Then the leg went.
“Elizabeth—”
He was there before the wall could take her a second time, one arm around her back, the other under her good elbow. He brought her upright with the swiftness of a man who had imagined this need more often in the preceding week than he was prepared to admit to any living soul.
She cried out again against his coat—a small broken sound she had plainly tried to keep to herself and failed—and her face pressed briefly against his shoulder before she remembered to resist it.
“Forgive me,” he said, very low. He did not know what he was asking forgiveness for. He only knew he could not have held her without saying it. “Forgive me—stand as still as you are able. Let the pain through.”
Her breath, jarred, came unevenly against his coat, and each time she drew it a small sound caught in her throat that she mastered before it could become a word. One of her hands had closed, apparently without consulting her, in the cloth at his shoulder. “Let me go!”
“I cannot.”
“Mr Darcy—”
“Elizabeth, I cannot. You will go down if I let go of you, and you are already bleeding into the dressings. Stand. Only stand.”
“I am standing.”
“You areheld upright.”
She did not answer that. He did not let her. She tried once more to straighten wholly away from him.
The wound answered with a hot pull he could trace through the arm at her back, and this time the sound she made was not small. It was the sound a woman made when she had been bearing something beyond bearing for the last hour and had at last been required to bear it a measure more.
“Enough!”
His voice dropped again at once, but what remained in it was no longer command. It was strain barely mastered, and fear barely mastered, and something beneath both that he was not prepared, in this lane, to put a name to.
“Enough. Do not punish yourself because I have seen you fail.”
She looked up at him. Her face, at that distance and for that length of time, he would be unable afterwards to put out of his mind.
“You should let me go,” she said. “If anyone sees—”
“Hadley has seen. He is at present too occupied with the bank to care how I bring you in. If the village sees, let the village see I have more sense than to leave an injured woman in a lane out of misplaced delicacy.”
“You do not understand.”
“Then make me understand.” The words came lower and harsher than he meant them, the words of a man offering rescue and asking, at last, not to be made a fool in the act of giving it.
She looked away from him toward the turn of the lane she had not reached.
“I cannot.”
His face hardened then. Not into cruelty. Into the narrower reserve that came to him whenever truth was withheld where he had asked plainly.
“No,” he said. “That, I think, has become evident.”
He bent—the movement so swift she barely protested before he lifted her. One arm behind her shoulders, the other under her knees above the wound. She clutched his coat because not clutching meant falling. The blue cloak slipped partly open. Cold air struck the bandage where the dampness had begun to show.
She was sobbing now. He had not seen her cry since Aldridge brought his bone saw. “Put me down!”
“No.”
One fist beat weakly on his shoulder. “I shall hate you.”
“You may do it indoors.”
