Chapter Two
Elizabeth went down the broken bank on her heels and one hand, the loose stone shifting and sliding beneath her, and reached the boy where he lay half in the cold wet at the foot of the slide.
He was perhaps seven, small for it, his face gray under the grime and running with tears he was plainly furious about.
One leg lay wrong. She did not let herself look at it longer than it took to understand that it was wrong—the shin turned where no shin should turn—and then she had her hands on his shoulders, holding him to the mud, because he was trying to thrash up onto it.
“Be still. Be still now, you must be still.” She had never in her life used such a voice and did not know where it came from. “What is your name?”
“Jem.” It tore out of him on a sob. “Where is my pa? My pa was on the—is my pa across? Did my pa get across?”
“I do not know yet. We will find out. Lie still and let me look at you, Jem, and do not dare move that leg.”
“Will it hurt?” Jem asked, with the tears still streaming down his face.
She did not want to lie, but did not want to distress the boy more than he already was. “This is the only way to make it better, Jem. Be brave for me now.”
Bootsteps came down the slide behind her, fast and heavy, sending a fresh scattering of stone past her skirts, and a voice she would have known anywhere said, close and low, “What do you need?”
She did not turn around. She had no spare grief left over to be astonished that of all the men in Kent it should be this one. “Someone to hold him still while I straighten his leg. It has to come straight before it can be bound. Can you hold him?”
“Yes.” Darcy was already down on his knees in the muck on the boy’s other side, his coat be damned, his big hands closing over Jem’s shoulders and chest where hers had been. “Look at me,” he told the boy. “What is the dog’s name? You have a dog. I can see the hairs on your jacket.”
“Tip,” said Jem, bewildered into answering.
“Tip. Hold Tip in your mind and hold still for me. This will hurt. You may shout.”
Jem shouted. Elizabeth took the small broken leg in both hands and drew it straight, steady and fast, the way she had once watched the farrier do for a hound at Longbourn—and the boy’s body arched and his scream tore up the bank and out across the broken water, and the man on the far side answered it with a roar of his own.
She felt the wrongness of it under her hands, and her stomach lurched, but her hands did not stop, because stopping halfway would be crueler than going on.
Darcy held the child down through all of it and did not flinch and did not loosen, and when it was done and the leg lay straight Jem was sobbing into Darcy’s sleeve.
Darcy was saying, low, the same three words over and over, that’s it, that’s it, that’s it.
It was the least a man could do. Any decent person would have held a hurt child. She told herself so, and got to work.
She needed a splint and she needed binding. “I need something flat—a lath, a paling, a slat off that cart—”
A slat was already coming over her shoulder into her hand.
Darcy had wrenched it free of the wrecked wagon one-handed without letting the boy go.
She laid it along the straightened leg, and then her own fingers were at her throat dragging her fichu loose and tearing it into lengths, and she began to bind the leg to the wood while Jem howled and clutched and the cold came up off the river into all of them.
“Hold the splint flat while I tie it.” She did not soften it into a request. Darcy set two fingers against the end of the slat and held it where she needed it, and she bound over and around without their hands meeting, fast, her knuckles white. “Not your whole hand. The end—where it lifts.”
He moved it. “There?”
“Yes.”
She did not thank him. He did not seem to expect it.
“Is my pa across?” Jem got out between sobs. “I want my pa.”
Elizabeth followed the boy’s wet stare across the gap.
The man on the far bank had come right to the lip of the broken stone, and two other men over there had hold of his arms—not to comfort him, she understood, but to keep him out of the water, because he had plainly already tried it once and the brown current would have had him in a breath and given him back to no one.
He was shouting his son’s name. He could see the boy.
He could not cross four yards of air to reach him, and he knew it, and he went on shouting anyway because a man must do something.
“Your pa can see you,” Elizabeth said, which was true, and the only true comfort she had. “He is watching you this very minute. Be brave where he can see.”
“There must be an apothecary sent for,” she said then, working, lower, to Darcy. “At once. Someone must go up to the village and fetch him—there is an apothecary in Hunsford, surely—”
“On this side, no.” Darcy said it flatly, without looking up from the boy.
“Mr. Shaw is across the water. His house is the second past the chapel on the far road. I have ridden past it a hundred times coming from Rosings.” A breath, while she took in that the only apothecary within reach was on the wrong side of a vanished bridge.
“There is a surgeon a half-day off at the market town. The same road. The same bridge.”
She had been at Hunsford three weeks and had not once had occasion to want a surgeon, and so she had not known.
“Then we shall send to the upper crossing,” she said. “Or we manage him ourselves until someone can.”
By now there were people around. They had come down from the village in twos and threes and stood along the lip of the broken lane, a dozen and then a score of them, looking from the gap to the brown water to the man stranded and bellowing on the far bank.
They did nothing, because no one had told them what could be done and there was no obvious thing to do.
Darcy rose. She felt him gather himself to take them in hand—saw his eye go straight to the one man among them who looked the part, a stout, well-fed fellow in a good broadcloth coat standing a little apart, and heard him begin, “You there. We will want every man who can—”
But the broadcloth coat only looked alarmed, and looked, himself, toward someone else.
They were all of them looking toward someone else.
Not the prosperous man. An older man near the back, lean and stooped and quiet, in a stained leather apron, with a folding rule still stuck through it from whatever bench he had run from.
The carpenter. Whatever was decided here, these people would do it because that man nodded, and the gentleman in the good coat could shout till he was hoarse and not a soul would move.
