Page 143 of Faceless

“Are you frightened?” he murmured into her hair.

“I am a great many things at the moment. Frightened is among them.”

“It was a quiet entry. We were not noticed.”

“I know.”

“Sleep. We are away at first light. Richard will be in the yard before us.”

She nodded against his shoulder. She did not move for a few seconds, and then she stepped back and unbuttoned the front of her travelling gown with hands that did not entirely cooperate, and Darcy turned away to give her the small privacy that mattered to neither of them in any other circumstance, and she got into the bed in her shift and pulled the covers up.

He banked the fire and blew out the candle. He came to bed in his shirt with his coat folded over the chair by the bed and the pistol within reach of his hand, and she felt the bed dip and his weight come down beside her, and his arm draw her in against him under the covers. She put her face against his throat and her hand against his chest, where she could feel his pulse, and she lay there listening to him breathe.

“Fitzwilliam?”

“Mm.”

“If anything happens —”

“Sleep, Elizabeth.”

“If anything —”

“Sleep. Please. I cannot if you do not.”

She closed her eyes against his throat and made herself slow her breathing to match his, and after a long time of listening to the inn settle around them — a board creaking in the corridor, the murmur of the taproom voices growing fewer, the soft crack of the parlour fire dying through the floor — she slipped without meaning to into sleep.

She woke to a man shouting in the inn below — not a word, only the shape of a command — and a chair going over, and feet, several pairs of them at once, hard on the boards beneath her.

She turned in the bed for him without opening her eyes. Her hand went where his chest had been.

The sheet was warm. He was not in it.

She came up onto her elbow. The room was dark. The fire had burned down to embers. His coat was gone from the chair. The pistol was gone from the chest. The chamber door stood slightly open, the catch not quite caught, the way a man left a door who had wanted to slip out without the click of the latch waking his wife.

Below, the shouting continued. A voice she did not know was saying something she could not make out, and then, very clearly, cutting through the boards:

Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy.

She was out of the bed before she had decided to be. Her feet were on the cold floor, and her hand was on the door, and she was in the corridor in her shift with her hair down her back and no shoes. The back stair was three strides away in the dim, and she went down it.

She reached the half-landing when an arm came round her from behind and hauled her back off the next step so hard her feet left the floor, and a hand clamped over her mouth before the cry could leave it.

It was Richard. She had not heard him come. She had not seen him appear. He had her against him with one arm locked across her body and his hand crushed over her lips, and he was stronger than she had imagined any man being, and she could not have made a sound if her life had depended on it, and for one wild moment she fought him — twisted, pushed, tried to wrench free and go down the stair to the man whose name had just been spoken aloud in a stranger’s mouth — and Richard only tightened his hold and bore her backward into the shadow of the passage and held her there.

“What are they doing? How did they —” The colonel moved to look past her, no doubt trying to hear or see what was going on below, and she saw her opportunity. She slipped his grasp and tore free.

She had got halfway down the back stair before he caught her again, and the next step would have put her past the turn and into sight of the parlour door, which stood open.

“What the devil are you trying to do, get you both killed?” he growled under his breath. “Stay here!”

“But how did they —”

His hand clamped over her mouth again. Elizabeth’s heart was pulsing in her throat. Richard’s hand stayed over her mouth — he did not trust her to even breathe on her own — and all she could do was watch and listen. Through the gap, she could see them — three uniformed backs in a half-circle, the lieutenant in profile holding a folded paper, and beyond him, between two of the soldiers, the dark coat and the line of shoulder she would have known in any room. Darcy. Standing in his shirtsleeves and his unfastened waistcoat. Not yet in his coat. Not yet taken hold of.

She shook her head and got her mouth open.

Richard’s hand was over it before the cry left her, and his arm came round her waist and lifted her bodily off the stair, and he carried her two strides backward into the dark of the upper passage and pinned her against the wall there with the whole of his weight before she could brace herself. “Not a sound!” he hissed.