Page 27 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
CHAPTER NINE
CAROLINE COMING AROUND THE MUD
Elizabeth
“Lizzy!”Georgiana’s voice carried over the squelching sounds of boots slipping through the mud. She reached me—hatless, her riding habit spattered with mud to the waist, and her dark hair coming loose from its pins in a way that Darcy’s programme of improvement would most certainly disapprove of.
She caught my hands, breathless. “Miss Bennet. Caroline fell. She dismounted, but her foot caught, and she twisted her ankle. Then her horse shied, and Mr. Bingley rode off for help. And I didn’t tie the horses, and now they’re gone.”
“Georgiana.” I held her arms steady and looked into eyes so like her brother’s that it constituted a small, personal inconvenience. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. “But the horses.”
“Are on their way back to the stable and their oats, but how is Caroline?”
“She’s hurt,” she said, her voice wavering. “But she’s still alive.”
“That’s good to know, I suppose.” Fortifying myself for the messof broken bones, I held Georgiana by the hand as if she were a baby Lydia and led her toward the bright-orange riding habit sprawled on the muddy, freshly plowed field.
My heart was hammering hard enough to hear, and the closer we drew, the more my imagination supplied—a leg bent at an impossible angle, blood gushing from a gaping wound, a collarbone sticking out of her neck, and perhaps, a ghastly gash across her skull or worse.
The wind corrected this impression before we arrived.
“—absolutely criminal, a rabbit hole the size of a crater! I shall have words with whoever is responsible for maintaining this wasteland. And my habit is utterly beyond salvage—if you think for one moment that I intend to sit in this filth while Charles takes his own sweet time?—”
I shook my head and turned to Georgiana, who was still gripping my hand with the intensity of a girl imagining the worst.
“Fear not. She will recover. Nobody with a truly serious injury possesses that volume or that vocabulary.”
Georgiana giggled, her face flushed and open. “Mr. Bingley told her not to dismount. Said we should stay on our horses.”
“A wise decision, no doubt, but sisters rarely heed their brother’s warnings, do they?”
A flicker crossed her face—quickly suppressed, not quickly enough. “I heed my brother’s warnings. Nearly all of them.”
Nearly. I tucked the word away like a coin found in a pocket.
“Caroline was the one who insisted we stop,” Georgiana continued. “She wanted to admire the view. She said the prospect from this slope was the only tolerable feature of the entire county.”
“How generous of her.”
“She says things like that quite often. I have not yet determined whether she means them or whether she enjoys the sound of her disdain.”
This was, I reflected, the most perceptive thing I had heard Georgiana say in days, and I rewarded it with the only currency Ihad—honesty. “A question I have asked about many people, Miss Darcy, and the answer is almost always both.”
We were close enough now to see the full picture. Caroline sat upright in the mud with one leg extended, and her hands pressed flat against the earth as though the field owed her a personal apology, which, in fairness, it rather did.
“Should I have stayed with her?” Georgiana asked, quieter now. “Mr. Bingley said to stay put, but she was—she was crying, Lizzy, and I thought if I could reach the lane, someone would see me.”
“You did exactly right.” I squeezed her hand. “You went for help. That is what sensible people do.”
“Fitzwilliam would say I should have stayed.”
“Your brother is not here, and I am, and I say you were brave.” I caught her eye and held it. “You dismounted to help her and ran across a field alone. Those are not the actions of a girl who needs to be told what to do.”
“What do we do now?” she asked, although a smile briefly flitted across her face from my words.
Then Caroline spotted us.
