Chapter 52 #2
Brutus barked and charged the road, standing guard against the onslaught. Hooves struck the frozen earth. A carriage wheel shrieked as it braked too hard. Men shouted. Someone cried out, “There! There she is!”
Elizabeth twisted in Darcy’s hold and saw torches swinging in the dusk, their flames bent sideways in the windless air as though unwilling to burn straight.
The inn servants were among them. The militia officer.
Stable hands. A boy from the yard. Faces she had passed without notice only an hour before, now sharpened by certainty.
Witch.
She heard it plainly now.
Witch!
Darcy shifted, drawing her slightly behind him, though he did not release her. She felt the change in him—the way his breath shortened, the tremor shuddering through his spine. He was not strong. Not as he ought to be.
“Do not hold me so tightly,” she whispered. “I am hurting you.”
His hand tightened instead.
A pistol fired.
The report cracked across the fields—and misfired in the same instant. The spark flared sideways, spitting harmlessly into the damp air. The man holding it swore and jerked back as though burned.
Brutus lunged… just as a second report split the air.
Elizabeth did not at first understand what had happened. The dog’s bark broke into a strangled yelp. He stumbled mid-stride and crashed hard upon his side, legs scrabbling against the frozen ground.
Darcy’s breath tore from him—not a word, but a sound she had never heard before. “Brutus!”
The name struck her like the shot itself.
Heat flared through her chest, sharp and sickening, as though the bullet had found her instead.
She tried to see past Darcy’s shoulder—tried to move—but the world narrowed to the dark shape on the ground and the red already spreading against the dog’s pale flank.
The man who had fired lifted the pistol again. He did not keep it.
Darcy slipped from Elizabeth’s side and wrenched forward with a strength that should not have been left to him. The weapon was struck from the man’s hand and flung into the grass. A cry rose from the crowd—anger, fear, something breaking loose.
Elizabeth stumbled forward, dropping to her knees beside Brutus. His body trembled beneath her hands. Blood slicked her fingers. His eyes rolled once, frantic, then found her. He was panting and whimpering, frenzied with pain and the desire to protect.
“It is nothing,” she breathed, though her voice shook. “It is nothing. You shall not leave us.”
A rough hand caught her shoulder—not cruel, but urgent. Harrowe. “Leave him to me,” he said sharply.
Before she could protest, he bent and gathered the great dog into his arms. Brutus gave a low, broken whimper but did not struggle. Harrowe turned at once, carrying him clear of the advancing press as the crowd surged inward.
The space Harrowe had left closed at once. A militia officer forced his way through the front ranks, face flushed and set with a terrible certainty. He glared at Darcy, then the man whose pistol Darcy had flung off the road. Steel flashed in his hand, and he moved grimly towards Elizabeth.
Darcy stepped between them. “Stay that blade!”
The officer rounded upon Darcy instead. “Out of the way,” he snarled, and there was no mistaking his intention. The blade descended with deliberate force.
Darcy raised his arm to turn it aside. He had no strength for such a contest. She felt that plainly in the tremor still running through him.
And yet the stroke did not fall as it should. The steel met something unseen and would not pass it.
A thin, unnatural sound threaded the air—metal under strain. Before Elizabeth’s eyes, the bright length of the sword altered. It did not glance away. It did not shatter.
It yielded.
The blade bowed inward upon itself, its straight line curving as though pressed against a weight no one could see. The officer cried out and staggered back, staring at the weapon in his grasp.
Darcy reeled with the force of it, his balance failing. She reached for him, but he caught her first, one arm coming hard about her waist. The shock ran through him and into her, sharp as winter water.
For one suspended instant, the field held its breath.
Then the crowd recoiled. And surged.
“See how it turns!” someone shouted. “See how the torch flame bends? She’s a witch!”
A sword flashed in another man’s hand, and wrenched sideways as if tugged by an invisible hook. It tore free of his grip and struck the ground between Elizabeth and the nearest man, quivering upright in the earth.
Gasps and terrified shouts broke like a flock of birds taking flight.
Elizabeth felt it then—not outward, but inward. The pull. The answering.
The torches leaned toward her and away again. Water in a roadside trough heaved once against its boards and sloshed over. The iron buckle at her shoe warmed against her skin, and even the brass buttons of Darcy’s coat popped free of their threads.
It was not unwanted obedience, like before. It was agitation.
Darcy’s breath ran ragged against her temple. “Elizabeth,” he said under his breath, and there was warning in it now. Not for the mob—for her. “Head down.”
The crowd parted suddenly as another carriage forced its way through, the horses lathered, the coachman white with the effort of keeping them straight. The door was flung open before the vehicle had fully stopped.
That same noblewoman from the inn descended without assistance, rejecting the groom’s offered hand with a motion so slight it might have been invisible to any but the man she dismissed.
Her figure was rigid beneath layers of dark silk; the plumes at her bonnet trembled in the cold air, though she herself did not.
The nausea struck without warning. It was not fear alone, nor memory of Mr Collins’s suffocating nearness, but something sharper—an internal recoil so violent she bent double, the contents of her empty stomach wrenching free as though expelled by force.
A murmur rippled through the men behind the carriage.
“See there… righteous judgement!”
“She cannot even stand—”
“It’s unnatural!”
Darcy’s arm closed around her waist. He ripped a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. “Breathe, Elizabeth. Breathe, love.”
The word slipped from him without calculation. She felt it more than heard it, and leaned her head into his shoulder as her body shuddered.
He did not release her. She felt him gather himself instead—felt the line of his body lengthen, his shoulders square, as though some ancestral instinct had been summoned to meet what approached.
“Lady Catherine.”
There was recognition in his tone, and warning. Elizabeth stiffened and looked up. So, that explained it.
