Page 14 of Not Without Me, Miss Elizabeth

He could feel Elizabeth trembling faintly where her shoulder pressed against his.Poor Elizabeth is frightened half out of her wits, and will be chilled through besides,though she had not made a sound since the sacks went on.

"I will see you out of this, Miss Elizabeth. You have my word." He kept his voice low, meant for her alone. "You need not be afraid."

She gave no answer, only a small, involuntary shiver he felt rather than heard, and the two of them lay on in the mud, which the rain was steadily working into a heavy, sucking mire beneath them, waiting on whatever their captors meant to do next.

CHAPTER 9

Elizabeth had fixed her attention upon the sack over her head, coarse twine, meant plainly enough for potatoes and not for persons, through whose weave she could count a hundred small points of light. Her scalp still smarted where her hair had been seized.

I have been taken.

The thought arrived, as her heart seemed to drop clean through her chest, leaving something hollow and cold behind it. Bile rose sharp at the back of her throat, and she swallowed hard against it, again and again, her breath coming too fast and too shallow to steady.

Beneath the sack, sweat had begun to gather at her hairline despite the cold, and she could feel her own pulse beating visibly in her throat, in her wrists, in the tight, clenched place behind her ribs.

She understood now why Mr. Darcy's countenance had darkened so at the sight of Wickham, though even now, lying bound in the dirt, she could not quite make herself believe the man capable of such a design against either of them. She turned the moment over and over in her mind, helpless to stop it: how entirely she had frozen where she stood, how her voice had simply failed her, how she had not so much as raised a hand to defend herself.

What am I to do?No answer came, as Elizabeth had none to give.

Mr. Darcy had spoken to her, she knew, though she could not afterward recall his words; she had shut out nearly everything beyond the small, bright pinpricks of light through the sack, and the sensation, presently, of rain beginning to fall upon her back. She had no means of sheltering herself from it, and was soon thoroughly wet through.

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She could not have said how long she lay upon the ground. Time had lost its usual shape entirely, stretching and collapsing by turns, marked only by the rain, which fell, and fell, and did not stop, and by the dull, spreading ache where the cold ground pressed up through her wet clothes into her hip and shoulder. She knew only that Wickham and his men had withdrawn some little distance, though not so far as to offer any real comfort, their low voices still audible whenever the rain eased enough to let them through.

Mr. Darcy spoke to her again at some point, she was aware of the shape of his voice, low and urgent, without, yet again, taking in a single word of it, her own mind too full of its own frantic noise to admit anything further.

Papa will come for me,she told herself, and made herself believe it, for as long as she could hold the thought steady.But what if he cannot find me? I left the house at a quarter past eight; how long before he even thinks to look?

She was uncomfortably, wretchedly aware that she had told no one in the household which direction she meant to walk that morning. It was her habit, and no one had ever thought to ask it of her before.

It will be hours yet before he so much as knows I am gone.The thought settled over her with the same cold, steady persistence as the rain itself, and try as she might, she could not make it lift.

Elizabeth knew that lying in the dirt of a thicket by the lake was hardly the first place her father would think to search. A slight movement beside her drew her attention to Mr. Darcy, whom she had, until that moment, rather deliberately shut from her thoughts, whether because he had frightened her, or because she could not help feeling him somehow the cause of their present situation.

It was Wickham's quarrel with him, after all, not with her; she wascaught up in it only by association, and his evident alarm on her behalf had done nothing, in her present temper, but confirm to their captors that the two of them were known to one another. The thought made her angry.

Why was he following me at all? He arrived already in a fury, what can Wickham and these men possibly want with him? His fortune, most likely.

She could not fault him for the anger he had shown on her behalf, nor for his evident wish to protect her, and yet his manner, so proud, so utterly unyielding even with a pistol levelled at his chest, had done nothing whatever to ease their circumstances, and a good deal, she suspected, to worsen them.

Had Darcy held his temper, had he simply given the men what they seemed at first only to want, information, cooperation, anything short of open defiance, the matter might yet have been reasoned through, she reasoned. Even as the thought formed, though, she doubted it; she had known the man scarcely a fortnight, and already understood that reasoning with Fitzwilliam Darcy, under any circumstance, was no easy undertaking.

He tried to protect me, all the same.She turned this over.

Elizabeth had never once imagined she might be glad of his company, and had, in fact, gone to some lengths these past weeks to avoid it. And yet everything about their present circumstances had conspired to alter that entirely. Whatever quarrel lay between him and these men, she understood with sudden, sobering clarity that her own survival was now bound up in his, that she stood a far better chance beside him than alone. She resolved, there in the mud and the rain, to place her trust in him fully, whatever came of it.

The first numbness of shock had begun, by degrees, to loosen its grip. She lifted her head, turning it toward him.

"What are we to do?" she whispered. Elizabeth had not expected a response, yet a response was given, quietly from a little ways near her.

"We shall escape, though it may take some little time to contrive how. Do not lose heart, Miss Elizabeth. Wickham is a cruel man, but no great thinker. You will come to no harm."

The rain had begun to ease as he finished speaking, which broughtsome relief, though the mud it left behind brought a misery all its own; Elizabeth felt it thick and cold against her cheek where it had worked its way beneath the sack, and along the edges of her ruined clothes.

Footsteps approached, and Mr. Darcy whispered quickly, "Miss Elizabeth, I will see you safely away from this as soon as it is in my power to do so."

Elizabeth, for her part, did not entirely believe Mr. Darcy, though she found herself wishing very much that he might be right. She could not, in her present state, imagine by what means either of them was to escape their captors.