Chapter 53
Chapter Fifty-Three
Darcy did not remember crossing the distance between them.
One instant, Elizabeth was dragged backward through the press of bodies, her sleeve torn, her hair ripping across her shoulders; the next, he was among them, striking hands aside, driving forward with a force that owed nothing to prudence.
The weakness that had dogged him for weeks fell away the moment she was dragged before Lady Catherine’s feet.
Strength returned—not kindly, not cleanly—but sharp and dangerous, like a blade drawn too quickly.
“Let her go.”
He did not shout. He did not need to. The command cut through the nearest ring of men by the mere fact of his advance.
One stumbled beneath his shoulder; another recoiled at the look in his face.
He seized the wrist of the man who held her and twisted until bone ground against bone.
The grip broke. Elizabeth lurched toward him, and he caught her again, one arm braced around her waist.
And at once the cost returned.
Her hand closed in his, and something inside him recoiled and gave way.
The strength that had carried him through the mob thinned as though drawn through a narrow channel.
His vision sharpened and dimmed in the same instant.
The ground seemed less secure beneath his boots.
He felt her pulse against his palm—too quick, too bright—and knew that whatever bound them was no longer dormant.
She wept into his collar, begging him. “No, Darcy! I will only make it worse!” He did not loosen his grip.
Behind Lady Catherine, her carriage stood at a perilous angle where the roadside had begun to fail. The matched greys plunged against their traces, iron ringing as harness strained. Anne’s pale face appeared at the window, her gloved hand pressed against the frame.
Lady Catherine turned at the sound of splintering wood. For one suspended instant, her composure fractured; she saw the tilt, the sucking slide of earth beneath the near wheel, the black gleam of water below. Anne’s cry pierced the tumult.
“Hold them!” she cried sharply to her servants, stepping forward as though command alone could force the road to obedience. “Are you blind? Secure the horses!”
The nearest horse reared high, forelegs striking air as its hind feet slipped. The second plunged sideways, the harness snapping taut between them. A torch fell and rolled beneath stamping hooves, scattering sparks against damp earth.
The soil beneath the near wheel continued to give, sloughing away in heavy clods and revealing darker earth beneath—a seam running along the roadside as though something long buried had shifted at last. One wheel dipped farther.
A groom shouted. The carriage body groaned and began, impossibly, to twist.
Lady Catherine wheeled back toward Darcy, fury conquering alarm. “You observe the consequence!” she said, her voice sharpened by outrage rather than fear. “You feel what indulgence has purchased! This disorder follows her—follows you! Even now, you would persist?”
Elizabeth strained in Darcy’s hold. “There is a woman inside the carriage! We must—”
Darcy blanched in horror. Anne. Innocent in all this, and endangered by her own mother’s pride. He felt the pull in Elizabeth’s frame—the terrible instinct to run toward danger rather than from it.
“No! Elizabeth, stay. Harrowe! For God’s sake, man!”
A fissure traced itself along the road’s edge, narrow as a thread before widening by degrees.
The near horse screamed again. A trace snapped.
The carriage lurched, one side dropping another inch toward the dark water of the ditch.
Men who moments before had shouted for judgment now scrambled for footing.
Harrowe lunged, caught the dangling bridle of the nearer horse with both hands, and dragged its head sideways, using his full weight to turn the animal’s panic away from the collapsing edge. A groom seized the other rein. Together they forced the team back a pace.
“Move!” Harrowe roared to those still clustered nearest the wheel. “Do you want it over on you?”
Darcy attempted to step forward to assist and felt his knees threaten betrayal. Elizabeth’s fingers tightened convulsively in his. The contact burned—not in heat, but in depletion.
Behind Lady Catherine, Anne leaned from the carriage window, crying out in terror. “Mama!”
Another slip of earth answered her cry. The wheel sank deeper.
Lady Catherine glanced back long enough to quake in horror. Then she whirled, as if Darcy had the power to pull Anne from the brink.
“Do your duty, Darcy! Leave that temptress at once, and place yourself where continuity has been preserved and not squandered. Your father would be ashamed—ashamed!—that his son must be ordered about so, but this spectacle proves the necessity of it.”
“To do what?” Darcy barked. “Lady Catherine, no matter the proper reading of events, this is neither the time nor the place. Call off this madness and let the matter be discussed with civility and decorum.”
