Page 15 of I Have Faults Enough

"Well, Ned. I do not think you signed on tonight expecting to end with two hostages. I think you would be rather finished with this business, and I promise you, so would we."

"Can't help ye," he said, but his eyes had gone, despite himself, to the large opening again, and to the pistol in his own hand.

Elizabeth thought the boy must be even younger than she first suspected, for the look he gave her, a sort of helplessness, made him look to be barely sixteen. How could he have ended up with this sort, she wondered. Despite her fear and anxiety, she found herself feeling more sorry than upset about the situation Ned found himself in.

It was during this reflection that Elizabeth heard Bill's cold voice rise again outside; it was sharp with alarm, as he called for Cobb. She could not hear what they discussed, but she could hear voices rising in anger.

A moment later, Cobb came through the opening, white-faced and furious, saying that there were lights moving on the road not a quarter mile off, and lanterns, and voices calling.

They all knew that clearly a search had already begun, and that Cobb would have to make a decision soon, as he had his ruffians had no more time to sit here deciding anything at all.

"Up," Cobb said, hauling Elizabeth to her feet by the arm with none of the careful consideration he had shewn her minutes before. "Both of you. We're moving, and you will not make a sound before I say you may,” he added harshly.

CHAPTER 10

Elizabeth and Darcy were bundled out of the cart and into the increasingly freezing cold night. By the conversation amongst the captors, Elizabeth had learned that lanterns that could be seen moving along the road perhaps a quarter mile off, and voices carrying thin and broken shouts across the cold air.

Elizabeth thought she could hear, for half a second, the unmistakable sound of her own name carried faint across the distance, “Miss Elizabeth,” and the sound of it, however briefly caught was quickly lost again under the wind, gave her some small, fierce hope to hold to, in a predicament that had otherwise offered her very little worth holding.

She thought the voice sounded like it might have been one of the Longbourn grooms, though it was too far off to know for certain. As the voice died down, she felt Cobb's hand closed hard over her arm and dragged her toward the trees at the barn's far side, away from the road, away from the lights, and away from anyone who might yet have found them in time.

Elizbeth very nearly screamed regardless. She felt the sound rise in her, hot and desperate, at the sound of her own name carried so near and so uselessly close, and it was only the memory of Cobb's flat warning, and her own fear that told her a scream now would end matters far more quickly than it would save them. And so, she kept her scream locked behind her teeth.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek, hard enough to taste blood, and let the pain stand in the place the sound would otherwise have cried out, and stumbled on through undergrowth she could not see, Cobb's grip still merciless on her arm.

Darcy was behind her, hands still bound, Bill's fist knotted in the back of his coat to hurry him along, and she heard, once, a low grunt behind her, catching himself against a root or a low branch he could not see to avoid. Elizabeth wanted, with a fierceness, to turn back for him and offer some arm to steady him. And yet, she could do nothing to help at all.

It was a strange realization that she saw Mr. Darcy as a source of comfort, and knowing him to be behind her, even under such circumstances, gave her something of a reassurance that she was not alone. She kept walking, dragged forward by a stranger's hand, and trusted that he kept his feet.

For some minutes there was nothing in the world but the effort of not falling on ground she could not see, and the terror of a shout rising fresh in her throat each time a voice carried through the trees, and the strange, disordered feeling that fear brings, that she should hold her tongue. It was stranger still having her senses sharpened through the ordeal.

She could smell a faint hint of tobacco on Cobb's breadth; and, she thought his coat smelled of wet wool and pipe-smoke. She noticed the way the moon, when it showed at all through the branches, lit the ground in patches too far apart to be any use for seeing by; she felt the sound of her own heart, absurdly loud, and beating more rapidly than she had ever felt before.

They did not stop until the sounds of the search had thinned to nothing behind them. They were swallowed by distance and by trees grown thick enough to close out the last of the moon, and came at last to a second shelter.

It was not a barn this time but the ruin of some old mill; its roof half fallen in, the wheel long since rotted from its axle and standing black and skeletal against what sky showed through the gap above it. Cobb pushed them both down against the driest of the walls and stood a moment, breathing hard, listening for a pursuit that did not, for the present, appear to be coming.

Elizabeth's legs, once she was permitted to stop using them, discovered all at once how little strength remained in them, and she sat harder against the stone than she had intended, and found Darcy, a moment later, lowering himself beside her, moving down slowly with his bounded hands. He moved close enough that his shoulder nearly touched hers, though neither of them closed the last small distance to make it certain.

"You are unhurt?" he whispered, very lowly, under the sound of Cobb and his men still catching their breath a few feet off.

"Unhurt," she said, nodding her head slightly in assurance. Well, it was not quite, strictly, true, as her ankle had turned once, in the dark, and ached now, but it was true enough for the moment's purpose, and she did not think either of them had leisure just then for anything less than the essential accounting. "You?"

"Well enough," he said in a grave, vexed sounding tone. She did not blame him for it, as she was vexed herself.

"That's twice tonight I've near lost the whole business to bad luck," Cobb said, when he had breath enough for it, turning back to face them, "and I'll tell you plain, I don't know as my luck holds for a third."

"Then end it," Bill said urgently, glancing toward the door. "You heard them calling her name not two hundred yards off. Whoever they are, they know where to look, and they'll keep looking till they find something, and I'd rather they found nothing at all than found the two of them able to swear to our faces in a courtroom."

"And what would you have me do with two bodies, Bill, that wouldn't want twice the digging and twice the danger?"

"I'd have you decide it, Cobb. Every hour we sit on this is an hour closer to a rope for the lot of us, and I'll not hang for a job that was meant to be plate and nothing more," Bill said unceremoniously.

It was the grey-haired man, Tam, who had been hit by Mr. Darcy and had stayed outside with the horses, and behind the group, that stirred from where he stood apart and said, quietly, that Bill was not wrong to want it settled, whatever else might be said of how he wanted it settled, for a decision deferred was still a decision, and generally the worse one.

It was here, into the pause that followed, Cobb thinking of the growing predicament, Bill's jaw working, Ned white-faced and silent by the door, his pistol held now in both hands as though the extra grip might steady something in him, that Elizabeth felt the whole situation coming to its head.

And, she knew she must do something. Elizabeth had watched her own words move Cobb once already, in the barn; she had watched Darcy's stillness deny the man any purchase. And, she did not, in the moment, consider the wisdom of speaking so much as felt the necessity of it pressing against her throat.