Page 25 of I Have Faults Enough

When she lowered her eyes, he said rather sternly, "You are laughing at me.”

She shook her head, still wearing a smile, and looked back up to him. "I am laughing at both of us eating sloes off a hedge like a pair of vagrants. Do you know, a week ago, I do not think either of us could have imagined any circumstance in the whole entire world that would bring us to it."

He let a slow exhale move through his nose and out. "A week ago.” His tone had a tinge of sarcasm. "I do not think either of us could have imagined a great many things that have happened to us." As he replied to her, something in the gravity of his eyes, as he looked into her own, made her look away first, busying her hands with another handful of the sour fruit.

After stopping a few moments to attempt, as they could, to swallow the sour meal, they moved onward.

Toward the middle of the day, they reached a cold stream, shallow enough to cross without incident, and Darcy, examining its bank, discovered a place where the mud held the fresh, unmistakable print of a deer's passage, and further along, half-hidden under a fallen branch, a scatter of hazelnuts some squirrel's hoard had spilled and not yet reclaimed.

The find was another hidden mercy, and it occupied a careful quarter hour of both their attentions, cracking the shells between two stones and dividing the meagre result with a scrupulous fairness that struck Elizabeth, watching him count out the halves, with a small kind of tenderness.

"You need not divide them so exactly," she said. "I do not think either of us will begrudge the other an extra mite of a nut."

"No, madam, neither of us will receive the shorter. I own it is a small thing, but I find I care about it a great deal, as we are both hungry and in need of some sort of sustenance.”

She did not press him more, and took her exact half with a slightly teasing gravity, and found herself more than grateful for the small bounty they had received.

The afternoon brought harder going; there was a stretch of boggy ground that took them the better part of an hour to cross safely, her ankle protesting every step, until Darcy, without asking leave, decided to gather her up bodily where the ground grew worst and carried her the last dozen yards to firmer footing, setting her down again with care. Though, when he straightened, it was clear to her that the effort had hurt his own battered ribs considerably more.

"You need not have done that," she said, breathless with surprise, as his strong arms released her from his grasp.

"I would rather bear the discomfort than watch you injure that ankle further. I for one, Miss Bennet, have survived considerably worse than carrying a woman across a bog this week.” He said, in a tone determined to be correct, while still holding out his arm, to offer it, in the event she needed it.

She laughed at this speech, and let her hand rest a moment against his arm; neither seemed inspired to comment on it, and before too long, they continued on.

It was toward evening, the light beginning to fail and neither of them any nearer a landmark they could name, that they came upon a shepherd's hut. It was small and rough but sound, tucked into the lee of a low rise with its door standing unlatched and its single room offering, blessedly, a stack of dry bracken meant for bedding, clearly set aside for some person's use.

Fortunately, Darcy noticed a bit of cold ash in the small, rough stone hearth. He determined it needed only the striking of a spark, and he made to work to light it, so they would not be too cold.

Having walked all day with relative sunshine, their clothes were less damp, but they were still cold, and Darcy was determined to ensure they passed the night in some degree of comfort, if only from the bracken and the kindling of a fire on a small hearth.

Darcy first helped Elizabeth arrange the bracken as best the small room allowed, and settled into it together as the light failed outside the single unglazed window. Next, Darcy worked his flint until finally procured a light, which after a few tries, drew a small ember, and eventually the cold ash took. There were a few wood pieces meant for the flame, and he threw one into the hearth to burn.

He returned to where their bedding was laid out, and Elizabeth, exhausted past the reach of any further conversation, felt Darcy's arm come round her with the same matter-of-fact necessity it had found the night before. She let herself sleep properly, her head against his shoulder, and his hand resting, still and warm, over hers.

The whole day's hard-won small kindnesses settled into something very unlike anything she had ever before called gratitude. Elizabeth was entirely thankful, in that moment, that Mr. Darcy was with her, and that he took it upon himself to take care of her. Bless him, she told herself, as she slowly drifted off into sleep.

***

She woke before he did, in the grey half-light of the shepherd's hut, and lay a moment without moving, conscious first of the ache in every limb of their time in the river, and the day's walking; and second, more slowly, of the particular warmth of him at her back, his arm still loose across her waist where sleep had settled it sometime in the night, his breathing slow and even against her hair.

She did not move to wake him. She lay instead in a stillness she found she did not much wish to end. She was a woman who had taken account of his every act as proof of his selfish disdain and endless series of faults. And yet, that same woman felt, this morning, like she was comfortable, safe, and altogether grateful to be wrapped up in his warm embrace.

It was difficult to reconcile who she thought Mr. Darcy was with the man she had been living and surviving with for the last few days. He had always been so proud and spared his good opinion. However, Elizabeth reflected on how Mr. Darcy, had, as of late, been more than courteous, he had been kind. Always looking to ensure she was safe and cared for, from giving up his coat without being asked for, the ankle inquired after before she thought to mention it herself.

He also somehow managed to ensure she felt the larger share of the fire's warmth, again and again, somehow ensuring that her body was in front of the fire rather than his own. She could not point to any single instance of it and call it remarkable. It was dozens of little things, when she thought of them together, found that he was by and large, a very different man than the one she knew in Hertfordshire.

Darcy woke, eventually, and she felt him go still behind her as memory returned, and then, gentler, the slight tightening of his arm that told her he had found his bearings and was glad that she was still there.

She did not move at once, though she was entirely awake, and had been for some minutes, lying with her eyes closed and her mind in a state she could not properly have described to anyone, least of all herself.

Elizabeth was aware of the warmth of him at her back, of his arm loose across her waist, of the small, unremarkable fact that she had slept better in that position than she had slept for a long time, and of a rising, formless panic that had nothing to do with river, or robbers, or the whole considerable danger they had only just escaped, and everything to do with the fact of a man's arm around her and the more alarming fact that she did not quite wish it to be removed.

This realization concerned her more than the river had. The river, at least, she had understood. She had known what to be frightened of, and how to be frightened of it, and had gone about the business of surviving it without any particular confusion as to her own feelings on the subject.

This was different. She could not have said, lying there, whether she was embarrassed, or something considerably warmer than embarrassed, or some entirely new sensation that borrowed the symptoms of both and answered to neither name properly.

Her face was hot. Her heart was behaving with a want of discipline she found genuinely offensive in a woman who prided herself on her own good sense. And beneath both of these, some small, treacherous portion of her mind was occupied entirely with the question of how long she might reasonably continue lying exactly as she was before propriety, or hunger, or the plain necessity of the day ahead, obliged her to move.