid.
Her head grew heavy. She fought it for a time, unwilling to sleep when danger might still be near, but eventually her body betrayed her. Her eyes closed, opened, and closed again.
Darcy noticed, and without a word, he shifted closer and allowed her to lean against his shoulder. This time, Elizabeth did not protest.
The river still roared some distance away. The little fire burned low between the roots, and Darcy's shoulder was warm beneath her cheek. For tonight, she decided, she would ask nothing more of herself than to remain alive until morning. The rest can wait.