He caught her before she hit the snow, gathered her against his chest and stood, lifting her as he had done once before in a storm that felt like a lifetime ago. She was lighter than she should have been, or he was stronger than he knew, or desperation had lent him something beyond his ordinary capability. Her head fell against his shoulder. Her hand found the lapel of his greatcoat and gripped it with a strength that surprised him, a drowning woman's grip, fierce and instinctive.
“I am sorry,” she said against his neck. The words were slurred, half-lost to the cold. “I am sorry I ran.”
“I know.” He turned and waded back toward Atlas, carrying her through the snow. The horse stood where he had left him, patient and steady, watching his master's approach with ears pricked forward. “I know why you ran. And you are going to tell me everything, but not now. Now you are going to be quiet and let me take you home.”
She made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob. Her grip on his lapel did not loosen.
“Home,” she repeated, the word muffled against his collar. “Where is home?”
He did not answer. He reached Atlas and shifted her weight, lifting her into the saddle with an effort that cost him more than he showed. She slumped forward over the horse's neck, her fingers finding the mane, and he saw her body curl into the animal's warmth the way she had done in the first storm.
He took the reins and turned Atlas north.
Toward the cottage. Toward the conversation they would have when she was warm enough to have it, and the truth they would both speak.
The fog pressed in around them, close and white and directionless, but Darcy did not falter. The cottage was less than a mile away. He walked. Atlas followed. Elizabeth shivered against the horse's neck.
He did not look back. He did not slow down. He listened to her breathing, shallow and rapid against the horse's mane, and he walked faster.
10
THE RESCUE
The cottage appearedthrough the fog like a memory: gray stone, the pale glint of glass, the thin ghost of smoke still rising from the chimney where the fire had not quite died.
Darcy tightened his grip on the reins and walked faster.
Elizabeth had not spoken since the wall. She lay against Atlas's neck with her eyes closed, one hand still fisted in the mane, the other pressed against the horse's warm shoulder. The shivering had not stopped, but it had changed character, deepening from violent tremors into something slower, as if the cold had worked its way past muscle and into the mechanism beneath. He knew what that meant. He had seen it in lambs born during Derbyshire blizzards, the point where the body began to spend its last reserves and the trembling became less a protest than a surrender.
He guided Atlas around the side of the cottage to the stable.
The remains of last night's hay lay scattered on the frozen ground, trampled where Atlas had stood, the stone trough still holding snowmelt. Atlas lowered his head toward the waterwithout being asked, and Darcy stripped the saddle and bridle with hands that moved faster than his mind, looping the reins over the post, leaving the animal to find his own comfort in the familiar shelter.
The horse would be fine. Elizabeth could not wait.
Darcy reached up and lifted her from Atlas's back. She came without resistance, her body folding against his chest with the boneless weight of someone who had used the last of her strength to hold on during the ride. Her dress was soaked through. Her pelisse was heavy with wet. He could feel the cold radiating from her body even through his own damp clothing, a chill so deep it seemed to come from inside her rather than from the air.
He carried her around the cottage and through the front door, which still stood ajar from his frantic departure. The room inside was dim and cold.
He set Elizabeth in the chair nearest the hearth and knelt before the fireplace.
His hands were shaking. He forced them steady. Kindling first, the dry scraps from the storeroom, a handful of bark, the last curls of tinder he could scrape together. The ember caught the bark, smoked, and flared. But the firewood was gone. They had burned the last of it two nights ago, and the cold that had driven them into each other's arms had not restocked the woodpile.
He looked at the cottage's second chair. The storeroom shelves. The frame of the cot.
He did not hesitate.
He smashed the chair against the stone floor with a violence that startled him, and fed the broken legs to the flames. The dry old wood caught, burning fast and hot. He added the seat, the back, and the crosspieces. When the chair was gone, he pulled the shelves from the storeroom wall and broke those too. The fire grew. Grew again. He built it high, burning a dead woman's cottage to save a living one, because the alternative was watching Elizabeth die of cold.
When the heat pushed outward, he turned to her.
She sat where he had placed her, her head bowed, her hands in her lap. She was not shivering anymore. The stillness frightened him more than any tremor had.
“Elizabeth. I need you to look at me.”
Her eyes opened. Found his. They were glassy, the gaze of someone surfacing from a great depth, and his chest constricted at the effort it cost her to hold them on his face.
“I need to remove your wet clothing,” he said. His voice was level, practical, the voice of a man managing a crisis. “The wet fabric is pulling what heat remains from your body. It must come off.”