“Mr. Dawes.” Elizabeth pitched it past Darcy, to the apron, because she had spent three weeks watching this village and she did at least know this. “It is Dawes, is it not? Will you tell us what the bridge will allow? You know it and we do not.”
The carpenter came forward, ignoring the broadcloth coat entirely, and crouched at the edge to look.
Darcy, beside her, said nothing at all. He had stopped, and looked where she looked, and let his own half-finished order die in his mouth, and when Dawes began to speak it was Darcy who went still to listen hardest.
“Span’s gone,” Dawes said. “Both ends took. There’s no walking it and there’s no mending it today nor tomorrow.
Water’s too high and too quick to ford—won’t drop till the rain’s done and the thaw’s through, and that’s a week or more.
” He spat to the side, not unkindly, only a working man reckoning a job.
“Upper crossing’s your road. Five miles up where she narrows.
Full day there and back on foot for a sound man. Less, mounted.”
“Mounted,” Darcy repeated. It was the first useful thing he had said since he stood up, and he said it like a man taking a fact and putting it in his pocket for later. He did not seize on it. He did not announce a plan. He only asked, “How many of yours are caught on the far side?”
And so it came out, in pieces, the shape of the disaster.
The far side held the apothecary and the surgeon’s road and half the men who had gone to the morning market.
It held Jem’s father, who could be seen and named and shouted to and not reached.
And it held, it transpired, the person an old woman near the front was trying with great dignity not to weep about.
“My daughter is over,” the old woman said.
She stood very straight in a good plain bonnet, her hands folded hard together.
“Mrs. Poole, sir—I beg pardon—I am Mrs. Poole. My daughter is brought to bed within the fortnight with her first child, and she is over the water at Wickett’s farm, and I am here.
” She unfolded one hand and folded it again.
“I had meant to be with her by Sunday. I have her linen by me. I have the caudle made. I had thought only how to carry it across, you understand, and now there is no way across.”
She did not ask anyone to fix it. She stated her linen and her caudle and her daughter and her side of the river, plainly, like a list, and let them lie there. Elizabeth’s throat closed on her, and she made herself breathe past it, because a closed throat splinted no legs and carried no linen.
“You will be with her,” Elizabeth said. “We will find how. Not yet, but we will.”
It was a rash thing to promise and she knew it as it left her.
Into the middle of this came Mr. Collins.
He came down the lane at a sort of reverential trot, his hands already raised, and took in the broken bridge and the stranded man and the bound and weeping child, and what he reached for, out of the whole storehouse of human response, was Scripture.
“A most awful visitation! A most awful and instructive visitation! ‘He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run among the hills’—my dear people, we must consider what the Almighty intends us to learn—Mrs. Poole, you must not give way, it is unbecoming in an affliction sent for our improvement—”
“Mr. Collins,” said Charlotte, who had come down the lane behind him at no trot at all, with her arms full of blankets and a girl behind her carrying more, “go up to the parsonage and have Sarah build the kitchen fire high, and bring down the hurdle from the wash-house for the boy to be carried on. The flat one. Go now, there’s a good man, you will be of the greatest use. ”
Mr. Collins, who could not be of use and could not bear to be told so, brightened immensely at being told the opposite, and went.
Charlotte knelt by Elizabeth in the mud without a word about her gown, looked once at the splinted leg, once at Elizabeth’s face, and began paying out blankets to cold villagers as though she had been doing it all her life.
They got Jem onto the hurdle when Collins brought it, Darcy taking the head of it and a younger man the foot, and it was as they lifted that the boy’s mother reached them at last.
Mrs. Holt came running from the far end of the village with her skirts in both fists and her cap gone crooked, and reached the hurdle with no breath left to spend.
She did not scream. Jem was watching her.
Her step hitched once, then she came to his side and put both hands on his grimed face. “Jem.”
Her eyes went to the splint, to the strips of Elizabeth’s fichu, to Mr. Darcy at the head of the hurdle—wet through, ruined, and holding steady. Her mouth trembled once.
Just once.
“Is my pa across?” Jem asked her. “Mam. Is my pa across?”
“Your pa’s grand,” Mrs. Holt said, which was a lie, her husband being visibly not grand, roaring himself raw on the far bank. “Your pa’s grand, and you’re to be brave. You’re not to cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“I know you’re not.”
She lifted her eyes from her son then and looked at the two of them—Elizabeth muddy to the elbows, Darcy ruined in his fine coat and still holding the head of the hurdle.
“Thank God you were both here,” she said. “The two of you. Thank God.”
Elizabeth said something—that anyone would have, that it was nothing, the things one says—and bent to take up the corner of the hurdle, and underneath the saying a small wild laugh turned over in her chest and she crushed it before it could reach her mouth.
Both here. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes ago she had stood in Charlotte’s parlor and told this man he was the last in the world she could ever be brought to marry, and meant it to the marrow, and the words were still warm in the air somewhere above the ruined bridge.
And here was a frightened mother thanking God for the pair of them in one breath, as though they were a matched set, as though they belonged in the same sentence.
The universe, it appeared, had a sense of humor, and it was not a kind one.
She got her shoulder under the hurdle. Darcy took the far corner without being asked.
They carried the boy up the broken bank between them, and Elizabeth fixed her eyes on the rutted lane, and on the lit windows of the village above it, and on every other thing in the whole of Kent that was not the man at the other end of the load.