Page 21 of I Have Faults Enough

Cobb did not answer, or if he did the wind took the words before they reached her. Elizabeth could only see a confused, shouted argument conducted half in gesture, as the party of captors clustered at the bank's edge while lightning showed them, in brief violent flashes.

The water's violence roared about, with white caps showing where it broke over submerged stone; the far bank looked to be a darker smear scarcely visible across a distance that had become considerably more than fifty yards of ordinary crossing.

It was in the confusion, Cobb and the grey-haired man shouting over each other, Bill turned half away to argue his own case, Ned forgotten at the party's edge, his pistol hand gone slack with the same cold and fear that had them all in its grip, that Darcy's cuffed hand closed hard on Elizabeth's arm and drew her.

He drew her half a step back at a time, away from the huddle of raised voices, toward the darker edge, where the bank curved away out of the little light the lightning offered.

"Now," he said, low, close against her ear, "while they are arguing amongst themselves and not watching us. I do not know that we shall have a better chance than this one."

"Now? To escape? What of our hands!" She whispered, looking dumbstruck at the thought of fleeing their captors in these horrid conditions.

"Yes, now!” He demanded, “I would rather run bound than stand here and wait for them to decide our fate." His grip found hers, awkwardly, as both their wrists were still fettered, and he pulled her with him; Elizabeth did not seem to have a choice in the matter, as he moved her away from the water's edge, away from the shouting, and into a stand of low scrub that the storm's dark made, for the moment, a kind of mercy.

They had not gone thirty yards before a shout went up behind them, and Bill's voice rang with fury, “They're gone, Cobb! They're bloody gone!” This put the whole night into a redoubled chaos, as the surprised group of captors sorted out their pursuit.

Darcy immediately pulled Elizabeth into a desperate run through the woods; and, she ran as she had not run in her life, her ankle screaming protest with every stride. Darcy's hand locked around hers dragging her onward when her own strength faltered. The muddy ground remained treacherous with roots and stones that she could not see until she was already stumbling over them one by one.

Behind them she could hear Bill crashing through the scrub, closer than she wished to believe, and once, terribly close. Then, she heard the flat crack of a pistol fired blind into the dark; the shot went wide but the sound of it was enough to send her heart into her throat.

"The river!" Darcy said, in a breathless shout, after they heard the shot. They broke from the scrub back toward the water's edge some distance below where they had left the others, "if we can cross it, they will not follow easily in this, not encumbered as they'll be."

"No! We’ll drown!" Elizabeth cried back, as the winds continued to howl around them.

"It may, but I judge it the better wager against what waits behind us." He was already hauling at the rope binding his own wrists against a jagged outcrop of stone at the bank's edge, sawing the sodden fibre with a desperate strength.

After a dozen frantic strokes it gave, frayed through at last, and his hands came free, and the first thing he did with that freedom was turn to hers and tear at the knot there with fingers gone half-numb from cold until it, too, gave way.

"Can you swim?" he asked, already pulling her toward the bank.

"Badly," she said, and the word came out more frightened than she meant it to. "And not in this!"

"Then you will hold on to me, and I will do the swimming, and we will trust the rest to God, for we have no other course left to try!" He shouted, before catching her hand in his and laced their fingers fast.

There was no time for more, as another pistol-shot still rang in both their ears. The shot told them both the same thing, that they must move, and must move now.

Darcy pulled her to the ledge, and they jumped into the water together. The cold of it drove out every other sensation at once; she felt a shock so complete it stole her breath away. And, for a moment, Elizabeth could not have screamed had she wished to.

The current immediately seized them before either had drawn a second breath. Within moments her feet lost the bottom, and the water dragged them downstream with such a violent thrust that she felt the entire situation surreal; not believing that a river was so capable of such strength.

A shout carried from the bank behind them, and another shot, this one closer, though whether closer to striking them or merely closer to their ears in the water's confusion she could not tell; and then the current took them round a bend the darkness had hidden, and the shouting fell away behind, swallowed by distance and by the river's own roar.

As the river pulled Elizaebth and Darcy, there was nothing left in the whole world but cold and current and the man whose neck she held to as though her life depended upon the grip, which it did.

A large wave came, pouring over her, and she could not find the surface. Elizabeth knew that the surface must be somewhere above her, but her body would not attend to what her mind knew.

Water filled her nose, her open mouth, and the cold had already stolen so much of her strength that when she tried to kick, to claw upward, the effort seemed to accomplish nothing at all, as though the river itself had closed a hand around her and did not mean to loosen it.

Then Darcy's arm miraculously came round her, hauling her up and back against him, and her head broke the surface at last, and she took in air in a single ragged, whooping gasp that hurt worse than the water had. Her chest seized and her lungs burning as though she had swallowed fire rather than river, and before she had drawn a second breath the current spun them both and pulled them under again.

She fought it this time, with what little she had left. She kicked, and clawed at the water, and felt Darcy's grip on her never once loosen even as his own strokes grew irregular with the effort of keeping them both afloat, and when her head cleared the surface again it was only for a moment, only long enough to drag in another burning breath before the river took her down a third time.

"Hold to me!" she heard him shout."Do not fight me! Only hold!"

She held. She locked her arms about his neck and let him fight the river for the both of them. Her breathing began to find some sort of rhythm; it was snatched in whatever moments the water allowed her, though it was never enough, never nearly enough, but enough to keep her from drowning.

Elizabeth did not know how long the river carried them before it delivered them, at last, into shallower water where a fallen tree had thrown up a tangle of roots and debris against the bank, and Darcy, finding footing at last, dragged them both against it, and hauled her clear of the current's pull with the last of his strength.

They caught their breadth there in the water, holding for their lives against the tree, before they picked their way along its broad bark, into an inlay and onto a muddy bank.