Chapter 7
Darcy was moving before he had consciously understood why.
He had been at the far end of the lawn, a glass of lemonade going warm in his hand, enduring an account from Miss Bingley to which he could barely attend, when a sound came up from the direction of the marquee.
It was Miss Elizabeth, crying out a name.
He did not decide to go. Between one breath and the next, he was simply going, the glass abandoned he knew not where, the lawn tilting past him, Miss Bingley’s sentence left in the air behind.
She was running too, off to his right and nearer the table — ahead of him for the first few strides, but running straight in.
To reach the boy, seize him, turn, and come out again would take too long.
His own line was worse for distance but better for escape—across the lawn at an angle, towards the open end of the table, where he might take Henry without breaking stride and carry him on.
Ahead of them both, the canopy strained and cracked, one corner torn loose, the tall centre pole grinding off its footing. Beneath it, Henry Atherton balanced on a hamper, one arm holding something over the bowl of melted ice and strawberries, his head turned towards the cry.
Darcy ran faster.
Miss Elizabeth reached the boy first. She did not try to lift him. She caught his wrist, pulled his arm free of the bowl, and turned him bodily into Darcy’s path. Then she stepped aside.
It was enough. Darcy would not have to stop. But there was nowhere for her to go except back—which put her square beneath the pole.
Two steps later he had Henry round the waist, lifted, and carried still moving forward in the same line.
A step after that, he caught Miss Elizabeth too as he passed, his right arm hard across her middle.
The force of it took them all down together on the grass several feet beyond the table, the boy against his left side and Miss Elizabeth clutched to his right.
Behind them Darcy heard a crash.
A violent jolt went through the ground, and the world seemed to come apart at his back.
China and glass shattered. Someone cried out.
He dragged the child and Miss Elizabeth closer and bowed over them, shoulders hunched, his back to the flying debris.
Something small and hard glanced off his shoulder; something colder struck the back of his neck.
The water and lemonade poured down over them in a flood, running under his collar, over the front of Miss Elizabeth’s dress, and somehow reaching Henry, who had been merely startled until that moment and now drew the long, gathering breath of a boy about to make his feelings widely known.
Then the canvas came down.
It settled over the wreck in great snapping folds, shutting out the sun, the air thick with the smell of canvas, lemonade, crushed strawberries, and trampled grass.
For one stunned moment, none of them moved.
Then Miss Elizabeth gave a breathless, disbelieving laugh. A laugh.
She is unhurt, Darcy thought with relief, and for a second, he could think of nothing else but her weight against him, the quick rush of her breathing, and the fact that she was already trying to rise. He released her. Henry began batting at the canopy.
Hands seized the canvas above them.
“Hold still,” Richard said. “Or at least choose a direction and make it unanimous.”
The canvas lifted. Light broke in, sharp and sudden, and Richard appeared over them, hat gone, coat splashed, face stripped of every expression but focus. He caught the nearest fold and flung it back over the fallen pole. Bingley and Hurst peeled it back on the other side.
“Miss Bennet first,” Darcy said.
“I am perfectly—”
“Up,” said Richard, and took her by both hands to draw her to her feet.
He set her clear of the wreck before she had quite finished protesting.
Then he bent again for Henry, who was already standing and had recovered sufficiently to object loudly to being rescued, wet, and separated from his play all in the same minute.
“There now, Master Henry. A famous escape.”
“The fish—”
Richard looked at Miss Elizabeth, who mouthed “The strawberries.”
“Ah. Gone to ground, I am afraid,” said Richard, depositing the boy into a waiting footman’s care. “A cowardly manoeuvre, but common among the species.”
Darcy, finding himself abruptly without either burden, rolled over and sat back in the grass. He bent one leg at the knee and assessed the ruins. His coat was soaked through, lemonade and water were making progress down his spine, and before him lay the wreckage of a very expensive picnic.
The centre pole had crushed the table at one end. Plates and pieces of plate lay in the grass. Strawberries were everywhere. A raised pie had come to grief against a chair. The glass bowl was gone entirely, except for the pieces glittering under the fallen canvas.
Richard took in the entire scene and then offered Darcy his hand.
“Well,” he said as he pulled Darcy to his feet, “I think we may safely say the meal is concluded.” He turned to the boy. “Well done, Master Henry.”
Henry, who had got his breath ready for a roar, appeared to reconsider it, and held out his arms to Miss Elizabeth.
