Gasps and terrified shouts broke like a flock of birds taking flight.
Elizabeth felt it then—not outward, but inward. The pull. The answering.
The torches leaned toward her and away again. Water in a roadside trough heaved once against its boards and sloshed over. The iron buckle at her shoe warmed against her skin, and even the brass buttons of Darcy’s coat popped free of their threads.
It was not unwanted obedience, like before. It was agitation.
Darcy’s breath ran ragged against her temple. “Elizabeth,” he said under his breath, and there was warning in it now. Not for the mob—for her. “Head down.”
The crowd parted suddenly as another carriage forced its way through, the horses lathered, the coachman white with the effort of keeping them straight. The door was flung open before the vehicle had fully stopped.
That same noblewoman from the inn descended without assistance, rejecting the groom’s offered hand with a motion so slight it might have been invisible to any but the man she dismissed. Her figure was rigid beneath layers of dark silk; the plumes at her bonnet trembled in the cold air, though she herself did not.
The nausea struck without warning. It was not fear alone, nor memory of Mr Collins’s suffocating nearness, but something sharper—an internal recoil so violent she bent double, the contents of her empty stomach wrenching free as though expelled by force.
A murmur rippled through the men behind the carriage.
“See there… righteous judgement!”
“She cannot even stand—”
“It’s unnatural!”
Darcy’s arm closed around her waist. He ripped a handkerchief from his pocket and pressed it into her hand. “Breathe, Elizabeth. Breathe, love.”
The word slipped from him without calculation. She felt it more than heard it, and leaned her head into his shoulder as her body shuddered.
He did not release her. She felt him gather himself instead—felt the line of his body lengthen, his shoulders square, as though some ancestral instinct had been summoned to meet what approached.
“Lady Catherine.”
There was recognition in his tone, and warning. Elizabeth stiffened and looked up. So,thatexplained it.
Lady Catherine did not look at Elizabeth first. She regarded Darcy, and her expression did not blaze with temper, but settled into something far more dangerous: certainty.
“Darcy,” she said, as though addressing a subordinate who had disappointed her publicly. “What do you here? You persist in compounding error with spectacle.”
Behind her, the carriage rocked slightly as someone within shifted. Elizabeth caught a glimpse of the young lady seated inside—pale, teeth clenched so tightly her whole body trembled, eyes wide not with triumph but apprehension.
Lady Catherine’s gaze moved at last. It struck Elizabeth like cold iron.
“And this,” she said, taking in Elizabeth’s bent posture, Darcy’s arm around her, the circle of men pressing nearer, “is the…influencefor which you would discard order. Fie! A sham and a temptress. You are a fool, Darcy.”
A torch flared too high behind her. Sparks hissed into the damp air. One of the horses reared and was dragged back sharply.
“She made the water rise!” someone shouted from the road. “And the fire—you saw the fire!”
“The vines! I saw them at the inn—”
“Witchcraft!”
Lady Catherine did not rebuke them. Did not protest that “witchcraft” was not a mortal crime anymore, but it would not have mattered. The crowd were lathered to a panic, and it served her purposes.
She stepped forward, skirts sweeping over rutted earth, her gloved hand lifting as though to indicate an object for removal.
“I cautioned you, Darcy,” she continued, her voice cutting cleanly through the rising agitation. “I explained to you precisely what indulgence would invite. Yet you choose to stand in a ditch, clasping the hand of a young woman whose very presence provokes convulsion and hysteria.”
The iron fittings on one of the bridles gave a sharp metallic cry, twisting under strain. A groom swore and leapt to capture the horse, even as the bit fractured and fell from its mouth.
