Page 15 of Not Without Me, Miss Elizabeth

Rain still fell in scattered drops from the trees above, pattering into the puddles that had gathered across the clearing. She could hear the footsteps splash in the mud and come to a stop near her.

"Up with you," a man barked, hauling Mr. Darcy roughly to his feet. Elizabeth gave a small cry as she too was pulled upward, her sodden clothes heavy and awkward as she was set upon her feet. Once both stood steady, their captors pushed them forward, directing their steps as they pleased. Mr. Darcy realised, before long, that he was being led in a direction quite different from Elizabeth's own.

"Where are you taking Miss Elizabeth?" he demanded, his voice carrying further than was wise.

"Never you mind. We ain't doin' nothin' to yer lady." The man's tone held the lazy contempt of someone who knew precisely how little his prisoner could do about it.

"Do not touch her!" Darcy spit out, sharp as a blade.

"You don't tell me what I can and cannot do, d'ye hear? I'm the one tellin'you, and you'd do well to remember it." A shove punctuated the words, driving Darcy forward a stumbling step.

"If any harm comes to Miss Elizabeth, I will see you flayed alive." Darcy expressed, sounding livid.

"Ho! Flay us, will you!" The man's laugh was short and ugly. "You'rethe one trussed up like a Christmas goose, sir. I'd mind my own skin, was I you."

Be silent, you foolish, foolish man,she thought in growing fear. Elizabeth heard each of Mr. Darcy’s threats like a blow to her own chest, dread pooling somewhere beneath her ribs. He was the one bound, hands useless behind his back, utterly at these men's mercy, and there was nothing in the world so likely to invite a villain's cruelty as forbidding it outright, as though pride alone might substitute for power. She held her own tongue, though it cost her something fierce to do it, however desperately she longed to beg him to stop.

At length the pushing ceased, and a pair of arms closed about hers, guiding her down into a crouch before releasing her rather abruptly from the shoulders. She landed, fortunately, upon ground not so very muddy, and without much hurt, the drop being slight. She felt the rough bark of a tree at her back, and allowed herself to lean into it, her bound hands brushing against a soft cushion of moss along its base.

Through the small holes in the sack she could still make out daylight, and the vague green of the surrounding wood. Her face, at least, no longer lay in the mud. But she could not keep her thoughts from turning toward what might come next.

Will they kill us?She put the thought from her mind at once, as there was no profit in dwelling on it. Elizabeth was determined to do what she could to endure, and to escape.I must survive this.

"We move at sundown," Wickham announced to the men nearby, and a chorus of assent followed. One of them, a man with a faint Welsh lilt to his voice, Elizabeth thought, called out toward the prisoners, "And if either of you so much as makes a sound, we'll shoot the lady first." The threat was delivered plainly, without heat, which somehow made it worse.

She could not tell whether it was meant only to silence Mr. Darcy, or whether the man was in earnest, but she trembled all the same upon hearing it.

Hold your tongue, Mr. Darcy,she pleaded silently, dreading that his temper might place her squarely in the path of that threat. Where were they to be taken at sundown?Lord, help us.

One thing, at least, she understood with terrible clarity, her father's search, whenever it began, would not find them before they were moved on.

The men, meanwhile, passed the intervening hours in conversation of the most ordinary kind, cards, past travels, a favourite recipe for mince pie, as though nothing at all were amiss. It struck Elizabeth as almost grotesque, to hear such commonplace talk carried on so near where she sat bound to a tree, soaked through, while her captors spoke as if she were not there at all. There was something in it nearly comical, and something else besides, a strange testimony to how easily the ordinary and the monstrous could sit side by side in the same men, on the same afternoon.

She thought of the soldiers whose crimes she had read of in the papers, and found herself now living some version of the very accounts that had so troubled her only weeks before, with no notion how her own story was to end. She resolved to be a model prisoner, docile, compliant even, in the hope of earning some small measure of goodwill, particularly after Mr. Darcy's outburst had done so much to set the men against them both.

Elizabeth could sense the sun beginning its slow decline, though dusk, in the long days of summer, remained a good while off yet. She had eaten nothing since the night before, and hunger gnawed at her now that fear had loosened its grip a little.

She felt, too, a growing and increasingly urgent need, and after some half hour spent gathering her courage, called out, uncertain quite where her captors stood. "Excuse me, I must ask to relieve myself."

"What's that?" a voice returned.

"I must relieve myself, sir," she said again, louder, forcing the words out past her own humiliation, hoping only to be granted some small measure of privacy for the office.

"I beg your pardon; whatever do you mean?"

"Do yer business right where ye stand."

"Here?" The word came out smaller than she intended, mortification closing over her like water.

"Aye, here, or back to where ye sat, and no privacy at all."

Footsteps withdrew a little way around the tree, unhurried, entirely unconcerned, and Elizabeth, judging she could delay no longer, crouched down in the dead leaves and did what she must, her hands trembling, her skirts drawn about her as best she could manage with her wrists still bound, praying the fabric gave her some small covering against whatever eyes might yet be watching.

Once finished, she rose and struggled to right herself, her fingers clumsy with cold and shame both. She had once, on a solitary walk, found herself in similar necessity, and had sought the shelter of a thick hedge with something very near amusement at her own predicament, a small, private joke to carry home and never tell a soul. This was nothing like that occasion. She was entirely undone, burning with a shame so complete she could feel it in her throat, in her chest, in the roots of her hair, and found herself, for once in her life, grateful for the sack over her head, which spared her at least the sight of any face that might have witnessed it.

The footsteps returned before she was properly steadied, and her arms were seized once more, drawn back toward the moss-covered tree where she had first been made to sit.

CHAPTER 10