Speechless, page 4
“Regrettably, we were caught short by the weather en route and forced to divert onto a road with more cover overhead.”
Darcy baulked as that part of his own memory resurfaced with mortifying clarity. He had been at St Albans, visiting friends. Returning to London ought to have taken a matter of hours—a direct carriage ride down the Great North Road. And so it might have been, were it not for the moment of madness that came upon him as he readied himself on the morning of his departure.
He could picture in his mind’s eye the colour that arose in his cheeks as he stood before his dressing mirror, torturing himself with the knowledge that St Albans was but ten miles from Meryton. Ten miles from the town to where often walked the woman he had not seen since he danced with her at Bingley’s ball last November. Ten miles from the woman who had plagued almost every one of his waking thoughts—and as sure as the devil every single dream—since. Ten miles from the woman whose equal he had yet to find anywhere in the whole of his acquaintance. He had fought long and hard to relinquish his attachment and would not seek her out by design—but the temptation of a serendipitous encounter had proved too much to resist. He had sent his man home in the carriage and set out on horseback along the alternative route back to London, via Meryton.
No such encounter had occurred—at least, not that he recalled. The snow had started to fall whilst his horse rested at one of Meryton’s coaching inns and begun to settle by the time he set out again towards Ermine Street. A snowbound road and a diversion down an easier path both rang faint bells amongst his otherwise hazy memories of the rest of that day.
He looked away to the darkest corner of the room, attempting to conceal the disdain curling his lip, for it was not meant for Elizabeth. He was never impetuous. Bingley was the impulsive one, forever landing himself in awkward scrapes as a consequence of caprice. Darcy had made it the study of his life to always act with purpose and forethought—and so he had achieved until Elizabeth waltzed into his world and made a reckless fool of him. And look where his newfound imprudence had led! At worst he was a dead man, at best he was a mute, and either way he was marooned with the one woman whom he was damned if he could resist but whom duty forbade him from ever having!
“There was less snow on the other road,” Elizabeth continued, “but, it transpired, more ice. I do not know precisely how it happened, but our carriage overturned.”
Darcy’s heart gave a great thud, and he whipped his gaze back to hers, ignoring the searing pain in his neck. She looked pained but composed, and her aplomb shamed him far more than a display of hysteria would have. She had given no hint of having suffered any misfortune, and so preoccupied with his own accident had he been that it never occurred to him she might also have been injured. “Good God!” he mouthed, “Were you hurt?”
She watched him say the words but struggled to understand, no doubt due to the urgency with which they were said. He snatched up the pen and scratched out the enquiry on paper.
“Oh, nothing broken,” she replied dismissively. “But Perkins, my uncle’s man, he—” She stopped speaking abruptly and looked at her hands. When she spoke again, her tone was sombre, and she did not look up. “He was travelling with me in the carriage due to the cold, and when it began to swerve, he leant out of the window to call to the driver and—that is when it happened. I believe he broke his neck.”
“Dear God!” Darcy waited for her to glance up and mouthed clearly, “I am very sorry.”
“As am I,” she replied quietly. “I barely knew him, but I know my uncle thought very well of him, and I am sure the Perkins family will be devastated. Such a needless tragedy. My uncle or my father will have to compensate them—and buy a new carriage—and all because I desired to go to London a fortnight early! Had I only waited and gone when I had planned to, it would all have been avoided.”
Darcy’s first instinct was to pull her into his arms and whisper his assurances until she denounced all notion of blame. His second was to push such foolish wishes from his mind and indicate mutely for more ink. He waited for Elizabeth to hold it out to him, dipped his pen, and wrote,
I am grieved that you had to witness such a thing.
She read it and gave him a wry smile. “It was horrible, I shall not deny it, though I am not the sort to faint away in the face of real life, sir. Which is fortunate, given what happened next.” She looked pointedly at him and took a deep breath before elaborating. “Rogers, the driver, freed one of the horses. The other was trapped somehow in the harness, and it was…screaming. I have never heard a horse make such a noise. He could not get to it, I could not get to him, for the carriage door would not open properly. And then you appeared.”
Darcy vaguely remembered the sound of a horse screaming—and a woman, who must have been Elizabeth. The image of her trapped in an overturned carriage with a dead man, crying for help, raised the hairs on his arms.
“Once I climbed out, I saw you both working to free the horse. Rogers was holding up the crossbar, and you were trying to untether the harness under the horse’s belly, and it was thrashing about and…and it just…it all happened so quickly I cannot say with certainty, but I believe it caught you in the throat with its foreleg or some part of the traces or I know not what! But you sort of”—she moved both hands in parallel through the air, watching the space between them as though envisioning him moving with them—"flew backwards and landed in the snow.” She looked up to meet his eyes. “I thought you must be dead too, but you were not.”
Darcy felt slightly nauseous, though whether at the grisly scene Elizabeth depicted or the snatches of looming trees, falling snow, and suffocation that nagged him to remember them, he could not tell.
“Do you recall any of this?”
He wrote his answer slowly, feeling somewhat dazed.
Some of it.
