CHAPTER 10
Dusk was hours in coming. The long days of summer made for correspondingly short nights, and the men grew restless waiting upon it.
Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy kept their silence throughout, seated where they had been placed, while their captors stationed themselves a little distance off, near enough to keep watch without troubling to remain in close company with their prisoners.
When night fell at last, both were helped to their feet, their sacks removed so that they might walk more easily through the wood, their captors directing their steps from behind.
They were led some way through the trees until they came clear of the thicket altogether, and Elizabeth recognised, with a small pang, the path she stood upon, near enough the lake that she might almost have called for help, had there been anyone to hear it.
She listened in vain for any sound of a search party, and concluded, with some despair, that her father must be scouring quite the opposite direction, toward Oak Hill.
A cart soon came up the lane, drawn by two horses, Wickham perched upon the box with one of his men beside him.
At his direction, the prisoners were helped, or rather forced, into the bed of the wagon, and made to lie down as before.
Before Elizabeth complied, the sack was returned to her head, and once she lay flat, she felt first one blanket, then a second, drawn heavily over her.
Two of the men climbed in to keep watch over them, while Wickham and his companion remained on the box, and the wagon lurched into motion. Elizabeth felt warm tears slide silently down her face, with no notion of where she was being carried, and no comfort to be found anywhere in her circumstances.
Mr. Darcy's shoulder lay warm against hers beneath the coarse weight of the blankets, and she heard him whisper once more, close against her ear, "I will protect you. Do not fear, Miss Bennet."
She could not bring herself to credit it, however much some small, foolish part of her wished to.
It seemed to her that his presence, however well-intentioned, had only drawn her further into danger, that it was his quarrel, and not her own, which had brought them both to this pass, and that she had paid the price of it all the same.
Exhausted as she was by the day's events, sleep would not come.
The wagon rocked and jolted beneath her with every rut in the road, each jarring motion driving the ache deeper into her bruised hip and shoulder; the ceaseless drone of crickets pressed in from the dark beyond the wagon's sides, indifferent and unbroken, reminding her at every turn that she lay exposed still among men who might do her any harm they pleased.
Elizabeth endured the slow, monotonous progress of the night in silence, counting nothing, not miles, not hours, only the dull, repeating ache of the boards beneath her and the cold, hard certainty that would not leave her, that dread which sat in her chest like a stone and did not shift, however she tried to reason herself past it.
***
Before dawn, she heard Wickham call, "Whoa," and the wagon rolled to a stop.
There followed a shuffle of movement, the blankets drawn away, and she and Mr. Darcy were directed out and onto their feet.
Her back ached, stiff from the hard boards and the long jolting ride.
She was made to walk, pushed forward over some threshold into what she took, by the change in air, to be a house, and then up a narrow staircase, taken slowly enough to try her guard's patience.
At the top, she was steered into a room to the right. There her guard turned her by the shoulders and freed her wrists of their bindings. She drew them at once to her chest, rubbing at the raw, chafed skin.
The door shut behind her with a heavy sound, followed by the click of a lock turning.
She stood motionless a moment, straining to sense whether she was truly alone, before cautiously drawing the sack from her head.
The room proved windowless and small, furnished with nothing more than a simple straw bed and a side table bearing an empty wash basin.
The bed offered a rough blanket and a lumpy pillow, humble as they were, and Elizabeth felt something close to gratitude for them, more, certainly, than she had known the night before.
Mr. Darcy was taken up in much the same fashion, though his quarters proved considerably worse. He was thrust into the room opposite the stairhead, bare of all but a pillow and a thin blanket flung upon the floorboards, the wood cold and gritty beneath where he landed.
"Never you mind about yer wee girl," the young guard teased with a provoking smile.
His hands remained bound as the door shut and the lock turned over with a heavy, final-sounding click.
The sack still over his head, he bent at the waist and worked himself free of it by degrees, striking his skull against the wall once, hard enough to see white behind his eyes, before it finally slid loose.
