Page 20 of A Selfish Disdain

He moved a short distance from the wreck, feeling along the ground with a care. As he searched, Mr. Darcy found wheel-ruts and a broken brush; within a few minutes with his countenance set in such a grimness that Elizabeth did not believe she had seen him wear before.

"I cannot find the way we came. The ground here is too dark, and there is no moon to help us. If we go stumbling through this wood searching for a road, in the dark, we are as likely to lose ourselves entirely as to find Reeves, or the road, or anything else worth finding."

Elizabeth felt anxiety growing deeper in her chest, and she was not entirely sure what course of action they should take next. "Then what do you propose? We cannot simply leave him."

"I do not propose to leave him, but I do propose that we are of no use to him lost and injured ourselves in the dark, and that our best chance of bringing him any help at all is to find our own way to some habitation and a person inside it who can be sent back with proper aid.” He paused, sensing her mounting distress, and let out a determined exhale. “I do not like it any better than you do, Miss Bennet, but I do not see a better course open to us."

She did not dislike Mr. Darcys’ idea, rather, Elizabeth hated it. Should hated the sense of abandonment in it, however reasoned it was, but she could find no argument against it that did not amount to anything more than her own wish that the situation were other than it was.

"Very well.” She said a little more coldly. “Which way out of this?" They were still in the shallow gully where the carriage finally went down, and they would need to likely climb out.

"I do not know," he admitted. "But I noted, before the light failed entirely, that the ground fell away to the west of us, toward what I took for lower country. And, lower country generally means a stream, or a road, or some sign of habitation nearer than high ground.” He looked at her, barely registering her features in the darkness of the woods.

"Then it will have to serve," said Elizabeth, and found, gathering her skirts in hands still not entirely steady. In addition, she felt a headache coming on and was not in quite the mood to argue with him further, and simply added, “Lead on, sir.”

Mr. Darcy did just that and beckoned her to follow him, as they slowly made their way in the opposite direction, from whence he had earlier explored.

They walked slowly, careful to avoid stumbling over rocks and tree stumps. After what felt like the better part of an hour, they eventually made it out of the gully.

On slightly higher ground, Elizabeth began to discover that wood was not as silent as she had believed it to be, though its sounds offered little reassurance. She heard a rustle of things unseen in the undergrowth, the creak of branches overhead stirred by a wind, a sound that might have been a horse, or might have been nothing at all. And, yet, with each noise, she noticed Darcy's hand go, briefly, to where his pistol might have been had it not been lost somewhere in the wreck behind them.

"Are you managing?" he asked her more than once, and she told him each time that she was, though her half-boots, sturdy enough for a country walk to Meryton, were proving a poor match for ground thick with root and bramble in the dark, and she had twice caught herself against his arm when the footing gave way beneath her without warning.

"I am managing better than you are, I think," she said, on the second such occasion. "You have said nothing about your arm since we set out.”

He was quick to reply to her suggestion. "It is of no consequence."

Elizabeth would not drop the subject, now that her vigor had increased through their walk, and her head, feeling slightly better, replied. "It will become of considerable consequence, sir, if you bleed enough to faint from it in the middle of a wood at night, and I do not relish the prospect of dragging a man of your size the remainder of however far we have left to walk."

This drew from him something that was almost, in the darkness, a laugh; it was brief, and surprised her. "I will endeavour not to faint, Miss Bennet, purely to spare you the exertion."

"See that you do. I have quite enough to manage without adding you fainting to the list," she replied, a tone equal parts sarcastic and concerned.

They walked on in a silence that felt, for the first time since the crash, more companionable than watchful. The wood had not grown less dark, nor less strange, but Elizabeth found she minded it rather less with the sound of his footsteps beside her own. In truth, she was exceedingly grateful for him, walking beside her through a wood that would have frightened her considerably more if she had been made to walk it alone.

The ground, when it changed at last, changed slowly, a softening underfoot, a lengthening of the space between one tree and the next, so that Elizabeth was some while in realizing that the close pressure of the wood was beginning to loosen its hold.

The trees thinned, and the air, which had lain thick and close about them for the better part of an hour and a half, began to move again, carrying with it a coolness that had nothing of the wood's damp in it.

Elizabeth raised her eyes at last from the treacherous ground she had been watching so carefully, and noticed ahead a single point of light.

She stopped walking, and immediately pointed at it. "There." Her voice caught, from relief or exhaustion or some combination of both. "Mr. Darcy, there. Do you see it?"

He had already seen it, and he stood beside her a moment, very still, looking at that single distant light with intensity.

When he spoke again, his voice carried a note of relief. "Come," he said. "It is not far now. Whatever it is, it is shelter, and I think we have both had enough of this night to last us a very long while."

He offered her his arm, the uninjured one, and even exhausted, he had thought of that; she took it without hesitation, and together they went down toward the light.

CHAPTER 12

The light belonged to a farmhouse, low and sturdy, set back from what proved to be a proper lane after all. The farmer, a broad man named Thatcher, who looked to be in his early fifties, opened his door to find Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, looking worse for wear. Thatcher, with his lamp held high, wore an expression that passed from wariness to alarm and then to concern, as Mr. Darcy explained their predicament.

"Highwaymen, you say! On the Dunstable road? Lord above!” The man began, before turning over his shoulder and yelling, “Martha! Martha, fetch blankets, and put the kettle on!" He had already taken in Darcy's bloodied sleeve and Elizabeth's disordered hair and torn hem. "You'd best come in, both of you, before you take a chill on top of everything else."

It was Darcy who spoke first upon the delicate matter of what account to give, drawing Thatcher aside for a moment before either of them crossed the threshold, and Elizabeth heard enough of the low exchange to understand that her own reputation had not escaped his notice even in the middle of so disordered a night.

Elizabeth was quickly presented to Mrs. Thatcher, as Mr. Darcy's cousin, waylaid together upon a family journey to relations in town; it was a fiction delivered by Darcy with such grave and convincing steadiness that Elizabeth, warming her hands at last before a fire, found herself almost believing it herself.