Chapter 1 #3
The path crossed the weir — a stone structure throttled with ice, the overflow channel silted, the whole system seized.
He noted it. Continued along the eastern shore toward the southern bank, where the mere's margin met the slope, and the slope climbed toward the ridge.
The sky was white. The snow was old, crusted, undisturbed.
The afternoon was already thinning toward the early dusk that came to valleys in January like a door closing.
He was fifty yards from the southern bank when he saw the blood.
Not much. A smear on the ice near the shore, dark against the white, already freezing into the surface.
He followed it with his eyes — more smears, a trail of wet, drag marks scored into the snow, the chaotic evidence of a body hauling itself across a frozen surface.
From a ragged hole in the ice to the bank.
The hole was already refreezing, the water beneath it dark.
Then the sound.
Low, animal, coming from the birch cluster near the southern shore.
Not a fox — he knew the sound a fox made in winter.
Not the cry of any creature he could put a name to.
A human sound, pressed through locked teeth, the sound of a body in a kind of trouble that does not permit screaming because screaming requires breath, and breath was being spent elsewhere.
He was running before the sound had finished. Boots punching through the crusted snow on the slope, balance gone on the frozen grade, recovered, gone again. He did not care. The sound was still coming from the birch trees. It was getting weaker.
She was against the largest trunk. A woman — young, dark-haired, her clothing soaked through and already stiffening in the cold. Her legs were before her. Her left leg —
He stopped three feet from her. His body locked the way a horse locks at a fence it will not take — not gradually but absolutely, every muscle seizing at once.
Her left leg was at an angle that no intact limb could make.
Below the knee, the fabric of her skirt was heavy with ice and heavier with something else.
Blood.
Enough of it to have left the trail on the ice behind her. Enough to be pooling beneath the ruined leg on the frozen ground, melting the frost where it gathered, steaming faintly in the January air.
He could see, through a tear in her stocking, where the fabric had been destroyed from the inside, the thing that was causing the blood. A shard of white where no white should be, the jagged end of bone catching the winter light.
The sight of it went through his stomach like a fist. He locked his jaw.
Swallowed. Swallowed again. If he were sick now, he would be useless.
She needed him not to be useless. He had no one else — no surgeon, no housekeeper with any skill, no one in this valley he knew or could call for, because he had been in this house for one day.
He did not know where the bandages were.
He did not know if there were bandages at all.
She was conscious. Her eyes were open, tracking his approach, the pupils constricted to pinpoints. The fact that they were open — focused, aware — was both the best and the worst thing about the scene before him. She was alive. She was watching him look at what was left of her leg.
"How long?" His voice came out wrong — strangled, pitched too high. He tried again. "How long have you been here?"
Her lips were grey. She worked them apart. "I do not know."
The voice was educated. Thin with cold, but carrying beneath the thinness a composure that should not have been possible — not with bone showing through the skin, not sitting in her own blood with no one coming for her.
She was not shaking, which did not reassure him.
When the body stopped shaking, the reserves were gone.
He was on his knees beside her. He did not remember dropping.
His hands were reaching for the leg before the rest of him had caught up, and he had to stop them — physically stop them, his right hand seizing his left wrist — because the wrong touch would push the bone further through the skin or open something beneath it that was keeping her alive.
He could see the wound now, close, in full: the tibia displaced forward, to the side, the torn end jutting through a ragged hole in the skin.
The flesh around it swollen tight, dark with blood that was still running, still leaving her.
He had nothing. No bandages, no instruments, no knowledge beyond a groom's broken arm at Pemberley eight years ago — a simple fracture, the bone intact beneath the skin.
Nothing like this. A wound that could rot and kill her in days if the cold did not kill her in hours or the blood loss did not finish her in the next few minutes.
The woman was watching him with those terrible, focused eyes. The blood still running.
Think. Think, Darcy!
The bleeding was not arterial. If it were arterial, she would already be dead. But it was not stopping, the blood running steadily from the wound into the fabric of her skirt, into the frozen earth beneath her, a loss that her body could not afford and could not stanch on its own.
He needed to stop the bleeding. He needed to immobilise the leg without touching the bone. He needed to get her out of the cold before the cold finished what the mere had started. Blast, he needed a surgeon! The nearest town was Bakewell. Bakewell was eight miles on frozen roads.
And the light was going.
His coat was off his shoulders before he had finished the calculation. He spread it over her — her torso, her arms, everything except the leg. The leg needed to be visible. The leg needed to be dealt with.
"I am going to bind the wound. I cannot set the bone — a surgeon must do that.
But I must stop the bleeding or the bleeding will kill you before the surgeon can arrive.
" He was talking too much. The words were coming out of him in a way that was not like him, fast and uncontrolled, the verbal equivalent of the tremor he could see in his own hands when he looked down at them. He stopped talking. Breathed.
She looked at him with those terrible focused eyes. "Then stop it."
He tore a strip from the lining of his waistcoat.
The fabric protested — gave way in a ragged line.
He folded the cloth into a pad, thick enough to apply pressure without pressing on the bone itself.
His hands, when he brought them to her leg, were shaking badly enough that the cloth trembled between his fingers.
He clenched them once. Opened them. Brought the pad down against the wound, around the protrusion — not over it, never over it — pressing the fabric into the torn skin on either side where the blood was running.
He could smell the blood now, iron and copper and something rawer beneath, the smell of the inside of a living body exposed to air that should never touch it.
