CHAPTER 18
To their great dismay, Ware offered no further cart to carry them the remaining distance to Meryton; it being hardly large enough to call a town. There was only a village shop, which was connected to an open-market.
Thomas, having business of his own to conclude at the market, bid Darcy and Elizabeth goodbye.
This inevitably meant that they had to set out on their own to Meryton, which lay some eight or nine miles further on a road, according to Thomas.
Fortunately, the road was plain enough for Darcy and Elizabeth to follow without the need for a guide.
Hence, they set out on foot, as the light of the morning began to grow stronger, the storm's last traces gone from the sky entirely. Elizabeth found the going, for the first mile or two, easier than any stretch of the preceding days; it was, afterall, a proper road, and firm underfoot.
However, they continued slowly, as her ankle was still sore. Darcy was thankful to have milestones to mark their progress and, at intervals, other travellers whose ordinary business seemed, after several days of danger, its own small miracle to witness.
The morning had long since gone, and the sun, no longer directly overhead, told them the afternoon was sliding toward evening. They had passed a few carts headed the opposite way, their drivers unwilling to turn back for coins that Darcy did not, at present, have to offer them.
It was perhaps four miles short of Meryton, where the road narrowed through a stretch of close-grown woodland before the county's more open farmland reasserted itself for the final mile or so, that Elizabeth first felt the particular prickle of being watched.
Meanwhile, Darcy thought it no small incivility that a cart and its driver should decline to carry a woman so plainly in want of aid, and found the refusal chafed him thoroughly, for he was a man unused to want of resources, and still less accustomed to being refused anything at all.
So thoroughly did his indignation occupy him that he remained entirely unconscious of a far graver matter, that Elizabeth's attention had fixed, some minutes since, not upon the departing cart, but upon the road behind them, and the growing certainty that they were being followed.
"I have never in my life seen such incivility," he stated somewhat loudly, though the manner of his speech was directed more to the road ahead of them than to her.
Elizabeth let out a short laugh and glanced at him sideways, offering a good humored tease, despite the discomfort she felt in her ankle and their surroundings.
"I confess I have walked a good deal further today than my feet had any wish to, Mr. Darcy, and I find I have not the strength to spare for the tragedy of your name failing to work its usual magic on a cart driver. "
He looked at her wryly, a twitch of his jaw forming what looked like almost a smile. "No," he admitted. "I do not suppose you did."
They had been walking slowly down the road, he at her side, supporting her, as they went. Elizabeth was nearest to the treeline, and Darcy was positioned nearest the road, leaving her the more open ground to her left.
It was only a moment, just after his reply, that she felt something again move towards her left, nearest the wood.
It was not a sound, but some sense that someone was near; some shadow lurking under cover of the thick brambles.
She glanced behind her and saw nothing but the empty road curving back the way they had come, and she told herself it was nerves.
However, a moment later, Darcy, beside her, had gone stiff, and he spoke close against her ear, still looking straight ahead, "Do not run.
" His voice was very low, but he did not break his stride.
"If it is what I fear, running tells them we have seen them, and a man who knows he is seen has less to lose by acting than one who believes himself still unnoticed.
Walk as though we suspect nothing, until I have a better plan. "
Elizabeth's heart began to beat rapidly against her ribs, and she absurdly wondered whether his voice might be heard by them from the trees. She tried to reign in her fraying composure, by fixing her eyes on the road ahead, but failed and could not rest her eyes on anything at all.
She also tried, as she may to match her stride to his, one foot and then the other, though every step felt to her like an act of will separate and complete unto itself, requiring its own small, deliberate decision, as though her legs had forgotten how to walk.
They walked on for perhaps a hundred yards, every sense in Elizabeth's body screaming against the casualness of the pace, before the woodland's edge produced the figures she had half expected and had prayed not to see again.
She saw Bill, gaunt, filthy and wild-eyed, and beside him the grey-haired man, moving with less haste but no less purpose, both of them stepping out onto the road perhaps thirty yards ahead, cutting off the straightest path toward Meryton.
"Well," Bill said, his voice carrying across the gap, "here's a turn. Thought the river had you both, and here you are, walking to Meryton as you please, to tell every magistrate in the county exactly what we look like."
"Cobb is taken!" The grey-haired man spit out.
"A day gone, near Hertford, and Ned with him.
We are what's left, and I'll tell you, sir, we've considerably less to lose by finishing what should have been finished at the mill.
You best be coming along with us now," both men began to move closer to Darcy and Elizabeth.
Darcy's hand found Elizabeth's immediately. He held her in a firm, desperate grip, coiling around hers with a focused readiness that reminded her that he would do anything he could to protect her.
And yet, his desperate grip also confirmed what she had already begun to fear; two men against one, and that one still nursing ribs that had not finished healing, with nothing between them and the road ahead but whatever Darcy's wits and his half-mended body could manage to supply.
"You have two choices before you," Darcy called out, his voice hard and flat.
