“Miss Bennet. I am going to carry you to the house. The distance is perhaps a quarter-mile, uphill. I must not jostle the leg. I will go as carefully as I can.”
“The leg has been vocal today. I expect it will have more to say.”
Something inside him broke—the ice on the mere cracking beneath her, surface giving way to unfathomable depth. The composure. The wry edge, delivered through grey lips with shin bone jutting through stocking. He did not know her. He knelt in her blood. Yet something cracked and would not close.
He gathered her. One arm beneath her knees—careful, hand hovering beneath splint, braced against jolts—the other across her back. She was lighter than a woman of her stature should be. Not frail, but reduced—lightness born of insufficient food, a body that spent more than it took. Her hand moved to the back of his neck, her fingers cold as ice against his skin.
The leg swung as he rose. She clenched her jaw. A small sound escaped, torn away, traveling not through ears but through the hand’s grip, the contact of bodies. Her eyes grew distant, focused gaze hazing, pupils dilating.
“Stay awake, Miss Bennet. Stay awake.”
“I am awake.” A whisper. “Merely calculating whether consciousness is worth the cost.”
He began uphill. Every step a negotiation—fast enough to shield her from cold before blood loss finished her, slow enough to keep the leg still.
Every step catalogued what the house could not offer her. Upstairs in the south chamber, his sister lay, attended by a kitchen girl. Below, a cook fully occupied at the range, a valet whose duties did not extend to nursing, Mrs Bannon, who, confronted with a bleeding woman in the hall, would retreat to the scullery and find a pot to polish. He had himself—and what he had been for six weeks—the man carrying water every morning for the patient already here.
Now a woman bled in his arms, and this house was all he had to give.
Chapter Three
Heopenedthedoorwith his shoulder. The hallway beyond was warmer than the slope had been—the kitchen fire at the back of the house had burned since before dawn, and some warmth had reached the front rooms through the flags—but the warmth was insufficient for what she needed.
“Mrs Bannon!”
His voice carried, ringing off the stone and bare walls. A door opened at the back of the hall—not the kitchen, the scullery—and Mrs Bannon came to it, wiping her hands on her apron with the unhurried air she gave to any summons from her master that had not yet been raised to a manner she deemed warranted. She saw what he carried. Her hands halted on the apron.
“Sweet merciful—”
“Get Mrs Reeves. Get hot water boiling. Gather every clean cloth you can find. Now, Mrs Bannon!”
She remained still.
“Mrs Bannon!”
“Sir—Miss Darcy is asleep. Nan has just—”
“I know. The chamber at the end of the passage—the old housekeeper’s parlour—is it cleared?”
“It has the loom in it, sir. And the linen press. It has not been a chamber since—”
“Clear it. Now. I am going no further into the house than I must, because I will not have her carried past my sister’s door. Send Mrs Reeves with hot water. Send Martha—the girl—with blankets. Tell Norton to ride for the surgeon at Bakewell and say the words compound fracture, exposed bone, blood loss. Tell him the surgeon must come tonight. Tell him I said so!”
Mrs Bannon’s face, which had been the still blank of a woman calculating a refusal, changed. Not softened—that would have been too much of a concession forMrs Bannon, whose face had not softened in Darcy’s presence these past six weeks. But the calculation ceased. The refusal withdrew wherever refusals went when Mrs Bannon set them aside. She turned and sped down the passage, not running but faster than Darcy had seen her move.
He stood in the hall with Miss Bennet in his arms. Her head rested against his shoulder, her face turned to his neck, her breathing shallow against his collarbone. He could not hold her here indefinitely—the longer he stood, the more blood she lost into the fabric between them. But he could not carry her past the staircase either, for the stairs led to the first floor where Georgiana slept, and he would not endure a crisis near his sister’s door while Nan read to her with the patient, unhurried voice that was the sole thing restraining Georgiana from another swooning fit.
The old housekeeper’s parlour lay at the far end of the ground-floor passage, beyond the dining room and the little door that led down to the cellar. He knew the room. He had walked through it in his first week, cataloguing which parts of the house might be of use and which must wait. It was small—fifteen feet by twelve—with a fireplace on the inner wall and a single window onto the kitchen garden. It had served as the housekeeper’s sitting room in the previous century, before the housekeepers of Merebank had been absorbed into the kitchen wing and the parlour had been relegated to storage for linens and broken furniture. A bed-frame rested against the wall beneath the window, serving as a shelf for what Mrs Bannon had not known where else to place. The bed-frame was how Darcy recalled the room.
Movement came from the far end of the passage—Mrs Bannon’s voice, shrill and quick, followed by Mrs Reeves’s deeper reply from the kitchen, then footsteps on the flags, and the sound of a pot lifted from a hook. He adjusted his hold on Miss Bennet. Her hand on the back of his neck had gone slack, the ice fingers loosening, and he spoke to her without turning.
“Miss Bennet. Stay with me. A few minutes more.”
“I am with you, Mr Darcy.” A breath of a voice, thinner than on the bank. “I am merely resting my eyes.”
“Do not rest them. Keep them open.”
“They are open. It is the rest of me that becomes uncertain.”