After a moment’s thought, he added,
I recall being unable to breathe.
“You could not—not properly. I thought you would stop at every moment, but, well, here you are. Rogers would not leave me alone on the road, so I did what I could to keep you warm and left with him to find help. We took your horse—I hope you do not mind. At least he is safe in the stables here now.”
Darcy smiled his acquiescence. Fine beast though it was, his horse was the least of his concerns.
“This was the nearest inhabited place. One of the guests, Mr Stratton, lent us his carriage and sent his man with us to help carry you. The innkeeper sent his nephew as well.”
Darcy reached for the ink. Elizabeth waited in silence for him to write.
You returned with them?
She drew back, her expression turned cold. “Yes, I did. I suppose it would have been more ladylike to remain here and let the men fetch you—and it certainly would have been less troublesome—but in all honesty, it did not occur to me. We may not be the best of friends, Mr Darcy, but we are well enough acquainted that I could not countenance leaving you to the mercy of strangers. Not in this state.”
Darcy not only extended his finger to object but held it up between them to ensure she saw it. When he had her attention, he wrote,
I do not mean to disapprove. I am only surprised—and grateful!
“Oh, I see.” Elizabeth deflated somewhat, though she lost none of the fire from her eyes. She wrapped her hands around the worn ends of the arms of her chair and rubbed them absentmindedly as though wishing to direct her vexation somewhere, if not at him.
Darcy would have taken more time to assure her of his admiration for her courage and compassion were he not so close to exhaustion. The pain in his neck had grown nigh unbearable, his breathing had taken on a quality not dissimilar to the din of a sawmill, and his ears rang from the heaviness of the congestion in his head. He opted to glean more answers over offering compliments before sleep reclaimed him.
Then?
“There is not much more to tell,” Elizabeth replied with a small shrug. “We brought you back here, and here we are still.”
Darcy used the last of the ink on the pen to enquire,
Why?
Elizabeth leant forward to read it and gave a small scornful scoff before she sat back and said with no little disdain, “We are snowed in.”
He raised a dubious eyebrow.
“There is no need to look at me in that manner, sir. I am well aware of the absurdity of the situation. There could not be two people with so little desire to be in the same place, yet here we are, detained together in the most intimate circumstances by a snowdrift. You really could not make it up.”
Darcy kept watching her. She was right; he could think of little worse than being trapped in a confined space with the woman who tested his restraint more than any he had ever met. The possibility that she should feel similarly about him sparked the same flickering tightness in his chest that had assailed him constantly during his stay in Hertfordshire last autumn. Resolving to disregard it, he held the pen out for more ink, his arm almost too heavy to lift clear of the bed.
Who else is here?
Elizabeth looked displeased with the question. “I assure you, were any of the other guests willing or able to assist, I should hardly refuse, but there is nobody.”
Darcy closed his eyes briefly. Lovely she may be, but he wished Elizabeth were not quite so determined to always misunderstand him. Why she should always assume he meant to upbraid her, God only knew. Perhaps because her mother did naught else, she had grown used to defending herself? With leaden fingers, he scrawled an almost illegible explanation.
Would know you are safe.
She appeared somewhat puzzled by this. “I beg your pardon, sir. I thought… Never mind. ’Tis a small inn, run by the owner, Mr Timmins, and his nephew, Master John. He informs me his sister usually lives here also, but she has not been able to return from a visit to her mother since the snow began. The other guests are Mr and Mrs Ormerod, Lieutenant Carver—”
The pen fell from Darcy’s hand. He reached after it instinctively, jarred his neck, and flung himself back onto the pillows only to receive another burst of pain from the lump on his head. He held himself rigid, exasperated by debility and wheezing in agony.
Elizabeth retrieved the pen from the floor and removed the paper from his lap. “I am perfectly safe, Mr Darcy,” she said softly. “There are eight people here other than you and me, and they have all been exceedingly kind. You need not concern yourself for my well-being.”
Darcy smiled weakly but earnestly. “Good.”
Without further word, Elizabeth once more knelt on the edge of the bed and held out her arms for him. He accepted her help and allowed himself to be pulled forward. Rather than removing the extra pillow, however, she surprised him by letting go of his arms, crouching to the floor and sliding the chamber pot from beneath the bed. Had Darcy been any more alert, he would have been better able to express the extent of his mortification. As it was, all he could manage was a level stare and a vaguely disbelieving look.
“As I told you,” she said, “I am not one to shy from real life. You need my help to sit up—therefore, either I help you, or, well—” A simple shrug said all that was needed. “I shall send Master John up presently to fetch it.” She indicated the offending article with a nod. Then she reached to move the extra pillow from behind him, gave him a small smile, and left the room.
Darcy rubbed his face with both hands. Then he grabbed the nightstand as he had earlier in the day, though he stopped short of attempting to pull himself to his feet, forced to acknowledge that he could not even sit up unaided, let alone stand—had done himself untold damage attempting it once already. And what was the point in any case? They were snowed in. Even were he able to walk, he would get no farther than the front door. He had not the slightest hope of being rescued, for he had informed nobody of his intention to travel this way. He let go of the nightstand and struck it forcefully with his fist. The movement jarred his neck, and he bared his teeth in pain and vexation.
