Chapter Nine
Darkness pooled and thinned in turns, like ink stirred through water.
A shape at the edge of her mind kept reforming—hedge, hill, ditch, hedge again—never holding still long enough for her to grasp it. The world blinked white once, then slipped sideways. Something throbbed behind her eyes, a steady pulse she could neither name nor ease.
“Miss Bennet?”
A man’s voice, too close, too real to be part of the dream.
The light changed. A thudding grew louder—her own heartbeat? Footsteps? The rise of wind along the field? She tried to turn her head, and the sound stuttered, splitting into two uneven beats.
The wrongness surged again—cold earth rising toward her, the hedge tilting—and she flinched, or thought she did.
“Her pulse is stronger now,” someone murmured. A different voice. Female.
Elizabeth tried to open her eyes; one lid obeyed, the other sagged as if held down by a thumb she could not see.
Blur. Firelight? A lamp? Her vision rippled, and for an instant the flame elongated into the shape of the boundary hedge, needle-thin and shivering. She gasped. Or tried.
“Easy, my dear,” the woman said. “You are quite safe.”
Safe. The word rang oddly, as though echoed back at her from the wrong direction.
A hand touched her wrist. She jerked, the movement weak but sudden.
“Forgive me, Miss Elizabeth,” the man said again.
His voice floated somewhere above her shoulder—familiar yet somehow distorted against familiarity.
Was it… Mr Jones? No… Something cool brushed her swollen wrist, smelling faintly of spirits and crushed leaves.
“That should help with the inflammation. Can you open your eyes?”
She attempted to answer, but her tongue felt thick, clumsy. What came out was a dry whisper: “Not… here…”
The woman clucked her tongue. “Poor lamb. She is wandering. Shock does strange things.”
Shock. Yes. That might have been it. Fainting from exertion or hunger—some innocent explanation. She clung to that idea with both hands.
The man pressed a palm lightly to her forehead. “Her fever appears very slight. She may simply have overtaxed herself. A fall, perhaps. Miss Bennet? Do you recall anything of your morning?”
Morning. Yes. She had gone walking. Clear skies. The far hedgerow like a line of stitching through the field. Her wrist—
Her eyes fluttered wide at once.
The world swam, but she managed to rasp, “The… ground.”
“Gently, Miss Elizabeth,” he said. Yes—surely it was Jones. She knew that voice. Had known it since her childhood. But the room tilted, and the certainty dissolved almost at once. “Give yourself a moment.”
Elizabeth’s gaze caught on a fold of brown wool near her shoulder—someone standing beside the bed, though she could not yet place them.
Pillows held her upright, blankets arranged with a care that did not feel like home.
The air carried a faint scent of wood polish and something sharp from the herbs.
Beyond the half-open door, two voices murmured—low, deliberate, neither of them familiar.
Not home.
The thought flickered and died.
“Where—” Her voice cracked. She swallowed. “Where am I?”
“Netherfield, miss. Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley found you on the east rise. You were quite unwell. Mr Bingley brought Mr Jones and then rode to Longbourn himself. Mr Darcy waits in the hall for word.”
Netherfield?
The name dropped into her consciousness like a stone into dark water. Memory rippled outward: Mr Darcy’s face bending over her, the hollow sway of a saddle beneath her, the dull roar of hooves. His voice—steady, unnervingly calm—telling someone to fetch help.
Mr Jones lifted her hand and turned it toward the lamplight. “What happened here? It looks as though it has been festering some while.”
Elizabeth snatched her hand back before thought could intervene.
“No,” she said at once. Too quickly. “No, it is nothing.”
He exchanged a brief glance with the housekeeper but did not ask more.
She swallowed and lay her head back on the pillow. She was lying in a guest chamber—she could see now the fine plaster moulding, the pale curtains drawn against the afternoon light, the unfamiliar quilt draped over her legs. The room spun once, gently, as though nudged.
She brought a hand to her temple.
Mr Darcy had carried her here. And she had been… babbling? Her mouth tasted of cold air and uncertainty. She opened her eyes.
“Netherfield,” she whispered.
Mr Jones adjusted the blanket at her shoulder. “Just so. And I think it time Mr Darcy came in to see you for himself. He will be relieved to see you awake.”
Mrs Nicholls opened the door only a hand’s breadth before slipping away, leaving it ajar in clear invitation.
Darcy stepped inside.
The room was warmer than the passage, a small fire crackling low in the grate.
