Page 28 of When Elizabeth's Cat Chose Darcy
“Miss Bennet.” She greeted me with the warmth one reserves for a bad debt that has turned up at a party. “What are you doing here?”
“Walking, Miss Bingley. It is, as I understand, what one does when one prefers not to fall off a horse. What did you hurt?”
“My ankle,” she replied tersely.
I knelt, not that I wanted to, but it was the right thing to do. “May I see it?”
“You may not,” Caroline snapped. “Where is that gig my brother went to fetch? The sun is unbearable, and I shall be freckled beyond recognition.”
“Then we will need to walk back to the house, as there are no trees out here in the field. Can you stand?”
Caroline’s lips thinned into a line of displeasure. “I can stand. It is the walking that presents the difficulty.”
“Then we shall carry you.”
The look Caroline gave me at this announcement—traveling from my face to Georgiana’s face to the freshly plowed October mud between Netherfield and us—was the look of a woman doing rapid, unfavorable arithmetic.
“You cannot be serious,” she protested. “I will not be dragged like a sack of grain.”
“I’m afraid the gig would be stuck in this mud before it reached you. Perhaps a donkey would have been more practical, but the moment for that particular arrangement has unfortunately passed.”
“Miss Bingley,” Georgiana said, her voice small but steady. “We ought to try. The ground is cold, and if we wait here, the ankle will swell further. My brother’s physician always says elevation and warmth, and neither is available in this field.”
Caroline shifted on her seat in the mud and attempted to flick dung off her riding habit. Flies buzzed, landing on her, and her skin was already blotching, reddening alarmingly.
“Very well,” she said, extending her arms with the imperious grace of a woman accepting a hand into a barouche rather than being hauled off the ground by the younger sister of a man she pinned her hat for and a woman she had no use for.
We lifted her, or rather, Georgiana lifted her right side with the advantage of being nearly Caroline’s height, and I lifted her left side with the disadvantage of being five inches shorter, which meant that Caroline’s arm lay across my shoulders at an angle that put my face level with her armpit. She smelled of horse, mud, sheep, and jasmine toilet water, this last ingredient notably failing at its assignment.
“Lean on me,” I said through my teeth.
“I am leaning on you. You are shorter than expected.”
“I am precisely the height I have always been. It is your expectations that require adjustment.” I braced my feet and took a step. Georgiana matched me on the other side, and Caroline, suspended between us, hopped on her good foot with the reluctant, ungainly progress of a woman who understood that dignity was no longer available.
We managed perhaps twenty yards before she announced that she required a rest.
“Already?” I adjusted my grip, which had been slipping down Caroline’s waist toward her hip in a manner that would have scandalized Mrs. Bennet, who believed that physical contact between unmarried women should be limited to the linking of arms and the pressing of hands.
“My ankle is in considerable pain, Miss Bennet, and your pace is not helping.”
“My pace,” I retorted, unable to keep the edge from my voice, “is the pace of a woman carrying someone across a field. If you would prefer a sedan chair and four liveried footmen, I regret that Hertfordshire has failed to extend to such luxuries.”
Georgiana made a sound—half cough, half something else—and turned her face away so that Caroline could not see it. Caroline did not respond, although the pressure of her arm across my shoulders increased in a way that might have been an involuntary spasm of pain or a very controlled attempt to strangle me by degrees. Her riding habit trailed through the mud behind us like the train of a very orange and now brown wedding gown.
We paused our journey after a mere twenty minutes, not only due to Caroline’s injured ankle but also because I had discovered that bearing a woman five inches taller than oneself across uneven terrain was akin to translating Homer—a task both Herculean and seemingly interminable. With gentle care, I eased Caroline onto a grassy bank beside the path, where Georgiana promptly joined her. From this vantage point, we were afforded a view of the western fields—the very ones whose drainage would have a direct impact on Longbourn’s lower fields.
“What are they doing over there?” Georgiana asked.
“Digging a channel,” I replied. “I believe Mr. Darcy is overseeing it to divert the water from the waterlogged fields above. Do you see where the channel leads?”
Georgiana studied the terrain with more attention than I hadexpected—the girl was not unintelligent, merely inexperienced, and something in my tone had alerted her to the fact that this was not a lesson in geography but an observation with consequences. “It slopes… southward?”
“Southward. Past the boundary stream and into the lower fields of the next estate.” I paused. “My father’s estate.”
Georgiana’s eyes widened. “You mean the water will?—”
“Go where water goes, which is downhill, into the winter wheat field where our tenants are ploughing at this very moment.”