Lady Catherine did not look at Elizabeth first. She regarded Darcy, and her expression did not blaze with temper, but settled into something far more dangerous: certainty.
“Darcy,” she said, as though addressing a subordinate who had disappointed her publicly. “What do you here? You persist in compounding error with spectacle.”
Behind her, the carriage rocked slightly as someone within shifted. Elizabeth caught a glimpse of the young lady seated inside—pale, teeth clenched so tightly her whole body trembled, eyes wide not with triumph but apprehension.
Lady Catherine’s gaze moved at last. It struck Elizabeth like cold iron.
“And this,” she said, taking in Elizabeth’s bent posture, Darcy’s arm around her, the circle of men pressing nearer, “is the… influence for which you would discard order. Fie! A sham and a temptress. You are a fool, Darcy.”
A torch flared too high behind her. Sparks hissed into the damp air. One of the horses reared and was dragged back sharply.
“She made the water rise!” someone shouted from the road. “And the fire—you saw the fire!”
“The vines! I saw them at the inn—”
“Witchcraft!”
Lady Catherine did not rebuke them. Did not protest that “witchcraft” was not a mortal crime anymore, but it would not have mattered. The crowd were lathered to a panic, and it served her purposes.
She stepped forward, skirts sweeping over rutted earth, her gloved hand lifting as though to indicate an object for removal.
“I cautioned you, Darcy,” she continued, her voice cutting cleanly through the rising agitation. “I explained to you precisely what indulgence would invite. Yet you choose to stand in a ditch, clasping the hand of a young woman whose very presence provokes convulsion and hysteria.”
The iron fittings on one of the bridles gave a sharp metallic cry, twisting under strain. A groom swore and leapt to capture the horse, even as the bit fractured and fell from its mouth.
“There!” a man cried. “Look what she does!”
Elizabeth did not mean to move. She did not mean to answer the pressure building inside her. Yet the earth beneath her boots seemed to harden, then shudder, as if resisting something that demanded passage.
Darcy tightened his grip.
“You will cease threatening her, Lady Catherine,” he said, and there was no politeness in it. “You are driving the crisis!”
Lady Catherine’s chin lifted a fraction. “You mistake defiance for devotion,” she replied. “The land does not belong to appetite, Darcy. It belongs to lineage and restraint. Stand aside.”
The men behind her shifted again, emboldened by her presence. One took a step forward. Another reached toward Elizabeth’s cloak as though to seize it.
Elizabeth felt the strange, wild forces that had shielded her before falter—no longer gathering around her in fierce defence, but scattering, confused, as though her proximity to Darcy had altered their allegiance.
The torches guttered. Then flared. Then bent sideways in a wind that did not touch her hair.
“She’s doing it again!”
“Take her—take her now—”
The torches flared and guttered in the same breath. One dropped from its holder’s grasp and hissed out in the damp grass. The sword embedded in the earth vibrated once more before toppling flat.
Another torch swung too wide and caught the sleeve of a man behind it. He shouted, beating at his own coat. A horse reared, nearly crushing a boy who stumbled beneath its hooves.
“Stop,” Elizabeth whispered. She did not know to whom she spoke. “Stop—”
Darcy’s breathing shallowed, and he coughed… blood.
“Seize her!” Lady Catherine cried. “Remove her from him! You see what she does! Stand idle, and she will ruin you all!”
Hands lunged. Darcy shifted to shield her, and she felt the cost of it in the tremor that ran through him. The ground beneath them gave a sharp, splitting crack—not wide, not deep, but enough to unbalance the men nearest them.
Then Elizabeth saw a child near the road’s edge—fallen, scrambling as another horse shied. If the surge came again… If it struck blind…
Someone could be killed. And she would destroy Darcy.
“No!” she cried aloud.
And something in the air collapsed. The torches burned straight. The water stilled. The iron lay inert in the mud.
The force withdrew.
Simply gone.
For the first time since the inn yard, she stood unguarded. Hands seized her arms, tore her sleeves, pulled the cloak from her shoulders.
Darcy tried to wrench her back, but the strength was no longer in him. She felt him almost withering beneath her fingers as they were torn from him. Someone struck him across the shoulder. Another shoved him aside.
“Do not!” she cried, twisting. “Leave him be! I am the one you want!”
Behind her, Darcy stumbled, caught himself as his knees hit the earth.
“Darcy—” she began, though she did not know what she meant to say.
“You see it,” Lady Catherine said, not to Elizabeth but to the men who held her. “You see the disorder she breeds. Even now, it falters and surges at her whim. Would you have this upon your fields? Your children? She is a demon. Unnatural!”
A murmur answered her—fear finding sanction.
“You will come to Kent,” Lady Catherine informed him, as one pronounces a conclusion long settled. “You will restore what you have unsettled. This spectacle is the consequence of your indulgence. You will not compound it.”
Elizabeth struggled, but the hands at her arms only tightened. Her sleeve tore further; something warm ran down her wrist. She felt Darcy attempt to move toward her, felt the effort through the air like a tremor.
He did move—rose from his knee to stagger one step, then another—but the colour had left him. His strength was draining visibly now. “Release her,” he said thickly.
There was no force behind it. Only will.
A man struck him aside with the flat of his hand. Not a sword. Not yet. Merely the confidence of numbers.
“She near drowned a child!” someone shouted.
“She’ll burn us all next—devil!”
“Bind her!”
Lady Catherine did not issue the order again. She did not need to. She had named the danger, and the men supplied the remedy.
Elizabeth was pulled backward in earnest now, her boots scraping furrows through the earth.
She reached for Darcy despite herself—knowing the touch harmed him, knowing she ought to spare him even now—and he was able to lunge just enough that their fingers brushed once more before the grip was broken.