Page 85 of Mr Darcy Bets on Love

She had seen him sit still at the top of the rise, one long black shape against the grey sky, on a horse with its head hanging. She had seen him see her. She had seen the horse start forward, and come down the long curve of the drive from the wood at a stumbling gallop, and she knew that the horse was done, that it could barely lift its feet, and that he was driving it anyway, the way he had driven every horse between London and here.

She did not know how long it took. A minute. A lifetime. The drive went up and up, and the gravel cut her feet, and her breath was sobbing in her throat, and the grey dawn light was growing all round them, turning the mist on the lake to silver and the beeches to green. And he came down towards her out of it, bigger and bigger, until she could hear the horse's hooves on the gravel and its breath roaring, until she could see his face.

He looked terrible. That was what she saw first. He was grey with dust from hair to boots, and unshaven, and his coat was torn at the shoulder and black with rain, and his face was so drawn and white that for one moment she did not know him. Then he pulled the horse up, so hard it nearly went down on its haunches, and he was out of the saddle before it had stopped, and he was running too.

They met in the middle of the drive, halfway between the wood and the water, in the first light of the morning.

She did not remember afterwards which of them reached the other first. She remembered only the impact: the hard, filthy, soaking wool of his coat, and his arms coming round her so tightly that her feet left the gravel and her ribs creaked, and the smell of horse and road and rain and, underneath it all, him. She had her arms round his neck. She had her face pressed into his throat. She could feel his heart hammering against her, and hear his breath coming in great ragged gasps, and he was saying her name, over and over, into her hair, as though it were the only word he had left.

"Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth."

"You came," she was saying. "You came. How did you come? You cannot have come. Tom only left yesterday—"

"I met him. At Market Harborough. At dusk." He set her down, but did not let go. He took her face between his two filthy hands and looked at it in the dawn light, as though he were searching it for wounds. "Are you hurt? Is Georgiana? Anne? Where is he? Elizabeth, where is he? Tell me he has not—"

"He is in the ice house."

Darcy stared at her.

"We caught him," said Elizabeth, and heard her own voice begin to shake, and could not stop it. "Last night. At six o'clock. He put a note in Georgiana's music case, in Lady Theodosia's hand, telling her to come alone to the ice house, and she brought it to me, Fitzwilliam, she brought it straight to me, she did not go. And Anne put on her pelisse and sat on the bench in the veil, and he came, and took her by the arm, and she screamed, the most enormous scream, every rook in the park went up. And James came out of the ice house and the Hollins men came out of the reeds with pitchforks and I stood in the path and he could not get past me. And Mrs Reynolds locked him in. With the ice. He has been there all night. He has a blanket." She took a great gulping breath. "And he told me her name. Through the grille. Lady Theodosia. He said it. James heard him."

He did not say anything at all.

He stood in the middle of his own drive in the dawn, with his hands on either side of her face, and looked at her: at her hair all down her back and her nightgown soaked to the knee with dew and her bare feet bleeding a little on the gravel. And his face did something she had never seen it do. It broke. It crumpled, quite suddenly, like a child's, and he made a sound she had never heard from him either, low and harsh, half a laugh and half something else.

Then he pulled her against him again, and put his face down into her neck, and she felt his whole body shaking, and understood that he was weeping.

She held him. She held him on the drive at Pemberley with the sun coming up over the hills behind the house and turning the whole front of it, stone by stone, to gold and then to pink, like the inside of a shell. She held his head against her shoulder with one hand and stroked his dusty hair with the other, and said, over and over, the way you would to a child woken from a nightmare, "It is all right. It is all right. We are all safe. It is over. You are home."

After a long time, he lifted his head. His face was wet and streaked with dust. He was laughing, a little, unsteadily, through it.

"You locked him in the ice house," he said.

"Mrs Reynolds did. I only stood in the path."

"You stood in the path." He shut his eyes. "God help me. You stood in the path."

"Somebody had to."

He laughed again, and it turned into something else, and he kissed her. Right there on the drive, in the full light of the morning, filthy and exhausted and weeping, with the tired horse cropping the verge beside them and, she found out later, half the Pemberley household watching from the windows. It was not a gentle kiss. It was desperate, and clumsy, and it tasted of dust and salt and rain, and it went on until she had to hold on to the front of his torn coat to keep upright.

When at last he let her breathe, he looked down, and saw her feet.

"You have no shoes," he said.

"I saw you at the top of the rise," said Elizabeth. "I did not stop for shoes."

He picked her up. He simply bent and swung her up into his arms, as though she weighed nothing, as he had on their wedding night, and turned towards the house with her, and began to walk down the drive.

"The horse—" she protested weakly.

"The horse," said Darcy, "can find its own way to the stable. It has been in worse company than me all night."

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The whole of Pemberley was awake by the time he carried her up the steps.

Darcy had not thought about that. He had not thought about anything but the weight of her in his arms and the warmth of her face against his neck and her bare cut feet. So it came as a shock to walk in through his own front door and find the great hall full of people.