“It will not answer hers,” Darcy cut in.
“You cannot substitute yourself!”
“I amnotsubstituting,” Darcy said, and now the restraint was gone. “I am presenting myself because I understand the cost. Her life is not mine to offer!”
“You don’t know it wants hers. But she’sgotto be there—I don’t know why, but she does!”
“Well, she is not here, and I am.”
“Then you’ll have to wait—call her back! I told you it was foolhardy to let her go.”
Darcy clenched a fist at his side and slowly rounded on Harrowe. “At every turn, the answer has been delay. Study. Debate. Wait until the pattern is clearer. And while we wait, fields fail. Ships founder. Boys die in foreign mud. If there is anything I can give that slows this—if there is any weight my body can place against it—then I will place it there.”
Harrowe stared at him. “You may makeit worse.”
Darcy nodded once. “I know.”
Harrowe searched his face for hesitation and found none. “You may not return.”
“Then at least I will not have stood aside.” He reached for the door. “I am going. With or without your approval. If you mean to stop me, do it now.”
Harrowe did not move, so Darcy opened the door.
Outside, the air had the sharp, rinsed smell of rain. The carriage stood ready, lanterns hooded, the horses shifting with a soft impatience that mirrored his own. Darcy mounted without assistance. Harrowe followed, less elegantly, the satchel wedged at his feet like a promise neither of them intended to keep. The dog sprang up after them and settled with a huff against Darcy’s knee.
As the door closed and the carriage lurched forward, Darcy looked once—only once—at the darkened windows of his house. London lay quiet behind him, deceptively so, as though the night had decided to grant itself an alibi.
“North,” he said, and the word felt like a vow made without witness.
The road north hadnot changed.
Darcy had expected some visible sign—subsidence, fissure, water where there ought not to be water. He had expected the land to declare itself now that he came to it with purpose rather than conjecture. Instead, the hedgerows stood as they always had. The fields lay in their winter bareness, unremarkable. Even the air felt ordinary, damp and cold and wholly indifferent to his passage.
Harrowe rode opposite him in silence, satchel braced against his knees, fingers worrying at its strap as though he feared it might vanish if he did not keep hold of it. The dog lay at Darcy’s feet, head lifted, ears pricked forward in a vigilance that had nothing to do with game or stranger.
Darcy ordered the carriage to take the western road that looped round Netherfield. Not the most direct route, but there was a place where that road branched and turned back, where one could stand on the rise and see Longbourn in the distance. Where a mere hundred paces or so could take him to the place he sought. They left the carriage where the lane narrowed and went on foot.
The fields here bore little resemblance to what Darcy remembered. The hedges were stripped raw by wind, their naked and broken branches clawing at the sky. The ground lay hard and pale, the winter having bitten deeper here than elsewhere, as though some protection long taken for granted had been withdrawn all at once. Darcy searched instinctively for familiar markers—a rise in the land, the shelter of a tree line—but the shapes had altered. Even the air felt different. Colder. Exposed.
He was already looking for the place where Elizabeth had fallen, but he found nothing.
The slope that should have cupped the hollow was flattened. The grass that did poke through the parched snow lay crushed and colourless, scoured down to soil in places, as though something had passed through and taken more than it left behind. Darcy slowed, his steps careful now, his eyes tracking the ground with an exactness born of memory and unease. This should have been near enough. He was certain of it. And yet—
He stopped.
“No,” he said quietly. “It is here. Or it was.”
Harrowe followed his gaze. “The land does not always preserve its scars where it is still bleeding.”
Darcy exhaled and made his decision. “Brutus.”
The dog had been straining at his side since they left the carriage, body angled forward, nose working the air in short, urgent pulls. At the sound of his name, he surged ahead at once, leash slackening as Darcy released it entirely.
“Find,” Darcy said.
Brutus did not hesitate. He ranged outward in a widening arc, head low, movements purposeful rather than frantic. He passed once over ground that looked no different from any other, then doubled back sharply, circling, snorting softly. His tail stiffened.
Darcy followed.
