“Once I climbed out, I saw you both working to free the horse. Rogers was holding up the crossbar, and you were trying to untether the harness under the horse’s belly, and it was thrashing about and…and it just…it all happened so quickly I cannot say with certainty, but I believe it caught you in the throat with its foreleg or some part of the traces or I know not what! But you sort of”—she moved both hands in parallel through the air, watching the space between them as though envisioning him moving with them—"flew backwards and landed in the snow.” She looked up to meet his eyes. “I thought you must be dead too, but you were not.”
Darcy felt slightly nauseous, though whether at the grisly scene Elizabeth depicted or the snatches of looming trees, falling snow, and suffocation that nagged him to remember them, he could not tell.
“Do you recall any of this?”
He wrote his answer slowly, feeling somewhat dazed.
Some of it.
After a moment’s thought, he added,
I recall being unable to breathe.
“You could not—not properly. I thought you would stop at every moment, but, well, here you are. Rogers would not leave me alone on the road, so I did what I could to keep you warm and left with him to find help. We took your horse—I hope you do not mind. At least he is safe in the stables here now.”
Darcy smiled his acquiescence. Fine beast though it was, his horse was the least of his concerns.
“This was the nearest inhabited place. One of the guests, Mr Stratton, lent us his carriage and sent his man with us to help carry you. The innkeeper sent his nephew as well.”
Darcy reached for the ink. Elizabeth waited in silence for him to write.
You returned with them?
She drew back, her expression turned cold. “Yes, I did. I suppose it would have been more ladylike to remain here and let the men fetch you—and it certainly would have been less troublesome—but in all honesty, it did not occur to me. We may not be the best of friends, Mr Darcy, but we are well enough acquainted that I could not countenance leaving you to the mercy of strangers. Not in this state.”
Darcy not only extended his finger to object but held it up between them to ensure she saw it. When he had her attention, he wrote,
I do not mean to disapprove. I am only surprised—and grateful!
“Oh, I see.” Elizabeth deflated somewhat, though she lost none of the fire from her eyes. She wrapped her hands around the worn ends of the arms of her chair and rubbed them absentmindedly as though wishing to direct her vexation somewhere, if not at him.
Darcy would have taken more time to assure her of his admiration for her courage and compassion were he not so close to exhaustion. The pain in his neck had grown nigh unbearable, his breathing had taken on a quality not dissimilar to the din of a sawmill, and his ears rang from the heaviness of the congestion in his head. He opted to glean moreanswers over offering compliments before sleep reclaimed him.
Then?
“There is not much more to tell,” Elizabeth replied with a small shrug. “We brought you back here, and here we are still.”
Darcy used the last of the ink on the pen to enquire,
Why?
Elizabeth leant forward to read it and gave a small scornful scoff before she sat back and said with no little disdain, “We are snowed in.”
He raised a dubious eyebrow.
“There is no need to look at me in that manner, sir. I am well aware of the absurdity of the situation. There could not be two people with so little desire to be in the same place, yet here we are, detained together in the most intimate circumstances by a snowdrift. You really could not make it up.”
Darcy kept watching her. She was right; he could think of little worse than being trapped in a confined space with the woman who tested his restraint more than any he had ever met. The possibility that she should feel similarly about him sparked the same flickering tightness in his chest that had assailed him constantly during his stay in Hertfordshire last autumn. Resolving to disregard it, he held the pen out for more ink, his arm almost too heavy to lift clear of the bed.
Who else is here?
Elizabeth looked displeased with the question. “I assureyou, were any of the other guests willing or able to assist, I should hardly refuse, but there is nobody.”
Darcy closed his eyes briefly. Lovely she may be, but he wished Elizabeth were not quite so determined to always misunderstand him. Why she should always assume he meant to upbraid her, God only knew. Perhaps because her mother did naught else, she had grown used to defending herself? With leaden fingers, he scrawled an almost illegible explanation.
Would know you are safe.
She appeared somewhat puzzled by this. “I beg your pardon, sir. I thought… Never mind. ’Tis a small inn, run by the owner, Mr Timmins, and his nephew, Master John. He informs me his sister usually lives here also, but she has not been able to return from a visit to her mother since the snow began. The other guests are Mr and Mrs Ormerod, Lieutenant Carver?—”