He straightened, blinking against the sudden dimness, and took stock of the room at once, from long habit, cataloguing every feature that might serve him.
No window, he let out a silent profanity.
A heavy, musty smell, damp plaster and old straw.
Beyond the crude pillow and the worn blanket, nothing; the room entirely stripped of anything a man might use, whether for comfort or for escape.
Small, but dry, at least, and free of the mud that had plagued him half the day, which he supposed he ought to count for something.
Hunger gnawed at him steadily, a hollow ache he had not properly attended to in hours, but a more pressing need soon crowded it out entirely.
He found a chamber pot set against the wall, made his awkward way to the door on his knees, his bound hands useless behind him, and struck the wood with one knee, twice, then a third time, harder, calling out for someone to hear him.
Some moments passed before footsteps sounded on the stair, two sets, by the weight and rhythm of them. A voice came through the door, flat with irritation. "What is it you want?"
"I require the use of a chamber pot."
"Hmph." A pause, considering. "Those can be dangerous things, in the wrong hands."
"Hardly, sir, with my hands bound as they are behind my back."
A silence followed, longer this time, then a low, muttered exchange between the two men beyond the door, words he could not make out, though their tone carried the particular flatness of men weighing a small risk against a smaller inconvenience.
At length one set of footsteps descended, and the other man called through the door, "We'll fetch you a pot to do yer business," in a voice laced with irritation.
***
While Mr. Darcy made his request known, Elizabeth had crept close to her own door, pressing her ear flat against the rough wood, straining to make sense of every sound that reached her through it.
That must be Mr. Darcy, she believed, hearing only a muffling of voices, with one sounding quite like her fellow captive.
Footsteps went up, then down, then up again; a pause; low voices, indistinct, rising and falling without shape; a door closing; footsteps descending once more.
She held herself perfectly still through all of it, scarcely breathing, cataloguing each sound as though her life might depend on correctly reading it, and perhaps, she thought grimly, it did.
When the hallway fell quiet at last, she withdrew from the door, her legs stiff from crouching, and crossed instead to the bed.
Elizabeth’s room smelled of mildew and old sweat, the mattress thin and lumpen beneath her, but it held a bed nonetheless, and she lay upon it at once, too weary to mind its faults.
After so exhausting and terrifying a day, even so small a mercy felt like riches.
She lay with her back against the frame, gazing upward at the ceiling, willing her racing thoughts toward something like stillness.
One, two, three, four... She found herself absently counting some carved wooden ornament set into the beams above; a rosette, or perhaps a rough star, she could not quite make it out in the dimness, her mind seizing on any small, meaningless task that might hold the panic at bay a moment longer.
The bark of a dog somewhere below jerked her attention back to the door, her whole body going rigid before she placed the sound and made herself breathe again.
From there her eyes wandered the walls, then the floor, taking in the old plaster, cracked in places, and the thick, dark timber framing beneath it.
The walls, she judged with a cold, practical eye, were far too solid to attempt breaking through; they were old, and thick, and entirely unyielding, whatever desperate scheme she might contrive.
Improper as the thought certainly was, she found herself wishing, fiercely, that she had not been parted from Mr. Darcy.
Whatever her vexation with the man, she did not doubt for a moment that he cared for her safety, which was rather more than she could honestly say of anyone else within these walls.
Although, everything about this situation, she reflected, with an anxious, humourless sigh, is entirely improper.
***
Hunger and thirst returned to press upon her thoughts before long, though there was little to be done about either. She debated whether to knock and beg for food, or hold her tongue.
An hour passed in this indecision before footsteps sounded once more, and the lock turned. An elderly, careworn woman entered bearing a tray Elizabeth could only call glorious, a glass of milk, a heel of crusty bread, and a bowl of porridge.
Bless you, she thought, watching the woman set it upon the floor.
She had very nearly murmured her thanks when the man behind the woman spoke first. "That's all ye're gettin', so ye'd best eat every bit of it."