“What a quantity of lemonade you have brought up with you, Master Henry,” Miss Elizabeth said with a smile as she took the boy from the footman’s arms. “We shall have to wring you out like a dishcloth and hang you on the line to dry.”
Henry gave one indignant sob.
“Yes, I quite agree. Very poor treatment for such a valiant fisherman.”
“Henry!” Mrs. Atherton rushed up, every drop of colour gone out of her.
Miss Elizabeth did not make a performance of the handing-over. She put Henry gently into his mother’s arms and stepped back, so that what the rest of the party saw as they hurried up was a mother holding her own son.
“He is safe,” Darcy said, because someone had to say it plainly. “Wet, frightened, and very angry. But safe.”
Henry, offended by the accuracy of this report, howled into his mother’s shoulder.
Mrs. Gardiner appeared at Miss Elizabeth’s side, steadying her with a gentle hand on the shoulder and offering a quiet word of reassurance.
A gust off the river went through Darcy’s soaked coat, and he realised he would not be fit to be seen until he had changed. He put the thought from him.
Bingley was, as ever, full of exclamation. “Good God—is he hurt? Darcy, are you—Miss Bennet—shall I send? The apothecary—where is my horse?”
Richard caught him by the sleeve. “No one is hurt, Bingley. They are wet, and the marquee is finished. Fetch the boy’s father, if you would? He is downstream.”
Bingley seized on the occupation, squared himself, and was off towards the bend at a hard run, his fright turned to good use.
From somewhere about his person Richard produced a flask and tipped it into a surviving glass. “Mrs. Atherton. For the shock—yours, not his. To judge by his lungs, the boy is thriving.”
Even Hurst’s face was creased with concern, something Darcy would not have expected. He studied the dripping child. “Boy’s not hurt?”
“Wet, sir,” said the nursemaid from where she stood, as if to reassure herself. “Only wet.”
“Hm.” He waited a moment longer, to be sure of it. “Good.” And, his duty discharged, he went to find himself something to drink.
Henry—swaddled now, restored to his mother, and assured by the adults that he was very brave—recovered enough to lay his grievance before the company entire.
“There was a fish,” he announced mournfully. “In the bowl. It was this big.” His arm came out of the blanket to measure. “And I nearly had him, and nobody fished him out.”
“We shall catch him another day,” said Mrs. Atherton into his hair, not yet able to laugh, but very near it.
“Best wait until you are dry, Master Henry,” Richard told him. “No fish worth catching will surrender to a gentleman whose shoes squelch.”
Georgiana had come down from the rugs. Darcy had not seen her arrive, and his first instinct was to wish her spared the sight.
But she had not come to be spared anything.
She had brought a dry shawl and put it about young Miss Atherton, who was trembling more from fright than cold and whom everyone, in the rush, had forgotten.
She crouched to the child’s height to say something Darcy could not hear.
The girl laughed through her tears, and a smile appeared on the small face.
It was the thing his sister did when she believed herself unobserved—she found the person at the edge of the trouble, the one everyone else had passed over, and went to them. He could not think where she had come by it.
Mrs. Atherton gazed at Miss Elizabeth a long moment over her son’s wet dark head. Whatever estimate the lady had held of her before—and he suspected Miss Bingley had been busy providing one—she had plainly revised it and found this new portrait much to her liking.
Miss Elizabeth, occupied in discreetly wringing the lemonade from her hem, did not appear to notice.
But Darcy noticed. He did so with something perilously close to pride, though he had no business feeling any.
Mr. Atherton came pelting up from the river, his rod abandoned and his face white as he took in the wreckage. The reunion was loud and took up the whole attention of the company—which was a mercy, for it meant that almost no one was observing the state of Darcy’s clothes.
The Athertons followed Georgiana up to the house.
Miss Atherton, whose spirits had come back faster than any grown person’s, tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Mamma. Do you think the marquee might fall on Henry again later?”
Mrs. Atherton closed her eyes for one brief, fervent moment. “No, Sarah. I certainly do not.”
“But I missed it.”
Her mother’s eyes snapped open, and she sighed. “No, Sarah.”
Mr. Gardiner arrived at a more philosophical pace, sorry to have quit the water and not yet certain why he had been required to. He took in the wet child being carried away, Darcy, the fallen marquee, and his own soaked niece in a single sweep, and seemed to arrive at the essentials.