Page 16

“I…? Wicks, sir! I’m from the Crown.”

Darcy cut him short. “Wicks, take my horse. You see that road? That is the road to Westerham. There is a surgeon in the High Street called Haslam. You will ride there as hard as that animal will go, and you will tell him a man’s leg is crushed and he is to bring a cart and splints and laudanum.”

The man stumbled over his words and hesitated.

Darcy urged him to move. “Get a chart, splints, and laudanum. Go!”

Wicks took the stable-lad by the collar and, more or less, threw him into the saddle. The black horse, which had no great opinion of strangers, laid back its ears, and for a moment Darcy thought it would unseat him. Then it was gone, up the hill in a spray of stones, and Darcy turned to the wreck, stripped off his coat, and went down on his knees in the dirt.

He noticed rather quickly that it was a bad leg. Though, Darcy had seen worse; there had been a quarry at Pemberley, in his father’s time, and a winter when a cart of stone went through the ice. The iron had gone across the thigh just above the knee. The man was grey-white and wet with sweat, and had stopped crying out, which was a bad sign. He stared at Darcy with the glassy bright eyes of the very frightened.

“I am going to move this,” said Darcy. “And it will hurt. I need you to not move. Do you understand?”

The man grimaced, but he nodded.

Darcy got his shoulder under the frame, and set his boots, and heaved. It was a great weight. Something in his back made a noise like a stick breaking, and the cords stood out in his neck, and he thought, with an odd, remote clarity, if this slips, it will take the leg off; and then the thing moved, an inch, and another, and he slid the man out sideways by the shoulders with the foam of his own breath on his teeth and let the wreck drop. It hit the gravel with a crash that set the baby shrieking afresh.

Darcy had a better look just then. The leg was clearly broken, and badly. But the blood was not coming in spurts, and he thanked God for that in the part of his mind that did not shake.

He took out his knife and cut the man’s breeches open to the hip, and was working a bar from the broken gate-post under the thigh with his own cravat for a binding, when he became aware that someone had come down the road and was standing at the edge of the gravel.

He did not look up for a good thirty seconds, which was a mercy of a kind, for when he did, and saw who it was, his hands stopped altogether.

Elizabeth Bennet stood with a basket on her arm and her bonnet in her hand. She had evidently run. Her hair had come loose, and there was colour in her face, and she was looking, with an expression he could not interpret, at the wreck, the woman, the children, the mud to his elbows and the blood to his wrists, and, last of all, at him.

He had no coat, and his waistcoat was ruined. His shirt was soaked through, and torn at the shoulder, and he had a smear of something dark along his jaw. He was on his knees in a ditch with his knife in his teeth. He took it out.

“Miss Bennet,” he said, directly, “the child’s mother is in a bad way. The little one is hurt. I do not know how badly. I cannot leave this.”

He saw Elizabeth take it in, and saw her understand what it meant. She set down the basket, and was gone from his sight, and he bent his head again to the man’s leg and heard her voice at the roadside, low and steady, cutting through the wailing like a knife through cloth.

“Madam. Madam, listen to me. Look at me. My name is Elizabeth. Is that your little girl? What is her name?”

He had not known that she could do that. She went down on her knees in the road in her good muslin and took the five-year-old into her own lap, and did something with a handkerchief that made the shrieking drop to a sob; and she kept up, all the while, a quiet unhurried stream of talk, about nothing, about the little dog at home and the pony and the great big crow on the fence, until the mother’s face began to loosen and she looked at the baby as if she had just that moment remembered it.

“He is very strong,” said Elizabeth, over her shoulder, to the mother, in a clear brisk voice. “Mr. Darcy has his leg quite safe, and there is a surgeon coming from Westerham with a cart. It will not be long. Can you tell me your husband’s name?”

“Eames,” said the woman, in a harsh whisper. “John.”

“Mr. Eames,” said Elizabeth, and Darcy, on his knees in the ditch, found that he was listening to her say it with an absurd and total attention, as if it were the only word in the language. “He is going to be well looked after. Will you hold the baby for me? Thank you.”

What happened over the next hour he could never afterward put in order. Darcy remembered the sun going lower, and the long shadows of the elms laid across the road like bars. He remembered the man Eames coming back to himself, in pieces, white and shaking and apologising for the trouble; and Elizabeth bringing him water in a flask from her basket, and kneeling to hold his head while Darcy tied off the splint, her hands steady under his. He remembered that they had spoken, perhaps, ten words to each other in all that time, and every one of them practical.

Hold that. Higher. Not so tight. Here. It was the oddest thing he had ever done. They worked as two people work who have been doing it for years. If he reached, she was already there. If she needed something held, he held it.

Her small hands, cool and quick, were in and out of his own all afternoon, and he did not once feel them as a presence, only as an extension of his intention, a part of the task, as natural and unremarked as breathing.

He thought, once, quite clearly, I have never in my life been so well assisted. And once, when the man cried out, and Darcy swore through his teeth, and she looked up at him with her eyes wide and her mouth twitching, and said, “Mr. Darcy, there are children,” he had very nearly laughed.

They had no differences that afternoon. It was a thing he could not account for. He was hard, and she was soft; he was impatient, and she patient; he gave orders and she gave comfort; and instead of striking against each other, as they had done from the first hour of their acquaintance, these opposites slid together like the two halves of a hinge. She calmed what he could not. He moved what she could not. Between them, in a muddy ditch on the Westerham road, a family held together.

The surgeon came at five, in a farm cart with a quantity of straw, and Wicks the stable-lad riding behind with the black horse in a lather and an expression of unholy pride. Mr. Haslam was a small, brisk, silent man with a bag, who knelt, and looked, and said to Darcy, without lifting his head, “Who put the splint on?”

Darcy replied gravely, “I did.”

“It will do,” said Mr. Haslam, which from a surgeon is a sonnet.

They lifted Eames into the cart, with the wife and the two children, and the little girl, who had attached herself with a limpet’s tenacity to Elizabeth’s skirt, had to be gently untwined. It took a good while. When it was over, and the cart had rumbled off up the hill in the long gold light with the rest of the wreck abandoned behind it, they found themselves alone upon the road.