"You may turn back into that wood now, or you may come at us here, on an open road not four miles from a town full of men who have spent three days searching for exactly this pair of faces, and discover how much a desperate man's fight is worth against a man with nothing left to lose either.”
"Big talk," Bill said, "for a man with no weapon and a woman to mind besides." His hands went to his hips, as he stopped a moment to consider Darcy’s clear threat.
"I have neither weapon nor woman to mind," Darcy replied gravely. "I have a woman I intend to see safely to her family within the day, and I promise you, my intention will not be altered by either of you."
Bill came at them first, not with any weapon Elizabeth could see, his pistol either lost or spent somewhere in the storm's chaos, but with his bare hands in unraveling desperation.
Darcy met him with a cold, and effective single movement that turned Bill's own momentum against him, driving him hard into a small ditch at the road's edge.
The fall forced him to empty his lungs, and left him gasping and stunned in the mud.
Darcy also felt the brunt of his actions, and Elizabeth saw him gain a sharp, involuntary catch of breath, one hand going briefly to his side before he moved to put himself square again between her and both men.
She let out a gasp she had not meant to allow herself, feeling how much more frightening this second danger was than the first; not Bill's fists, which she had at least watched Darcy answer once already and win, but the fact that his ribs could might fail him at the moment they were most needed, and against which she had no answer to offer at all.
Bill did not stay down. He came up out of the ditch with mud streaming from him, and his face looking wilder than desperation now. Bill walked over and lunged again, but this time for Darcy's legs rather than his chest, as though he had learned not to offer his opponent the same opening twice.
Darcy staggered under it, his bad side taking the brunt of the collision, and went down to one knee with a horrid; and, for one endless instant Bill had the advantage of him, his hands scrabbling for a hold, for anything that might turn the ground between them to his use.
Elizabeth did not think. She had, in her hand, nothing more than a stone she had picked up, once Bill was tossed into the small ditch. It was no larger than an egg, and she brought it down across the back of Bill's skull, and Bill instantly went still.
He was not dead, she could see that at once, with some relief.
Bill was now on the ground, clearly still breathing, as she could see the rise and fall of him ragged but present.
It appeared he was only stunned, and thoroughly, sprawled half across Darcy's legs with blood beginning to well dark through the mud-matted hair at his crown.
The grey-haired man had not moved to help him. He stood a little apart, deciding what he might do. Elizabeth could see even in the chaos of the moment, that fighting favored the man even less now than it had a moment before, with Bill stunned on the ground.
He called out, urgently, already backing towards the treeline. "Bill! Bill, leave it, there's nothing left in this worth dying for."
He did not wait to see whether Bill could answer him.
Instead, that man turned and went, crashing back into the close-grown wood with none of the caution he had shown coming out of it, and within a few strides the trees had swallowed him entirely, leaving only the fading sound of his flight to mark where he had gone.
Darcy worked himself free of Bill's weight and got back to his feet, with some visible pain; he had one arm pressed hard against his ribs, and his breathing came in short, careful.
"Elizabeth, are you hurt?" he asked her, before she had thought to ask it of him, his eyes moving over her with the same fast, searching attention she remembered from the riverbank.
"No," she said, shaking her head. She looked down at the stone still gripped in her hand, and said, "No, I do not think I am."
He drew her against him then, careless of Bill's fallen shape still groaning faintly in the dirt beside them, careless of his own ribs, which she felt him favor even in the act of holding her, careless of anything in the world just then but the plain need to hold what he had so nearly lost and confirm, by the fact of holding it, that the danger truly had passed.
She let the stone fall, and heard it strike the road with a small, dull sound that seemed, absurdly, the loudest thing she had heard all morning.
Her arms found their way around him in turn, careful of his side as he had been careful of nothing regarding his own comfort, and for a long moment neither of them spoke, nor moved beyond the small, involuntary tightening of an embrace neither seemed prepared to be first to end.
She could feel his heart still going hard beneath her cheek, not yet settled from the fight, and beneath that, further down, the faint hitch of breath each time his ribs reminded him of his effort.
She did not think she had ever, in the whole of her life, felt so entirely without the need to say anything at all.
The road was very quiet. Somewhere behind them, in the dirt, Bill stirred and groaned and did not otherwise move. The grey-haired man's flight had left no trace but a bent branch, already beginning to spring back toward its natural shape.
The late afternoon’s sun, weak and watery after the night's storm, had warmed the mud beneath their feet, and Elizabeth found herself feeling the environment in full, the sun, the mud, the branch, the man breathing against her hair. She was shocked and stunned, and felt everything muddled.
It was into this stillness that the sound of hoofbeats arrived, distant at first, and then unmistakably not.
They broke apart by unspoken agreement. Just ahead of them, a party of riders came round the road's bend.
By their speed and dress, they looked to be traveling with some urgency, and near their head, even at a distance, Elizabeth recognized a man she would have known in any state, any distance, and any light the world could offer to try her.
A sob broke from her before she thought to permit it. Her father was riding toward them, faster than she had ever in her life seen him ride.