The rain had thinned to a fine cold mist that silvered the gravel and reduced distances to within the eyesight of a man accustomed to the valley. The crutch-marks on the path showed where she had gone—narrow and definite where the leg had held her, wider and uncertain where she had recovered a stagger. The pattern told him, without having to be told, that she was already in pain and had gone on regardless, and that he had perhaps sixminutes and no more in which to come up with her before her body ended her errand for her.
He saw her a hundred yards past the south gate. She was half-bent against the stone wall of the lane, her forehead to the stone.
“Elizabeth!”
It came out of him loud enough to lift rooks from the elms. Her head did not come up. He was already running—at a pace neither training nor upbringing would have endorsed, because training and upbringing had no province in a lane where a woman he was trying not to name to himself was about to fall for the second time in ten days.
She was pale. There was a dampness at the hem of her cloak that was not rain. She looked him in the face with the dignity of a woman who had known, as she turned, that she had nothing left with which to argue and had decided to conduct the conversation nonetheless.
“You should not have come, Mr Darcy.”
“Should not have come? Elizabeth, you are bleeding into a lane!”
“It is only the wound. It has opened. It will close again. Let me on my way.”
“Are you bleeding mad? I will do no such thing. You are hardly fit to be out of your bed!”
He stopped a pace from her. His eyes went first to her face, then to the set of the crutch, then to the fold of the cloak over the leg she was plainly unable to keep straight beneath it. Dark blood showed at the cloak’s inner edge.
He moved to take her elbow.
“Do not, sir!” Her hand came up—not the one on the left crutch, which she could not spare, but the other—a small flat frantic gesture in the air between them. “Do not touch me. If you touch me, I shall not be able to stand again. Do not ask me how I know that. I only know I shall not stand again.”
His hand stopped. “Then sit, for Heaven’s sake.”
“No.”
“Sit in the lane, Elizabeth. Take my coat —”
“No. I cannot, sir.”
Footsteps came up the lane from below. Hadley, twenty paces off, his head down, his coat over his arm, spoke before he had looked up. “Ah, there you are, sir. I was coming up to say the lower run’s gone queer again. Bank’s giving where the lay turned wrong, and I thought to drop a hurdle across before dark if you —”
“Hadley. Not now.”
Hadley stopped. He looked up. His eyes went past Darcy to what was behind him, and his face changed. “Shall I fetch… someone, sir?”
Darcy glanced back in annoyance. “No. I will bring Miss Bennet back to the house myself.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “No.”
“Do not make me say it twice.”
“Then do not say it once in that tone! I am neither servant nor child to be ordered home because you dislike my direction!”
“I dislike yourcollapsein it!”
She winced. He took a breath that was not a help to him and brought his voice down to where he could trust it.
“You are hurt. Your leg is bleeding again.”
“Only because I came farther than I am used to. I only need to rest.”
“Stop, Elizabeth. I cannot pretend to understand, but there is something binding you and me and this place. This healing—this miraculous healing of yours is not real Elizabeth. It cannot last apart from here. You and the water—it defies all reason and sense, but you cannot go!”
She closed her eyes, breath hissing between her teeth. “You are a rational man, Mr Darcy. Your kindness has lead you to assume nonsense because you cannot bear it to be otherwise.”
“You heard what Hadley just said. The valley is already answering. Do you think I cannot see what your leaving in this condition would do—to my sister, to this house, to every creature already taking its temper from ours? If you have any justice in you, Elizabeth, come back before you do more damage to yourself and to everyone else.”
