Page 16 of I Have Faults Enough

"You are thinking of this the wrong way entirely," she said, and heard her own voice come out. "You speak of us as a danger to be disposed of, but we are worth a great deal more to you alive."

The entire party’s eyes came upon her, including Cobb's. He eyed her with the same sharp assessing attention she had won from him in the barn. "Go on, then."

She was aware, even as she gathered breath to continue, of Darcy going very still beside her, and likely even more upset that she had decided on a course, without his knowledge or consent. Nevertheless, in the narrow space between their shoulders, she could sense he held his breath. She wondered, in the half-second before she spoke again, whether he meant to stop her or not. But, as he did nothing to restrain her, she continued her persuasion.

"This gentleman," she said, with a small nod toward him, "is Mr. Darcy of Pemberley in Derbyshire, ten thousand a year, with an estate and a family that would empty half its coffers before they let harm come to him, and would do a great deal more besides to see him returned quietly, without magistrates. You need only a ransom note, delivered with care, to the right person, and you be paid a sum you would not earn in a lifetime of plates and stores, and see you gone from this county before anyone had troubled to look for you at all. Kill us, and you have nothing but a hanging offence and no profit in it whatsoever. Keep us, manage this properly, and you might yet walk away from tonight considerably richer than you came to it."

She felt the change, as her words worked in the room. Cobb's stillness moving into something closer to real interest, the grey-haired man's head coming up, even Ned's frightened eyes going, for a moment, thinking rather than merely afraid, the pistol's barrel dipping, forgotten, toward the floor.

She felt, too, in the same instant, Darcy's steady exhale; she knew it was an exhale filled with irritation; for, she offered them the cards he aimed to keep hiding as long as possible.

"Ten thousand a year," Bill repeated, slowly, and something ugly moved behind his eyes. "Ten thousand a year." He said it again, and Elizabeth watched, with a sinking feeling that reached all the way to her turned ankle. "And you'd have us believe a family with that kind of money is going to pay quiet and ask no questions after, is that it? No. No, I'll tell you what a family with that kind of money does; it sets every runner in London on us, it doesn't stop till every last one of us swings, and it does it with a fortune behind the doing.” He turned to Cobb and said in an accusatory tone. “There now, Cobb. She's just told us, plain as day, exactly how much trouble we're sitting on. I say that's argument for finishing it now, not for waiting on some fool notion of ransom that'll have the whole county's worth of lawmen down on us before the ink's dry."

"He’s right," said the grey-haired man, and it was somehow worse coming from him than from Bill, for there was no cruelty in it at all. "A poor man's hostage, you might trade quietly, and no one comes looking past the county line. Ten thousand a year doesn't stay quiet, Cobb. Money like that buys noise. Buys men who don't stop at the county line, or the next one either."

Elizabeth felt the floor of her own reasoning give way beneath her, all at once, the very leverage she had reached for turning in her hand to point back at her own throat, and she watched Bill's face and the grey-haired man's terrible calm agreement, that she had handed the argument for their deaths its most persuasive shape, dressed it in her own words, and delivered it directly into the hands of the one man in the room least inclined to mercy.

She looked, without meaning to, at Darcy, and found him already looking at her, and read in his face, not anger, though she had braced herself for anger, but something that frightened her a great deal more; he looked altogether worried, perhaps not for himself but unmistakably, for her.

It was a naked sort of look that she had never seen on his face in their whole acquaintance. The cold, brooding gentleman now looked to be someone else entirely. For a moment longer, he held her gaze, then moved from her to look at Bill, and his voice, when it came, was pitched to carry over Bill's, and utterly without the fear she had just seen beneath it.

"My family will indeed spend a great deal of money and a great deal of effort to see us returned, and they will not stop asking questions because they are asked to. But a man dead by your hands buys you nothing at all but certain hanging, whereas a man returned unharmed by some arrangement your leader is clever enough to manage carefully, buys you the one thing money from a frightened family reliably purchases in these matters, which is silence bought at the family's own request, because a family that has its own returned safe wants the business over and buried a great deal more than it wants revenge that risks the hostage's name being dragged through every newspaper in London along with yours. I do not say it is without risk. I say the risk of killing us is certain, and the risk of returning us is merely large."

