He heard horse hooves, and out of the corner of his eye saw two men in a curricle approaching. He bent his head to consider the nail. It yielded slightly, but his hand slipped.At least the toll collector ought to be back to unlock the gate.
“Darcy?” Elizabeth’s voice was surprisingly loud, but what struck him more was the intimacy of her calling himDarcy. He had lost the right to ask her to call him by his first name after he told her that was only for family, but to lose his title was a step toward the relationship he dearly wanted with her. He turned from the nail to smile at her, but she looked not at him, but over her left shoulder, behind them down the street. “Darcy, they are not slowing.”
The curricle rumbled toward them, and even at this distance, Darcy guessed the problem. No one approaching a toll gate should be travelling at that speed. The gentleman driving must have held the reins too slack, and rather than looping one rein into the other, he held them not in his hand but against his fingers. They had slipped away, and the horses, fearful or confused, had bolted.
“He will control his team.” He said this to reassure her as his stomach rolled in dread. He folded the knife and, rather than using the blade, used its thicker handle as a lever.
“I could pry my arm out! I can bear the pain well enough.” He heard the fright in her voice. She pulled back roughly, but more blood seeped along her torn sleeve and she gave a little sob.
“Stop! Even if you could bear it, you will tear a vein and bleed to death on the road!”
Over his shoulder Darcy saw the ignorant driver now furiously pulling on one rein and then the other to try to bring his team to a standstill. They were less than seventy-five yards away; unless the driver controlled the horses, he had perhaps thirty seconds before they crashed into the gate. Darcy’s heartbeat quickened, but he found his awareness heightened. He could not allow fear to render him motionless or they would be killed.
Elizabeth tugged her arm again, but she cried out in pain and the bloodstain on her sleeve widened. Darcy pressed the folded knife between her arm and the nail again. The handle was bending, but the nail moved slightly. He could not allow his hands to shake.
“Get out of the way.”
“What?” He used both hands to force the nail.
“Darcy, I am dead no matter what. Get out of the way.”
She had tears in her eyes, but she was entirely serious. “Elizabeth!” He paused long enough to give her a hard look. Her pupils were pinholes and her chest was heaving, but she was in earnest. “Never!”
He saw the passenger of the curricle looking poised to jump while the driver was sawing the mouth to no avail.
I cannot allow terror to overwhelm my mind.
“Please, Darcy, move!” Her eerie calm frightened him as much as the runaway curricle. He could hardly hear her over the alarmed cries from the townspeople watching the event unfold and the snorting of the approaching horses.
Darcy shifted as near to the gate as he could get to try again. From this position, he could reach one arm through the gate and pull the blade handle down with two hands rather than try to push it forward. The rush of his own pulse pounding in his ears was louder than the hoofbeats descending upon them.
The knife’s handle was not an equal match to an iron nail, but the nail finally tilted enough. Elizabeth jerked her bleeding arm free, staggering backward as she did toward the horses. Darcy wrapped an arm around her waist and, with swift steps, threw them both to the ground at the end of the gate. They had been near enough to see the cracked leather nosebands of both horses before they stumbled to safety.
He held Elizabeth against him as the feeling of helplessness and horror and panic began to recede. Her sleeve was ripped to tatters, and her skin little better, but she would be well. They stayed in the dirt, and he held her as tightly as he could, and her shaking fingers gripped his coat lapels, blood running down her arm.
The sound of an animal screaming in pain pierced his mind. From where he lay on his side, still holding Elizabeth, Darcy could see that one horse had jumped the gate and was galloping down the toll road,but the second failed to clear it. It crashed its head and knees to the ground on the opposite side, its body across the gate with its hind legs in the air. It was furiously kicking the curricle’s footboard and the sound of splintering wood added to the din.
Darcy raised himself on one elbow, gasping for breath, and saw the passenger had jumped clear before impact, but the man’s leg was bent at such a terrible angle that Darcy had to turn from looking at it. It was good that Mr Jones was returned because both he and Mr Lynn would be needed to set the leg or, most likely, remove it. The driver, oddly enough, was easier to look at because he was dead. He had remained in the seat and had taken a crushing kick to the head from the horse he had failed to control.
Any longer, and he and Elizabeth would both have been trampled by the horses or crushed by the curricle. Darcy lacked the strength to stand, to do anything more than look at his wife and be glad they were both alive. Elizabeth was sobbing, crying from relief and terror, and Darcy clutched her against him. She was deathly pale, and as he held her against his chest and told her that all was well, he was acutely aware of how rapidly and fiercely her heart was beating.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Elizabeth raised her head from her pillow and looked bleary-eyed around her room. It took a long moment to realise that she was safe, that she was not staring down a speeding curricle, she was not slammed into the dirt next to Darcy, she was not listening to the frenzied commotion of townspeople all talking and screaming at the same time.
The activity following the accident was hurried, loud, and confusing. Darcy called directions to everyone he saw about the apothecary, the horses, the smashed curricle, and the dead man. The toll collector suggested that she ought to be carried to Mrs Philips’s because it was so near, but Darcy insisted she be brought home directly. She remembered that the ostler had offered his cart, but Darcy made someone bring a carriage. Someone recommended she see Mr Jones, who was occupied by the injured man’s leg, but again Darcy refused every offer other than her being brought to Netherfield’s lodge.
Did Darcy think I could die and he wanted my heart to stop in my own bed rather than my aunt Philips’s guest room or in the apothecary’s consultation room?
She had not seen much of the results of the terrifying accident. Tears had blurred her vision, and Darcy held her to his chest, with hishand lightly pressed against the back of her head, and refused to let her look. While they were still lying on the ground, all she could see was how trampled both of their hats had become, and then she considered what would have happened to them if Darcy had been a few seconds slower. That was when her tears of fright had become sobs of guilt.
When the matter of where to take her and how to transport her was settled, she kept her face huddled against Darcy’s chest while he carried her to the carriage. She heard a horse screaming, the cries of people spreading the news, the wails of pain from the injured man.
And while listening to those horrid sounds, she was close enough to Darcy to feel the pounding of his heart.
He had clearly been so terrified that his heart was still beating away wildly even when they were in the carriage. Why did her own heart not stop beating from overwhelming alarm when those horses were near enough for her to see their teeth?
She would have expected the incident to bring on a painful heart episode.I have never known such terror in all of my life.Watching death come for her in the form of two out-of-control horses was unlike the daily fear of wondering if today was the day her heart would stop. Her actions at the gate were reckless, foolish, impulsive. What had begun as a way to make Darcy laugh became a stupid means to prove her strength, to forget for a little while that she was on the verge of dying.
