CHAPTER 20
The latch gave with a small metallic protest that felt, to Elizabeth's straining ears, loud enough to wake the whole island. She froze, listening,but the voices at the front door continued their grim exchange, Darcy's low and even, the stranger's growing shorter, more clipped, less patient.
The window swung outward into a tangle of gorse and bracken.
It was not made for a lady's escape, being narrow enough that she had to turn her shoulders sideways and scrape her hip hard against the frame, but she thought of nothing but the next inch of progress, and then the next, until she tumbled onto the wet grass below.
She lay still for one instant, breath knocked from her, and in that instant she heard the front door give way entirely, a great crack of splitting wood, a shout, and then the unmistakable sound of a struggle; furniture overturned, a grunt of pain that might have been Darcy's or might not, a voice raised in fury rather than menace now.
Every instinct told her to go back, but she silenced it. Mr. Darcy needs help, she told herself, fierce and low, as she scrambled to her feet. Do not waste the time. And, she ran.
She had no notion, afterward, how she had covered that mile so quickly.
She knew only fragments of it, the way her half-boots, unsuited to any pace beyond a genteel walk, turned each step into an agony; the way the heather tore at her skirts and her breath sawed in her chest like something with teeth; the way she did not once look behind her, because to look behind was to slow, and to slow was unthinkable.
The cottage, when it finally rose out of the grey morning ahead of her, showed a thin curl of smoke from its chimney, a sign of life that nearly undid her with relief.
She did not knock. She could not have summoned the composure for knocking.
She simply flung herself against the door and beat upon it with both fists, gasping out words that made no sense even to herself.
The door opened upon a startled woman of middle years, a ladle still in her hand, and behind her a broad-shouldered man rising hastily from his breakfast.
"Please!" Elizabeth got out, and found she could say nothing further for a moment, her lungs heaving, her vision swimming at the edges. The woman caught her by the arm before she could sink to the ground.
"M’dear, what's happened to ye?"
"Men," Elizabeth managed. "Armed,” she took a breath, “at the Kewleys' cottage,” she took another. “They mean to hurt Mr. Darcy! Please!” she took another breath, “you must send help, he cannot hold them alone!”
She did not know, afterward, how much of it came out as words, but it was enough.
The man was already reaching for a coat, already calling a name toward the back of the house,"Rab!
Rab, fetch the gun, and rouse Duncan next door!
" Meanwhile, the woman was pressing Elizabeth into a chair by the fire, murmuring something about brandy that Elizabeth waved away, she would later think unpardonably rude.
"How many?" the man, who she thought looked to be a fisherman, asked her, already at the door, already checking the charge of an old fowling piece with hands that did not shake.
"Four. Perhaps more. I did not stay to count them." Her voice cracked on the last word. "Please, he has only a pistol, and they came meaning violence, I heard it in their voices!"
"Four against one, and a woman fled through a window to fetch us.
" The man's mouth was a grim line. "Then he'll have held them longer than they bargained for.
Duncan!" This last bellowed toward a cottage just visible through the trees, where a door was already opening, a figure already stepping out with what looked, at this distance, like a scythe caught up in haste.
Within minutes there were five of them, the master of the house, whom the woman called Fergus; his son Rab, no more than seventeen but grim-faced and steady; Duncan from next door and his own grown son; and a fifth man, older, who arrived at a run with nothing more than a stout cudgel and an expression that suggested he required nothing more.
"You'll stay here," Fergus told Elizabeth, not unkindly, but in a tone that brooked no argument; the same tone, she thought with a strange pang, that Darcy himself had used not half an hour before. "The lads and I will go quiet. If they've a lookout he'll not see us till we're on him."
"I’m coming! I must see that he is unharmed" Elizabeth cried in anxiety.
Fergus looked at her, at her torn skirts, her scraped hands, her white, set face, and something in his expression softened, though his answer did not.
"You've done the bravest part already, Mrs. Darcy, and the most needful.
Now you'll do the next most needful thing, which is stay out of the way of five men running with guns and a scythe, so none of us need trouble ourselves over where you are.
" He was already moving as he spoke, the others falling in behind him.
"Mairi, see to her. We'll send word the moment there's word to send. "
And then they were gone, breaking into a run along the road, and Elizabeth was left in the warm, ordinary kitchen with a woman named Mairi's hand upon her shoulder, straining her ears toward a mile of silent hills for some sound, any sound, that would tell her whether she had run fast enough.
***
Elizabeth had not moved from the chair Mairi had pressed her into, though she had long since abandoned any thought of sitting still; her hands twisted in her lap, her eyes fixed upon the door, her whole body straining to hear any sign of return.
Mairi had given up urging brandy upon her and instead sat opposite, saying little, only rising now and again to glance out the window.
It was the dog that heard them first; a rough-coated collie by the hearth, which lifted its head and gave one sharp bark before scrambling to the door. Elizabeth was on her feet before she knew she had moved.
Through the window she saw them coming up the road, and for one terrible instant she could make out only shapes, not faces, not numbers, and then Mairi's hand closed hard about her arm, and a voice, Fergus's voice, carried across the yard.
"He's living! Tell her he's living!"
The words undid something in Elizabeth's chest that she had been holding rigid since the window latch had given way. Her knees very nearly failed her, and it was Mairi, again, who caught her.
She did not wait for them to reach the door.
She was out into the yard before her half-boots had found the ground properly, and there, there, being half-carried, half-walking between Rab and Duncan, his coat gone, his shirt dark with blood at the shoulder, his face the colour of old ash, was Mr. Darcy.
"Mr…Darcy!" Her voice cried as it broke upon his name.
His head came up at the sound of her, and though he was grey and swaying and clearly held upright by will alone, something in his eyes cleared when they found her, as though her face were the one fixed point in a world that had otherwise come loose from its moorings.
"Elizabeth." His voice was a wreck of itself, barely more than breath. "You are…you got away…"
"I am unhurt. I am entirely unhurt!" She reached him without any memory of crossing the yard, her hands hovering over him, uncertain where they might land without doing harm, and finally settling, helpless, at his uninjured arm.
"What have they done to you?" she cried, feeling both relieved and terrified at the state of him.
"You need not worry,” he started, trying to impress with a small smile. “I assure you, they did less than they intended." A ghost of that dry humor she had come, these past days, to know as particularly his own. "I believe I have disappointed them considerably."
"He fought like the devil himself," said Duncan, with the frank admiration of a man assessing another man's work. "Two of them will not sit easy for a fortnight, and the other pair ran when they heard us coming through the lane; thought there was a garrison upon them, likely, the noise Rab makes."
"And the fourth?" Elizabeth asked, though some part of her did not wish to know the answer.
"Took a ball in the leg for his trouble, from Mr. Darcy's own pistol, and was in no state to run anywhere," Fergus said grimly.
"He's trussed in the cottage now, and will answer for himself once we've sent for the magistrate.
He may tell us who sent him, or he may not, but he'll tell someone, in time. "
Darcy swayed, and Elizabeth's grip on his arm tightened involuntarily, as though her slight strength might actually be sufficient to hold a man of his size upright.
"You are not at all unhurt," she said, low, for him alone. "You are grey as a ghost, sir, and bleeding, and I would very much like you to sit down before you fall down and prove me a liar for having just told these good people you were living."
"A fair point, madam,” he took a deep breath, and added, “Well made.
" And then, to the general astonishment of the yard, and rather to his own as well, Fitzwilliam Darcy's legs simply ceased to support him, and it was only Duncan's quick arm and Elizabeth's smaller one, wholly inadequate to the task but offered without hesitation, that kept him from measuring his length upon the cold Isle of Mann ground.