Mr Jones stood beside the bed, frowning down at his leather satchel; Mrs Nicholls moved to occupy a chair near the foot, upright as a sentinel.
Elizabeth lay propped against pillows—still, pale, her lashes faint shadows against her cheek.
He had seen her only moments before, carried in his arms and laid out on the bed until Mrs Nicholls had huffed in to take charge of her.
But the sight of her now—quiet, reduced to stillness—struck him with a sharper unease.
This was not merely illness. It was absence.
As though something essential had been interrupted.
Mr Jones looked up. “Mr Darcy. I thought it best you hear the particulars at once.”
Darcy moved nearer, keeping to the opposite side of the bed from Mrs Nicholls.
He kept his hands behind his back; even so, he felt conspicuous, an interloper where he had no formal right to stand.
Improper, perhaps—especially as he had heard her voice through the door only moments earlier, and now her eyes were closed again. “Tell me.”
Jones cleared his throat and consulted the small ledger in his hand.
“Pulse irregular but not dangerously so. No evidence of injury save for an old scrape at her wrist—no bruising, no contusions. Her breathing is sound, though shallow from exhaustion.” His brows drew together.
“Her pupils respond, but somewhat sluggishly. I confess myself puzzled.”
Darcy’s attention drew, unbidden, to Miss Elizabeth’s hand lying open upon the coverlet. There was earth beneath her nails, a faint dark crescent at the edge of each finger. He felt the question form before he could stop it—how long had she been there alone?
Jones went on, “One possibility is exposure. She may have wandered farther than she intended, lost her way, succumbed to chill—”
Darcy shook his head before the sentence was complete. “She was not lost. Not in any ordinary sense. She walks those fields often.”
“Even the eastern rise?” Jones asked mildly. “I have known Miss Elizabeth for many years, and I have never heard of her being incautious.”
Darcy hesitated. He could not explain why that detail lodged so sharply—the memory of that stretch of ground, the way the hedgerow thinned, the quiet that did not feel like quiet at all. “I cannot say,” he replied at last. “But she would not go there without purpose.”
Jones nodded, indulgent rather than convinced. “Very well. Another possibility is strain of the nerves. A fright, perhaps. A sudden shock can sometimes bring on faintness of this sort.”
“No,” Darcy said at once. “She does not seem the sort to be given to fancies. She would not collapse because of a startled bird.”
Jones shifted, his tone lowering. “There are… more prosaic causes. Some ladies, after certain unwise associations—”
“No.” The word cut cleanly across the room.
Jones stopped short, colour rising in his face.
“I do not know her well,” Darcy continued, his voice even now but leaving no space for retreat, “but Miss Elizabeth Bennet is a gentlewoman of sense and character. You will look elsewhere for your explanation.”
“Of course, of course,” Jones murmured, chastened. “I merely list the possibilities. But none seem to fit the evidence. She took nothing poisonous that I can detect. There is no fever. No sign of illness. Merely…” He spread his hands helplessly. “A collapse without cause.”
Darcy drew a slow breath. Without cause.
The phrase rang false the moment it was spoken.
There was always a cause. He had felt it on that rise—an awareness he had dismissed at the time as fancy, fatigue, anything but what it had been.
The memory resisted examination. He let it. Some impressions were best ignored.
Mrs Nicholls rose quietly from her chair. “She tried to speak, sir, just before you entered. A word or two. But they made no sense.”
Darcy’s attention snapped back to the bed. “What did she say?”
Nicholls hesitated. “It sounded like… ‘Not here.’ Or perhaps ‘not near.’ I could not be certain.”
The words settled into him with unwelcome precision. Not here. Not near. As though the distinction mattered.
“And she lost consciousness again?” he asked.
“Not entirely, sir,” Jones replied. “She hears us, I am sure of it. She will wake soon enough.”
Soon enough.
“May I—?” Darcy checked himself. The request was improper; he knew it the instant the words formed.
And yet the conviction remained, stubborn and unaccountable, that there was something she might say—if she could say anything at all—that would render sense where none yet existed. “May I speak with her a moment? Alone?”
Jones looked up sharply, then exchanged a glance with Mrs Nicholls. “It is irregular,” he said after a pause. “But I see no harm in it. We will remain by the hearth. Speak quietly, sir—and take care not to startle her.”
Darcy inclined his head.
Jones and Mrs Nicholls withdrew, their voices lowered at once to practical murmurs—poultices, broth, warmed bricks—leaving the space beside the bed suddenly, conspicuously his.
He stepped closer.