CHAPTER 9
Elizabeth had fixed her attention upon the sack over her head, coarse twine, meant plainly enough for potatoes and not for persons, through whose weave she could count a hundred small points of light. Her scalp still smarted where her hair had been seized.
I have been taken.
The thought arrived, as her heart seemed to drop clean through her chest, leaving something hollow and cold behind it. Bile rose sharp at the back of her throat, and she swallowed hard against it, again and again, her breath coming too fast and too shallow to steady.
Beneath the sack, sweat had begun to gather at her hairline despite the cold, and she could feel her own pulse beating visibly in her throat, in her wrists, in the tight, clenched place behind her ribs.
She understood now why Mr. Darcy's countenance had darkened so at the sight of Wickham, though even now, lying bound in the dirt, she could not quite make herself believe the man capable of such a design against either of them.
She turned the moment over and over in her mind, helpless to stop it: how entirely she had frozen where she stood, how her voice had simply failed her, how she had not so much as raised a hand to defend herself.
What am I to do? No answer came, as Elizabeth had none to give.
Mr. Darcy had spoken to her, she knew, though she could not afterward recall his words; she had shut out nearly everything beyond the small, bright pinpricks of light through the sack, and the sensation, presently, of rain beginning to fall upon her back.
She had no means of sheltering herself from it, and was soon thoroughly wet through.
***
She could not have said how long she lay upon the ground.
Time had lost its usual shape entirely, stretching and collapsing by turns, marked only by the rain, which fell, and fell, and did not stop, and by the dull, spreading ache where the cold ground pressed up through her wet clothes into her hip and shoulder.
She knew only that Wickham and his men had withdrawn some little distance, though not so far as to offer any real comfort, their low voices still audible whenever the rain eased enough to let them through.
Mr. Darcy spoke to her again at some point, she was aware of the shape of his voice, low and urgent, without, yet again, taking in a single word of it, her own mind too full of its own frantic noise to admit anything further.
Papa will come for me, she told herself, and made herself believe it, for as long as she could hold the thought steady. But what if he cannot find me? I left the house at a quarter past eight; how long before he even thinks to look?
She was uncomfortably, wretchedly aware that she had told no one in the household which direction she meant to walk that morning. It was her habit, and no one had ever thought to ask it of her before.
It will be hours yet before he so much as knows I am gone. The thought settled over her with the same cold, steady persistence as the rain itself, and try as she might, she could not make it lift.
Elizabeth knew that lying in the dirt of a thicket by the lake was hardly the first place her father would think to search.
A slight movement beside her drew her attention to Mr. Darcy, whom she had, until that moment, rather deliberately shut from her thoughts, whether because he had frightened her, or because she could not help feeling him somehow the cause of their present situation.
It was Wickham's quarrel with him, after all, not with her; she was caught up in it only by association, and his evident alarm on her behalf had done nothing, in her present temper, but confirm to their captors that the two of them were known to one another. The thought made her angry.
Why was he following me at all? He arrived already in a fury, what can Wickham and these men possibly want with him? His fortune, most likely.
She could not fault him for the anger he had shown on her behalf, nor for his evident wish to protect her, and yet his manner, so proud, so utterly unyielding even with a pistol levelled at his chest, had done nothing whatever to ease their circumstances, and a good deal, she suspected, to worsen them.
Had Darcy held his temper, had he simply given the men what they seemed at first only to want, information, cooperation, anything short of open defiance, the matter might yet have been reasoned through, she reasoned.
Even as the thought formed, though, she doubted it; she had known the man scarcely a fortnight, and already understood that reasoning with Fitzwilliam Darcy, under any circumstance, was no easy undertaking.
He tried to protect me, all the same. She turned this over.
Elizabeth had never once imagined she might be glad of his company, and had, in fact, gone to some lengths these past weeks to avoid it.
And yet everything about their present circumstances had conspired to alter that entirely.
Whatever quarrel lay between him and these men, she understood with sudden, sobering clarity that her own survival was now bound up in his, that she stood a far better chance beside him than alone.
She resolved, there in the mud and the rain, to place her trust in him fully, whatever came of it.
The first numbness of shock had begun, by degrees, to loosen its grip. She lifted her head, turning it toward him.
"What are we to do?" she whispered. Elizabeth had not expected a response, yet a response was given, quietly from a little ways near her.
"We shall escape, though it may take some little time to contrive how. Do not lose heart, Miss Elizabeth. Wickham is a cruel man, but no great thinker. You will come to no harm."
The rain had begun to ease as he finished speaking, which brought some relief, though the mud it left behind brought a misery all its own; Elizabeth felt it thick and cold against her cheek where it had worked its way beneath the sack, and along the edges of her ruined clothes.
Footsteps approached, and Mr. Darcy whispered quickly, "Miss Elizabeth, I will see you safely away from this as soon as it is in my power to do so."
Elizabeth, for her part, did not entirely believe Mr. Darcy, though she found herself wishing very much that he might be right. She could not, in her present state, imagine by what means either of them was to escape their captors.
Rain still fell in scattered drops from the trees above, pattering into the puddles that had gathered across the clearing. She could hear the footsteps splash in the mud and come to a stop near her.
"Up with you," a man barked, hauling Mr. Darcy roughly to his feet.
Elizabeth gave a small cry as she too was pulled upward, her sodden clothes heavy and awkward as she was set upon her feet.