His stomach heaved. He bore down on it. Brought the pad against the wound, pressing the fabric into the torn skin on either side of the bone — not over it, not on it, around it — bearing down with both hands while his gorge rose and the blood soaked through the cloth and her body produced a sound that went into him like a nail driven through wood.
She screamed. Not the bitten-off sounds she had been making — a real scream, short and raw, ripped out of her by the pressure on the wound. It destroyed something in him. Some wall between the task and the man performing it.
His vision swam. His hands kept pressing. Her hand came up from her lap and closed on his forearm — five white fingers driving through his shirtsleeve into the muscle, bearing down with a force that belonged to a body spending its last currency on a single purchase.
Something to hold while the pain ate her alive.
Every rational faculty he possessed told him to keep working. Every other part of him — the part that was not a set of hands solving a problem but a man kneeling in blood beside a woman whose body was breaking — wanted to stop, wanted to take his hands away and never cause that sound again.
He did not stop. He pressed harder. The sounds she made grew worse — dense, throttled, shoved down behind her teeth the way everything she would not release was shoved down behind her teeth.
He held the pressure. The cloth was soaking through.
He needed more. He tore another strip from his waistcoat — the garment was destroyed now, the lining hanging in ribbons — and layered it over the first, pressing again.
The blood slowed. Did not stop, but slowed.
The cloth was doing enough, or the cold was doing enough, or the two of them together were buying minutes that the body could not buy on its own.
He could not set the bone — if he tried to push it back through the skin he would introduce every piece of filth on his hands into the wound, and the infection would kill her more certainly than the cold.
But the bone could not be left free. Every movement, every shift of her weight, drove it further through the torn skin.
He needed rigid material on either side of the break, bound tightly above and below, holding everything still with more clean cloth.
He had neither, because he had been in this house for only one day and did not know where the tools were kept, or whether they even existed.
What he had was himself. The walking stick he had picked up at the house — an old blackthorn, the previous owner's, propped by the back door. He had left it on the path when he started running. Fifty feet up the slope. He looked at her. Looked at the distance. Looked at her hand on his arm.
"I need to get the stick. I will be ten seconds. Do not move."
"I am not going anywhere, sir."
He pulled free. Sprinted. The stick was where he had dropped it.
Back at her side in three of her breaths, his hands already working.
He broke the stick across his knee. Bound the two pieces to either side of her shin with what remained of his waistcoat, above the break and below, wrapping as tightly as his cold fingers could manage.
The binding was rough, desperate, the work of a man who did not know what he was doing, who knew he did not know, who was doing it anyway because the alternative was to kneel in the snow and watch her die.
"What is your name?"
Her gaze wavered, unfocused for an instant, then steadied on his face.
For the first time, their eyes met without the intermediary of the wound between them — without the blood, the bone, the mechanical focus on the next task.
She saw him. He saw her. Two people who had shared more physical contact in fifteen minutes than many relatives share in a lifetime, who had not yet exchanged the most basic currency of human acquaintance.
"Bennet." Her voice was thinner now. "Elizabeth Bennet."
The name meant nothing to him. No family he had ever heard of. From the south — the vowels carried no northern weight. A woman with a shattered leg on land he had owned for six weeks and visited for one day. Her blood on his hands. His ruined waistcoat around her shin.
"Miss Bennet. I am going to carry you to the house. The distance is perhaps a quarter-mile, uphill. I must not jostle the leg. I will go as carefully as I can."
"The leg has been very vocal in its opinions today. I expect it will have more to say on the matter."
Something in his chest cracked. Not cracked — broke open, the way the ice on the mere had broken open beneath her, sudden and complete, the surface that had been holding giving way to something underneath that had no bottom.
The composure of it. The wry edge, delivered through grey lips with the bone of her shin jutting through her stocking.
He did not know this woman. He was kneeling in her blood.
Yet, something inside him had broken open, and he could not close it.
He gathered her. One arm beneath her knees — desperately cautious, his hand hovering beneath the splint, his whole body braced against the possibility of jarring it — the other arm across her back.
She was lighter than a woman of her height should be.
Not frail, but reduced — the lightness that comes from days of insufficient food, a body that has been spending more than it has been taking in.
Her hand moved to the back of his neck, and her fingers were ice against his skin.
The leg swung as he stood. She locked her jaw.
Something escaped — small, bitten off, a sound that went through him the way the first scream had, not through his ears but through the place where her hand gripped his neck, transmitted through the contact between their bodies.
Her eyes went distant, the focused gaze hazing over, the pupils blowing wide.
"Stay awake. Miss Bennet. Stay awake."
"I am awake." Barely a whisper. "I am merely calculating whether consciousness is worth the cost."
He started up the slope. Every step a negotiation — fast enough to get her inside before the cold took whatever the blood loss had left, slow enough that the leg would not swing, would not jar.
Every step was also a catalogue of failure: the gate hanging from one hinge.
The path unshovelled since the last snowfall.
The front steps cracked where water had frozen in the mortar with the patience of years.
The door unlocked because there was nothing inside worth the effort of theft.
The hallway dim, cold, the plaster stained along the ceiling where the roof had given way two rooms to the east. A house that had been dying under another man's ownership while Darcy stayed at Pemberley and let it happen because it was not his problem.
Now a woman was bleeding in his arms, and this house was all he had to offer her.
Read more on the healing powers of the water… and love in The Mirror at Northmere!