She walked.
This was the wrong direction. She knew this within minutes, when the ground sloped downward in a way that no path to Longbourn should, but she kept going because going was better than standing still, and standing still meant thinking, and thinking meant remembering the warmth of his arm across her stomach and the sound of his breathing and the way his hand had flexed on empty air when she lifted it away.
She stumbled. Caught herself. Stumbled again. The snow here was nearly thigh-deep, drifted into a hollow she could not see, the cold shocking the breath from her lungs. She dragged herself out on her hands and knees, gasping, her dress soaked through, her body beginning to shake with a violence that made her teeth crack against each other.
She was lost.
The knowledge arrived not as a sudden shock but as a slow, dreadful settling, the way night falls in winter, by degrees, each one darker than the last, until you look up and realize the light is gone.
She was lost in deep snow, in fog, in clothing that was now more wet than dry, with no shelter and no bearings and no one who knew where she was. She had walked into a clear morning, and the morning had betrayed her, and now she was going to die because she had been too afraid to stay in a warm cottage with a man who loved her.
The irony was so perfect it could have been one of her father's jokes.
She thought of Jane. Of her father. Of Kitty and Mary and even Lydia, shrieking and silly and young. She thought of her mother, who would wail and weep and never understand, and felt asharp, startled tenderness for the woman whose fate she had feared more than death.
She thought of Fitzwilliam.
His name in her mind was an ache, notMr. Darcy, not the formal title she had held up like a shield, but the name she had spoken in the dark with his mouth on her skin. She thought of his face in sleep, unguarded and young. She thought of his hand on her stomach, warm and certain. She thought of the words he would never say now, the story about his mother he would never finish, the life they would never build.
She had been so afraid of becoming her mother that she had run straight into becoming a cautionary tale of a different kind entirely.
A stone wall rose out of the fog like an apparition.
Elizabeth fell against it with a sound that was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh, and was mostly just air leaving her body because her legs had finally refused to carry her another step. The stones were rough and cold against her back, but they blocked the worst of whatever faint wind still moved through the fog, and the drift at their base was shallow enough that she could sit without being buried.
She drew her knees to her chest. Wrapped her arms around them. Made herself as small as she could.
She was so tired. The shivering had become constant, a full-body tremor she could not control, and with it had come a dangerous drowsiness. A softening at the edges of her thoughts. A warmth that she knew was not warmth at all but her body beginning to fail.
She forced her eyes open.
The cottage. She had left the cottage, which meant the cottage was behind her, which meant she needed to turn around. The fog made direction meaningless, but the ground beneath her did not. She had been walking uphill. The cottage was downhill, near the stream. She needed to go back the way she had come.
She turned. Took a step. Her ankle screamed, and her vision grayed at the edges, and she nearly went down, but she locked her knee and stayed upright through sheer, stubborn refusal to die in a Hertfordshire field because she had been too proud to stay where it was warm.
One step. Then another. She could not feel her feet, but she could feel the slope of the ground tilting downward, and she followed it the way water follows gravity, not thinking, just moving. Her hands found a wall, and she used it, dragging herself along its length, letting the rough stone bite into her palms because the pain kept her conscious.
Stay awake. Keep moving. Find the stream and follow it down.
She did not know how long she walked. She did not know if she was going in the right direction or stumbling deeper into the fog. She only knew that stopping meant dying, and Elizabeth Bennet was not going to die in a field because she had been foolish enough to run from the only man who had ever made her feel something worth running from.
She kept moving.
9
TRACKS
Darcy woke,reaching for her.
His hand found cold wool and empty air, and for one disoriented heartbeat he could not understand why the warmth was gone, why the shape of her was missing from the space his body had curved around in the night. Then consciousness arrived like a blow, and he was sitting upright on the floor of the cottage, staring at the rumpled blankets beside him, at the hollow where her body had been.
The fire was nearly dead. Gray ash and a single ember, pulsing.
He knew before he stood. Before he checked the storeroom or the conservatory or called her name into the silence. He knew by the quality of the emptiness, the absence not just of a person but of theirintentionto return.
She had run.
He stood. His body moved through the motions, putting on his boots, greatcoat, and gloves while his mind worked with the cold efficiency of a man accustomed to crisis. He had managed anestate since the age of two-and-twenty. He knew how to set aside feeling when feelings were an impediment to action.