Once both stood steady, their captors pushed them forward, directing their steps as they pleased.
Mr. Darcy realised, before long, that he was being led in a direction quite different from Elizabeth's own.
"Where are you taking Miss Elizabeth?" he demanded, his voice carrying further than was wise.
"Never you mind. We ain't doin' nothin' to yer lady." The man's tone held the lazy contempt of someone who knew precisely how little his prisoner could do about it.
"Do not touch her!" Darcy spit out, sharp as a blade.
"You don't tell me what I can and cannot do, d'ye hear? I'm the one tellin' you, and you'd do well to remember it." A shove punctuated the words, driving Darcy forward a stumbling step.
"If any harm comes to Miss Elizabeth, I will see you flayed alive." Darcy expressed, sounding livid.
"Ho! Flay us, will you!" The man's laugh was short and ugly. "You're the one trussed up like a Christmas goose, sir. I'd mind my own skin, was I you."
Be silent, you foolish, foolish man, she thought in growing fear.
Elizabeth heard each of Mr. Darcy’s threats like a blow to her own chest, dread pooling somewhere beneath her ribs.
He was the one bound, hands useless behind his back, utterly at these men's mercy, and there was nothing in the world so likely to invite a villain's cruelty as forbidding it outright, as though pride alone might substitute for power.
She held her own tongue, though it cost her something fierce to do it, however desperately she longed to beg him to stop.
At length the pushing ceased, and a pair of arms closed about hers, guiding her down into a crouch before releasing her rather abruptly from the shoulders.
She landed, fortunately, upon ground not so very muddy, and without much hurt, the drop being slight.
She felt the rough bark of a tree at her back, and allowed herself to lean into it, her bound hands brushing against a soft cushion of moss along its base.
Through the small holes in the sack she could still make out daylight, and the vague green of the surrounding wood. Her face, at least, no longer lay in the mud. But she could not keep her thoughts from turning toward what might come next.
Will they kill us? She put the thought from her mind at once, as there was no profit in dwelling on it. Elizabeth was determined to do what she could to endure, and to escape. I must survive this.
"We move at sundown," Wickham announced to the men nearby, and a chorus of assent followed.
One of them, a man with a faint Welsh lilt to his voice, Elizabeth thought, called out toward the prisoners, "And if either of you so much as makes a sound, we'll shoot the lady first." The threat was delivered plainly, without heat, which somehow made it worse.
She could not tell whether it was meant only to silence Mr. Darcy, or whether the man was in earnest, but she trembled all the same upon hearing it.
Hold your tongue, Mr. Darcy, she pleaded silently, dreading that his temper might place her squarely in the path of that threat. Where were they to be taken at sundown? Lord, help us.
One thing, at least, she understood with terrible clarity, her father's search, whenever it began, would not find them before they were moved on.
The men, meanwhile, passed the intervening hours in conversation of the most ordinary kind, cards, past travels, a favourite recipe for mince pie, as though nothing at all were amiss.
It struck Elizabeth as almost grotesque, to hear such commonplace talk carried on so near where she sat bound to a tree, soaked through, while her captors spoke as if she were not there at all.
There was something in it nearly comical, and something else besides, a strange testimony to how easily the ordinary and the monstrous could sit side by side in the same men, on the same afternoon.
She thought of the soldiers whose crimes she had read of in the papers, and found herself now living some version of the very accounts that had so troubled her only weeks before, with no notion how her own story was to end.
She resolved to be a model prisoner, docile, compliant even, in the hope of earning some small measure of goodwill, particularly after Mr. Darcy's outburst had done so much to set the men against them both.
Elizabeth could sense the sun beginning its slow decline, though dusk, in the long days of summer, remained a good while off yet. She had eaten nothing since the night before, and hunger gnawed at her now that fear had loosened its grip a little.
She felt, too, a growing and increasingly urgent need, and after some half hour spent gathering her courage, called out, uncertain quite where her captors stood. "Excuse me, I must ask to relieve myself."
"What's that?" a voice returned.
"I must relieve myself, sir," she said again, louder, forcing the words out past her own humiliation, hoping only to be granted some small measure of privacy for the office.
"I beg your pardon; whatever do you mean?"
"Do yer business right where ye stand."
"Here?" The word came out smaller than she intended, mortification closing over her like water.
"Aye, here, or back to where ye sat, and no privacy at all."
Footsteps withdrew a little way around the tree, unhurried, entirely unconcerned, and Elizabeth, judging she could delay no longer, crouched down in the dead leaves and did what she must, her hands trembling, her skirts drawn about her as best she could manage with her wrists still bound, praying the fabric gave her some small covering against whatever eyes might yet be watching.
Once finished, she rose and struggled to right herself, her fingers clumsy with cold and shame both.
She had once, on a solitary walk, found herself in similar necessity, and had sought the shelter of a thick hedge with something very near amusement at her own predicament, a small, private joke to carry home and never tell a soul.
This was nothing like that occasion. She was entirely undone, burning with a shame so complete she could feel it in her throat, in her chest, in the roots of her hair, and found herself, for once in her life, grateful for the sack over her head, which spared her at least the sight of any face that might have witnessed it.
The footsteps returned before she was properly steadied, and her arms were seized once more, drawn back toward the moss-covered tree where she had first been made to sit.