Behind Lady Catherine, Anne leaned from the carriage window, crying out in terror. “Mama!”
Another slip of earth answered her cry. The wheel sank deeper.
Lady Catherine glanced back long enough to quake in horror. Then she whirled, as if Darcy had the power to pull Anne from the brink.
“Do your duty, Darcy! Leave that temptress at once, and place yourself where continuity has been preserved and not squandered. Your father would be ashamed—ashamed!—that his son must be ordered about so, but this spectacle proves the necessity of it.”
“To do what?” Darcy barked. “Lady Catherine, no matter the proper reading of events, this is neither the time nor the place. Call off this madness and let the matter be discussed with civility and decorum.”
“Civility!” she cried back. “You would put off this reckoning for niceties in a drawing room? While Parliament trembles, while regiments starve for want of proper supply, while the stability of this nation hangs upon discipline and lineage, you would cast aside every established line in favour of fancy.”
The onlookers glanced from one to another, boots shifting away from the uneasy ground as voices murmured confusion. Dismay. For want of direction and purpose.
“What would you have me do?” Darcy answered, in a voice so soft his aunt was obliged to step closer to hear him. “And why—” he dashed a hand toward her faltering carriage— “would you endanger Anne’s health by dragging her from her warm hearth in winter? Let us look to her safety now!”
Lady Catherine’s jaw trembled with rage. “Can you be so wilfully ignorant, Darcy? Your duty is upon you even now. You will attend her back to Kent, and complete the alignment so that the families might be joined properly!”
Lady Catherine’s last words still rang in the air when Darcy felt Elizabeth flinch against him.
He thought at first it was only exhaustion—her weight sagging, her strength at last spent. Then her fingers closed convulsively in his coat, and he followed the direction of her gaze.
The mud at their feet wasmoving.
A slender green shoot pressed upward through the churned earth beside her boot, slick and dark as though it had forced its way from a depth that did not welcome light. Anotherfollowed. Then a third, and a dozen more sprouting in a perfect circle at her feet. They did not thrust wildly; they rose with terrible deliberation, coiling as they climbed.
Thorns caught the hem of her gown.
“Elizabeth!” Darcy dropped at once, one hand still locked around her waist while the other tore at her skirts, trying to tug her legs free of the thorny vine before it could wind higher. The stem resisted him. It did not snap like any winter growth he had ever known; it bent, flexed, and slid down her body only to fasten again, barbs hooking into silk and stocking with a precision that was almost intimate.
Elizabeth drew in a breath that never became sound.
The onlookers fell back in a widening ring. Someone crossed himself. Another muttered a prayer too quickly to finish it. The torches guttered in uneven light, and in that wavering glow the hedge seemed to gather itself—not spreading outward toward the crowd, not lashing in defence, but circling her. Claiming.
Harrowe swore under his breath and seized one of the thicker stems in both hands. He pulled. The vine strained against him, thorns biting into his palm, yet it did not release her. It tightened, inch by inch, about her ankles, then her calves, as though the soil itself had resolved to hold what stood upon it.
Lady Catherine stared.
For the first time since she had descended from her carriage, something unguarded crossed her face. “There,” she said, though the word emerged without its former command. “There is your answer! She is a false offering!”
Darcy scarcely heard her. He had wrapped both arms about Elizabeth now, lifting her as best he could while the thorns scraped and caught. As he drew her upward, the vines stretched with her, rising from the earth in a twisting arc, refusing to break. One thorn scored across his wrist. Another pierced the back of his hand, bright pain blooming where blood welled dark in the cold air.
Elizabeth’s head tipped back against his shoulder. “Darcy—”
He could not tell whether she meant to warn him or to beg him to let her go.
“No!” he cried, though he had no notion whether he spoke to her, to the watching crowd, or to the living thing fastening her to the ground.
A fresh rush of men pressed in, fear and righteousness indistinguishable now. One man, face white and eyes blazing, shoved forward with a pistol clutched in trembling hands. He did not level it properly; he brandished it, as though the mere presence of iron might master what he did not understand.
“Stand back!” he shouted. “Stand back, witch, or I swear I’ll fire!” The pistol trembled.
“Are you mad? Ignorant, superstitious fools!” Harrowe lunged for the weapon at the same moment the nearest horse reared again, hooves striking air, reins tangling beneath it. The ground split another inch. The carriage groaned, timber protesting under strain.
“This is no witchcraft,” he barked. “What do you mean to do, shoot at a thorn bush?”
The man faltered, but he was shaking so badly that his pistol discharged quite without intent.
The report cracked through the dusk and seemed, for one suspended instant, to tear the world in two. Smoke burst white and acrid between them. The ball struck not flesh but wood—splintering the sideboard of the tilting carriage—yet the shock of it drove a cry from every throat at once.
