Bingley nodded. “Right.”
Mounting with her proved difficult until Bingley lent a hand. Darcy felt the delay keenly, not from impatience but from the way his arms protested the effort, strength answering more slowly than habit promised. He dismissed it at once and swung up, settling Elizabeth before him, his arm secure around her to prevent any slip.
She stirred once, a faint sound of protest or confusion, then fell quiet again.
For a brief instant, the thought crossed his mind that it would be simpler to send her with Bingley. Safer. He could not have said why the idea felt wrong, only that it did. Before he could examine it further, he tightened his hold and gave the word.
Bingley urged his horse into a gallop, the sound of hooves striking the cold earth fading quickly along the rise. Darcy set his own mount in motion at a more cautious pace, every shift of Elizabeth’s weight requiring adjustment, each correction demanding more attention than it ought. The effort of keeping her steady drew upon him steadily, as though the act of bearing her diminished what remained.
She lay against him without resistance, her head tucked beneath his chin, her breath warm but uneven. The warmth did not comfort him. It only made him more aware of the strange heaviness gathering through his chest and arms, the sense that his body was lending itself where it would not easily be reclaimed.
A long strand of hair had come loose from her bonnet and brushed against his sleeve in a slow, dragging arc that unsettled him more than any cry would have done. A conscious woman protested, complained, demanded release. This utter quiet screamed louder in his thoughts than protests ever could.
The field blurred past them, hedgerows dipping and rising, but he scarcely marked it. Her earlier words—half-formed, unmoored—returned again and again without sense.Wrong place.No coherence, only distress. As the distance between them and Netherfield shortened, he adjusted his seat once, then again, annoyed to find that balance now required care. He looked down at her face—pale, drawn, lashes resting motionless against her cheek—and felt a colder thought intrude, uninvited and unwelcome.
Whatever had overtaken her in that field was not exhaustion, nor injury, nor anything he had known how to remedy.
And though he continued to ride on without faltering, Darcy was conscious, for the first time in years, that his strength was not equal to his resolve.
Chapter Nine
Darkness pooled and thinnedin turns, like ink stirred through water.
A shape at the edge of her mind kept reforming—hedge, hill, ditch, hedge again—never holding still long enough for her to grasp it. The world blinked white once, then slipped sideways. Something throbbed behind her eyes, a steady pulse she could neither name nor ease.
“Miss Bennet?”
A man’s voice, too close, too real to be part of the dream.
The light changed. A thudding grew louder—her own heartbeat? Footsteps? The rise of wind along the field? She tried to turn her head, and the sound stuttered, splitting into two uneven beats.
The wrongness surged again—cold earth rising toward her, the hedge tilting—and she flinched, or thought she did.
“Her pulse is stronger now,” someone murmured. A different voice. Female.
Elizabeth tried to open her eyes; one lid obeyed, the other sagged as if held down by a thumb she could not see.
Blur. Firelight? A lamp? Her vision rippled, and for an instant the flame elongated into the shape of the boundary hedge, needle-thin and shivering. She gasped. Or tried.
“Easy, my dear,” the woman said. “You are quite safe.”
Safe. The word rang oddly, as though echoed back at her from the wrong direction.
A hand touched her wrist. She jerked, the movement weak but sudden.
“Forgive me, Miss Elizabeth,” the man said again. His voice floated somewhere above her shoulder—familiar yet somehow distorted against familiarity. Was it… Mr Jones? No… Something cool brushed her swollen wrist, smelling faintly of spirits and crushed leaves. “That should help with the inflammation. Can you open your eyes?”
She attempted to answer, but her tongue felt thick, clumsy. What came out was a dry whisper: “Not… here…”
The woman clucked her tongue. “Poor lamb. She is wandering. Shock does strange things.”
Shock. Yes. That might have been it. Fainting from exertion or hunger—some innocent explanation. She clung to that idea with both hands.
The man pressed a palm lightly to her forehead. “Her fever appears very slight. She may simply have overtaxed herself. A fall, perhaps. Miss Bennet? Do you recall anything of your morning?”
Morning. Yes. She had gone walking. Clear skies. The far hedgerow like a line of stitching through the field. Her wrist—
Her eyes fluttered wide at once.