The room’s silence was taut with consideration, and Elizabeth did not dare breathe. She watched Cobb's face move through the same thoughts Bill's had, and then Darcy’s convincing words, then arriving, she could not tell, at which conclusion

"Nobody's killing anybody tonight," Cobb said at last, and Elizabeth felt the breath go out of her in a rush of relief, "not while I'm the one deciding it, and I am the one deciding it, Bill, whatever your opinion of the sum owed. We move again before first light, further off, somewhere with no search party like to stumble past it by accident, and I'll think on the gentleman's offer with a clearer head than I've got at this hour. But hear me plain, both of you," this to Darcy and Elizabeth together, his voice gone hard, "you've bought yourselves a stay of it, not a pardon, and if either notion of yours proves worth less than the trouble of keeping you, I'll not stand between you and Bill's opinion a second time."

Bill said nothing further, but the look he turned on Elizabeth as Cobb moved to rouse the others for the next stage of their flight was not one she thought she would soon forget. She realized, watching it, that she had bought them a night's reprieve at the cost of having shewn this man exactly how much reason he now had to want them dead before morning regardless.

Beside her, Darcy had not moved, and when at last he spoke it was so low she nearly missed it beneath the general commotion of the others gathering themselves to move.

"You must not do that again," he said in a serious whisper, "however well it answers. I would rather take every blow Bill has to give than watch you hand him a better reason to give one to you instead."

She looked at him directly, and spoke near his ear. "And I would rather do something than sit and be governed by a man's fists whether I speak or no. I could not simply."

She stopped, aware of how near her own voice had come to breaking, and did not finish it, and he did not ask her to, only looked at her a moment longer with that same unguarded concern she had glimpsed at a moment earlier, and could not now unsee it.

And then, in the next moment, Cobb's hand closed on her arm once more and hauled her to her feet, and there was no more time, that night, for either of them to say or argue anything further at all.

CHAPTER 11

They travelled the remainder of that night by a route that was a far cry from comfort, and Elizabeth soon found that whatever ordeal she had imagined the word abduction to mean her imagining had been considerably kinder than the reality delivering itself to her now.

Unfortunately, dawn found them not at any fixed destination but still moving, in favour of open country crossed on foot; it was a decision Bill argued against, on the grounds that walking hostages made slower progress, but Cobb overruled it, believing that the open road was precisely what any search would be watching for, and a party on foot across the fields, keeping to hedgerows and woodlands, considerably less so.

By now, Cobb had let go of Elizabeth’s arm, and she followed behind him, as he led the party. It was on this stretch, some two hours into a grey, colourless morning, crossing a water-meadow gone soft with the winter's damp, that Elizabeth's ankle at last failed her entirely.

She had favoured it as best she could through the night's earlier trials, saying nothing, for she had judged, rightly enough, that an admission of weakness just then would have bought her nothing but Bill's contempt and perhaps worse; but the ground here was uneven and tussocked with treacherous hidden dips beneath the grass, and she came down hard on it in a stride she had judged wrongly, and felt the joint give way beneath her.

Elizabeth suddenly felt a white flare of pain, which took the whole of her breath away, and very nearly brought her to the ground. She did not cry out, but she did stop. And, after a moment went down onto one knee in the wet grass. She could not help but let out a small, quiet cry, and could not, for several seconds, find the strength to rise.

Darcy was beside her in an instant.

Soon enough, she felt rough, bound hands beneath her arm, hauling her up; his voice, low and urgent, asking where, asking how badly she was injured; and something in his face she had seen only once before, last night, a type of raw concern directed to her alone.

"Cobb," he said, in a sharp voice loud enough to carry, and harsh enough that Bill turned with a scowl already forming. "She cannot walk on that. You will allow her a moment."

"We haven't the time for moments," Bill complained. "Search parties don't stop to let injuries mend, and neither do we."