“Civility!” she cried back. “You would put off this reckoning for niceties in a drawing room? While Parliament trembles, while regiments starve for want of proper supply, while the stability of this nation hangs upon discipline and lineage, you would cast aside every established line in favour of fancy.”
The onlookers glanced from one to another, boots shifting away from the uneasy ground as voices murmured confusion. Dismay. For want of direction and purpose.
“What would you have me do?” Darcy answered, in a voice so soft his aunt was obliged to step closer to hear him. “And why—” he dashed a hand toward her faltering carriage— “would you endanger Anne’s health by dragging her from her warm hearth in winter? Let us look to her safety now!”
Lady Catherine’s jaw trembled with rage. “Can you be so wilfully ignorant, Darcy? Your duty is upon you even now. You will attend her back to Kent, and complete the alignment so that the families might be joined properly!”
Lady Catherine’s last words still rang in the air when Darcy felt Elizabeth flinch against him.
He thought at first it was only exhaustion—her weight sagging, her strength at last spent. Then her fingers closed convulsively in his coat, and he followed the direction of her gaze.
The mud at their feet was moving.
A slender green shoot pressed upward through the churned earth beside her boot, slick and dark as though it had forced its way from a depth that did not welcome light.
Another followed. Then a third, and a dozen more sprouting in a perfect circle at her feet.
They did not thrust wildly; they rose with terrible deliberation, coiling as they climbed.
Thorns caught the hem of her gown.
“Elizabeth!” Darcy dropped at once, one hand still locked around her waist while the other tore at her skirts, trying to tug her legs free of the thorny vine before it could wind higher.
The stem resisted him. It did not snap like any winter growth he had ever known; it bent, flexed, and slid down her body only to fasten again, barbs hooking into silk and stocking with a precision that was almost intimate.
Elizabeth drew in a breath that never became sound.
The onlookers fell back in a widening ring.
Someone crossed himself. Another muttered a prayer too quickly to finish it.
The torches guttered in uneven light, and in that wavering glow the hedge seemed to gather itself—not spreading outward toward the crowd, not lashing in defence, but circling her. Claiming.
Harrowe swore under his breath and seized one of the thicker stems in both hands.
He pulled. The vine strained against him, thorns biting into his palm, yet it did not release her.
It tightened, inch by inch, about her ankles, then her calves, as though the soil itself had resolved to hold what stood upon it.
Lady Catherine stared.
For the first time since she had descended from her carriage, something unguarded crossed her face. “There,” she said, though the word emerged without its former command. “There is your answer! She is a false offering!”
Darcy scarcely heard her. He had wrapped both arms about Elizabeth now, lifting her as best he could while the thorns scraped and caught.
As he drew her upward, the vines stretched with her, rising from the earth in a twisting arc, refusing to break.
One thorn scored across his wrist. Another pierced the back of his hand, bright pain blooming where blood welled dark in the cold air.
Elizabeth’s head tipped back against his shoulder. “Darcy—”
He could not tell whether she meant to warn him or to beg him to let her go.
“No!” he cried, though he had no notion whether he spoke to her, to the watching crowd, or to the living thing fastening her to the ground.
A fresh rush of men pressed in, fear and righteousness indistinguishable now. One man, face white and eyes blazing, shoved forward with a pistol clutched in trembling hands. He did not level it properly; he brandished it, as though the mere presence of iron might master what he did not understand.
“Stand back!” he shouted. “Stand back, witch, or I swear I’ll fire!” The pistol trembled.
“Are you mad? Ignorant, superstitious fools!” Harrowe lunged for the weapon at the same moment the nearest horse reared again, hooves striking air, reins tangling beneath it. The ground split another inch. The carriage groaned, timber protesting under strain.
“This is no witchcraft,” he barked. “What do you mean to do, shoot at a thorn bush?”
The man faltered, but he was shaking so badly that his pistol discharged quite without intent.
The report cracked through the dusk and seemed, for one suspended instant, to tear the world in two. Smoke burst white and acrid between them. The ball struck not flesh but wood—splintering the sideboard of the tilting carriage—yet the shock of it drove a cry from every throat at once.
Elizabeth convulsed in his arms.
The thorn answered.