How had it come to this? The last few years had brought him more than his share of misfortunes, but never had he thought to end up bloodied and enfeebled in a dilapidated hovel with Elizabeth Bennet positioning a pot at his feet in which for him to piss. To think, when they had stayed under the same roof at Netherfield, he had considered the struggle to suppress his feelings for her the worst form of torture! He struck the nightstand again, twice, and welcomed the pain it occasioned, for he was helpless in every other respect; he may as well triumph in his despair.
Why her? He railed to himself. Why, of all the strangers in the country, must it be she with whom Fate had abandoned him in this state? And, worse than her seeing him dishevelled and unshaven, worse than his vomiting blood over her, worse than her bandaging his grotesque injury or setting the damned pot at his feet, was that she did it all with such captivating élan. He barely had the strength to see straight; how was he ever to find the strength to resist her? Even if he escaped this place alive, which he was entirely unconvinced he would do, he would never leave it unscathed. A man would need to be dead to survive such close confinement with Elizabeth and remain indifferent.
He did not have energy enough to hit the nightstand again. His anger had all been spent or smothered with fatigue. With an intolerable feeling of futility and no other recourse, he submitted to simply relieving himself as he had been instructed to do. He was asleep and sunk into dreams plagued with shame and longing before anyone returned to the room.
He slept better for having eaten. Indeed, other than occasionally bestirring himself to sip some water, Darcy did little but sleep until the sun was high in the sky the following day. He still felt sore and weak, but less confused each time he awoke. With better clarity of mind, however, came the full dawning of the seriousness of his situation, and though his recovery was naturally uppermost in his mind, other considerations soon began to intrude.
Though they had separate rooms, Elizabeth was presumably known by all at the inn to be nursing him unattended. It mattered not whether it was presumed she was a single woman or somehow entangled with him; either circumstance had the potential to wreak havoc on her reputation. His own, therefore, was in equally grave danger, for the most obvious solution was to sacrifice it and marry her.
His heart quivered staccato-like in his chest at the prospect, and he ignored it, as he had done many times before. To marry so far beneath him—into the Bennet family in particular, with its total want of either consequence or connexions—was impossible. Of this, he had already convinced himself a hundred times over. He cast his gaze about, unreasonably anxious that Elizabeth should somehow deduce his thoughts from the heat in his face. She was not there, and his folly made him cross.
Animated by vexation, he heaved himself a little farther upright and reached for the stack of writing paper sticking out over the edge of the nightstand. The pen rolled off it towards the floor, but he caught it without wrenching his neck quite as painfully as last time. Stretching to dip the pen in the ink proved less bearable, and he resolved the matter by bringing the well down from the nightstand and wedging it against the pillow atop his shoulder. Thus armed, he began furiously scribbling questions in the hope that the answers might ease his sense of helplessness—or perhaps melt the snow from the damned roads or banish the confounded feelings that flickered unobligingly in his chest at every other moment.
His efforts were to little avail, for even when an entire page of questions lay before him, he was convinced the answers to all of them would still not provide him with the level of information to which he was accustomed. Writing the list all but exhausted him, increasing his concerns for his state of health, as did the unrelenting pain in his throat occasioned by holding his head at the angle required to see what he wrote. Ignorance and weakness were two things Darcy had never tolerated well, and they, along with his growing concern for Elizabeth, began to well and truly sour his mood.
Where she was, he could not suppose. He did not think she was in her room, for the only sounds he had heard since waking were his own hoarse breathing and the odd muffled clatter from below stairs—but even if she were that close, he was powerless to discover it, for he could not call to her. He could not so much as squeak without succumbing to virulent and excruciating spasms. And if she were farther afield, what then? He would barely be able to help her were she sitting at the end of the bed—there was nothing he could do to protect her if she had been foolish enough to venture out of the inn.
His concerns were on the cusp of taking a far darker turn when Elizabeth abruptly appeared at the door from the landing. Fuelled in part by relief and in part by the worst of his fears, he dashed off another hasty question at the top of the page.
“Good day, Mr Darcy,” she greeted him, and her tone instantly trebled his concerns. She was very evidently tired and, judging by the paleness of her countenance, possibly distressed. Her attire was ruffled and muddied, proving she had ventured out of doors, yet she wore neither bonnet nor gloves. Any stable hand, vagabond, or potboy could have mistaken her for a serving girl and treated her accordingly.
“I see you are feeling much more like yourself today,” she remarked, walking across the room to put down something she had been carrying.
“Are you in good health, madam?” Darcy demanded, eager to know.
Elizabeth came closer, watching his lips as she approached him. He repeated his question, and, at length, she confirmed that she was tired but not unwell. Glancing at his list, she added, “What have you been writing that has put you in such a fine humour?”
“Questions,” he replied, though he did not feel it was an easy word to lip read and pre-empted her bewilderment by simply handing her the top sheet of paper.
