Page 12 of I Have Faults Enough

But he could not sit in that drawing-room, with Sir William's voice rising again somewhere behind him and Mrs. Bennet's laughter carrying from the card table, and let the last word between them stand exactly as it had been left; both of them cruel, both of them accurate, and neither of them, he suspected, entirely finished, without at least the attempt to say something further, though he could not himself, crossing the terrace into the dark garden beyond it, have said with any confidence what that something was to be. Meanwhile, Caroline, watching the situation, was momentarily stopped by her housekeeper, who was distressed about some matter of their downstairs servants, forcing Caroline to follow her out of the room and down the hall.

The night had turned colder than the evening of the larger party, the mildness of that earlier week having given way at last to a sharper, more seasonable chill, and the gardens, when he came into them, were darker than he remembered; the moon not yet risen, but he could just make out, ahead of him on the gravel walk, the pale shape of her gown moving toward the yew screen and the working garden beyond it, toward the lane he had not, until that moment, had any particular occasion to think of at all.

"Miss Bennet," he called, low, not wishing to summon the whole house to witness whatever was about to pass between them. "Miss Bennet, a word." She did not stop moving, and so he finally called out, “Elizabeth!” in a tone that indicated he requested she halt.

It was the first time he had used her name aloud in her hearing, and even in the dark, even at that distance, he saw her stop.

CHAPTER 8

She stopped, feeling quite alarmed at the use of her name, so intimately spoken from his lips. While she stopped, she would not turn around, determined not give him the luxury of seeing her spent from their heated exchange.

"I have had the whole of what I came out for," she said, to the dark hedge in front of her rather than to him. "You need not follow me to finish it."

"I am not come to finish it." He had closed half the distance between them, his boots loud on the gravel in a silence that seemed, all at once, very complete; the noise of the house behind them gone thin and far off, swallowed by the yew screen he had passed through. "I could not let it stand as it was left. That is the whole of my errand."

"Then perhaps you might have waited patiently until I returned, rather than run me down in the garden,” she said accusingly, still looking towards the hedge.

"I have waited a great deal already, Miss Bennet." He bit out, then stopped some feet from her, near enough that she could see, even in the poor light, the set of his shoulders, if she would only turn to look ar him.

She did not answer at once. Only stayed in place, staring out into the silence of the cold garden, everything unresolved between them still hanging in the air, charged and quite unfinished, when she heard a sound from across the way.

Elizabeth heard it again, a low scrape of wood against stone, quickly muffled. She could not help but turn toward the sound, distracted for a moment from everything that had passed between them by its sheer strangeness, half wondering whether some servant of the house stood near enough to have overheard the whole of their quarrel.

The thought brought with it, close upon its heels, a sudden and acute consciousness of the impropriety of their situation; she and Mr. Darcy alone in a dark garden, at an hour when neither had any proper business being there, and she very nearly said as much aloud, before the thought was driven entirely from her mind by what came after.

Elizabeth turned all the more, seeking to determine the source of the noise, when she saw Mr. Darcy’s eyes fixed on the dark screen of yew between them and whatever lay beyond it. There was a murmur beneath the scrape now, low voices, more than one, and Mr. Darcy moved an inch closer to have a better look at the situation not far off from where they stood.

She heard the voices subtly speaking, and beneath it the unmistakable murmur of more than one man's voice, pitched too low for words and entirely wrong for the hour, and wrong, too, for the direction it came from, which was not the kitchen door with its ordinary evening traffic but the stillroom and the stores beyond it, dark now, the household's business there long since concluded for the night.

Elizabeth went still, and then quickly flinched, as Darcy's hand came out and closed around her arm, not roughly, but suddenly and seriously. "Stay here," he said, very low, and then released her, and turned, and began to move toward the sound with the effort of a man who did not wish to be heard.

She did not stay, as she had never in her life been given to staying where she was told, and that habit, on this particular night, very nearly cost them both everything; but in the moment she thought only that she would not be left standing alone in a dark garden while he walked toward whatever the sound portended, and she followed him, quiet as she could manage in skirts never designed for stealth, to the gap in the yew where the working garden opened out before them.

There was more moon now than there had been minutes before, a thin cold sliver come clear of the cloud, and by its light she saw, before her mind had properly assembled what she was seeing, three men at the stillroom door.

One crouched at the lock with some tool, one stood back with a sack already half filled slung across his shoulder, and a third turned half away, toward the lane beyond the garden's rear gate, where a fourth figure held the heads of two dark horses harnessed to a low cart drawn up close against the hedge.

She understood, in perhaps two seconds, that this was not any ordinary household disturbance, and in the third second, before she had finished understanding it, the man at the lock looked up. She let out a gasp, and Mr. Dary turned to see her, not ten feet behind him.

The man saw them both plainly. There was no mistaking the fact of it; his head came round, and stopped, and for one suspended instant the whole tableau held perfectly still, four men and two witnesses regarding one another across twenty feet of moonlit kitchen garden, and Elizabeth felt, in that instant, a cold quite unlike the evening's chill settle into her, for she understood exactly what had just been made irreversible.

"The deuce!" Exclaimed the man at the lock, low and vicious, straightening. "They've seen us."

"Gentry," said the one with the sack, already backing toward the gate. "Look at them. That's Netherfield's own gentry, that is, out walking of a night!"

"Doesn't matter whose they are, they've seen us, they can put a name to this house and a face to the lot of us before the constable's had his breakfast."

Darcy had already began to move to her side, his arm returning and tightening on Elizabeth's arm, pulling her back toward the yew and the lit windows beyond it. "Go," he said, low and urgent, no trace left in his voice of anything that had passed between them minutes before. "Now! Run, quickly, back toward the."

He did not finish it. The man who had spoken of the constable was already moving, fast, cutting across the garden's width to close the gap before they could reach the screen, and behind him the other two abandoned whatever remained of their original purpose entire, the sack dropped where it stood, all three converging with the particular speed of men who risked the certainty of the noose.

"Don't scream." The foremost one said, low and fast, closing the last of the distance before either Darcy or Elizabeth had gone three steps. "Don't scream and nothing happens to you, but you're not walking back into that house to point us out to every magistrate in the county, so you can just."

Darcy put himself between the man and Elizabeth with speed and struck out instantly. She heard the blow land, heard the man's breath go out of him in a grunt, but there were three of them and the odds resolved themselves with brutal efficiency, one man seizing Darcy's arms from behind while another drove a fist into his stomach that folded him half over, and she was screaming now, or trying to, before a broad rough hand closed over her mouth from behind and a voice close against her ear told her that she had best be quiet if she valued her own skin, for he had no particular wish to hurt a lady but would do what the night required regardless.

She fought back. She had driven an elbow back hard enough to earn a curse, had twisted against the arm locked round her waist, but the hand across her mouth did not loosen, and beyond it she could see Darcy still struggling, blood at his lip, three men's worth of weight bearing down to keep him from breaking free, and one of them saying, “There’s no time for this! The cart; get them to the cart, before some fool servant comes out to see what the noise is!”

"You cannot!" she got out, the hand slipping for half a word before it clamped down again, "...my family will know, they will search!"