Page 29 of I Have Faults Enough

A ghost of a smile appeared on his face. “I call it fortunate, and would rather trust to a signpost than to my own fortune continuing indefinitely.”

Elizabeth looked toward him. “You are becoming rather humble.”

He offered a slight smile, and shook his head precipitously. “I assure you, I remain perfectly aware of my abilities.”

“Of course you do,” she replied with an eyebrow turned upward.

“But I assure you, madam, I am becoming increasingly aware of their limitations,” he teased her then, alluding to his disagreeable behavior.

She smiled and teased him, a warm glint shining in her eye as she did so. “That,” she said, “is progress.”

His mouth twitched, but he did not speak further. And, they continued walking slowly, hoping and praying to find someone to help them.

The signpost, when it came, arrived by way of a narrower mercy; it had a cart track, rutted but unmistakably a proper road rather than the hedgerows they had followed the day before. Beyond it, perhaps a quarter mile on, low smoke rose steadily from a cottage chimney into the grey morning sky.

They approached it with caution. Darcy's hand found hers, and his pace slowed to study the cottage's yard before committing them to it. However, much to their relief, the woman who answered their knock, elderly, sharp-eyed, drying her hands on an apron already well-used to a morning's work, took one look at the pair of them, mud-streaked and hollow-eyed and plainly gentry, did not wait to be asked before ushering them in toward her own fire.

"There's been men through here twice this week asking after two lost from Netherfield way," she said, setting bread and a wedge of hard cheese before them both with no more ceremony than she might have shown any ordinary guest, "and I'll wager, seeing the state of you, I needn't ask which two you'll be. You're a fair way north of that country, mind. Storm must have carried you further than you'd any notion of."

"How far, would you say, to Meryton?" Darcy asked with the politeness of a gentlebred man, despite the dirt and muck about his sodden clothes.

"A good fifteen mile, near enough, if you're wanting the direct road," the old woman said, "though my Thomas has the cart out this very morning taking eggs to Ware market, and Ware's not above six mile from here on his usual road, and Meryton's not so very far past Ware besides, if you'd a mind to beg a ride partway and walk the remainder. He'll be back for his meal within the hour, if you can bear to wait that long on cheese and bread and my own poor company."

They could bear it, and did, the hour passing warmly, as she allowed her limbs to rest and be thoroughly warm; and it was in the course of that waiting hour, the old woman occupied with her churning in the yard beyond, that Elizabeth found herself turning to Darcy with a question she had not yet had leisure, amid everything else, to properly consider.

"They will have told my family I am found, once we reach Meryton. What will you tell them, of how we came to be found in this condition, together?"

He answered confidentiality. “The truth. That we were taken from Netherfield's garden by robbers, held some days, and escaped by way of a river in a storm, and found our way home as best two people with no better resources than their own wits and a farmer's cart could manage. I do not intend to lie about the whole of it, nor could I, I think, if I tried, for half the county will have some version of the truth already, from whatever the gang themselves let slip once caught, if caught they are."

"I suppose the truth must serve," she said, "though it will come as a shock to a great many people, and place me in a position I can hardly call comfortable." She looked into the fire as she spoke, her eyes wide and fixed upon it, her mind still woolgathering about the implications of her abduction. And beneath that, worse for being quieter, the fear that it might cost Jane something too; that a scandal so attached to her name might undo, in one stroke, all that Jane had so lately and so deservedly won with Mr. Bingley.

Unaware of her concerns about Jane, Darcy looked at her, “It will be a shock, I do not doubt that. But, I do not think it need be a disgrace. Afterall, there is very little the world cannot forgive a woman for, provided she does not hide behind it.” Then, he reached out and took her hand, and spoke more softly. “We cannot undo what was done to us; we can only choose how it is known and how we might, together, respond to it.”

A sound from the yard brought their conversation to a halt. Elizabeth was uncertain whether it was a bucket set down too heavily, or a hen disturbed into indignant complaint. Regardless, neither of them stopped to determine which, and by the time the old woman came back through the door a moment later, she found the pair of them sitting at a careful distance from one another, warming themselves by the fire.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s heart was racing and she could not stop thinking of the warmth and care that she felt at his gentle, reassuring touch.

Thomas returned within the hour as promised. He was a broad, unhurried man entirely unmoved by the strangeness of his mother's guests. And, when she explained the barest outline of their trouble to him, Thomas readily agreed to carry them as far as Ware without any payment beyond their sincerest thanks.

After bidding the kind, old woman goodbye, Darcy helped Elizabeth into the cart. And, soon they were off, the cart carrying them, not too gently, the six miles to Ware.

As they were slowly carted onward, Elizabeth's head found a resting place against Darcy's shoulder. His strong arm came round her against the cart's jolting in a gesture that had, by now, long since ceased to require any explanation between them. And, it was somewhere in the last mile of that ride, that the market rooftop of the small town of Ware appeared.

CHAPTER 18

To their great dismay, Ware offered no further cart to carry them the remaining distance to Meryton; it being hardly large enough to call a town. There was only a village shop, which was connected to an open-market.

Thomas, having business of his own to conclude at the market, bid Darcy and Elizabeth goodbye. This inevitably meant that they had to set out on their own to Meryton, which lay some eight or nine miles further on a road, according to Thomas. Fortunately, the road was plain enough for Darcy and Elizabeth to follow without the need for a guide.

Hence, they set out on foot, as the light of the morning began to grow stronger, the storm's last traces gone from the sky entirely. Elizabeth found the going, for the first mile or two, easier than any stretch of the preceding days; it was, afterall, a proper road, and firm underfoot.

However, they continued slowly, as her ankle was still sore. Darcy was thankful to have milestones to mark their progress and, at intervals, other travellers whose ordinary business seemed, after several days of danger, its own small miracle to witness.

The morning had long since gone, and the sun, no longer directly overhead, told them the afternoon was sliding toward evening. They had passed a few carts headed the opposite way, their drivers unwilling to turn back for coins that Darcy did not, at present, have to offer them.

It was perhaps four miles short of Meryton, where the road narrowed through a stretch of close-grown woodland before the county's more open farmland reasserted itself for the final mile or so, that Elizabeth first felt the particular prickle of being watched.

Meanwhile, Darcy thought it no small incivility that a cart and its driver should decline to carry a woman so plainly in want of aid, and found the refusal chafed him thoroughly, for he was a man unused to want of resources, and still less accustomed to being refused anything at all.