Page 35 of The Blackmail of Mr. Darcy
Elizabeth shuddered as she contemplated if she should attempt to further incapacitate the man. But the colonel’s voice booming out from the window above and the sounds of someonehastening towards them made her turn her attention outward. In relief, she realised that Mr. Darcy had arrived.
She felt much safer, but she shifted her eyes back to the man on the ground, and she saw that he was taking a pistol out of his pocket.
“Pistol!” she cried.
Mr. Darcy plucked the stick from her hand and swung it hard against the man’s hand—and the weapon?—
The noise of the pistol’s discharge was extremely sharp, extremely loud. Elizabeth keened, certain that Mr. Darcy had been shot.
But time seemed to slow down as Elizabeth saw that Mr. Darcy was now blocking her view of the man with his body, possibly in an attempt to protect her from any bullets flying about.
A thousandth of a second later, she noticed that the only part of the man-who-might-be-Mr.-Wickham that was still visible to her was one of the man’s legs. It jerked and then went still.
A split second later, she realised that Mr. Darcy didnotdrop to the ground in agony, nor did he surge back against her with the impact of a bullet. She supposed—she hoped—that he had not been shot, after all.
And a fraction of a second after that, she found herself in Mr. Darcy’s arms. “Are you well? Are you injured?” he asked several times before she could get any words out of her mouth.
“I am well,” she assured him. “And you?”
He clutched her even more closely to his chest, and she heard his heart’s frenetic pace. He breathed in audibly and then said softly, “I am better now.”
Mr. Darcy straightened up and stepped back from the embrace. She looked towards the man, but Mr. Darcy was still shielding her view. She asked, “Is that Mr. Wickham?”
“ItwasMr. Wickham,” he responded.
They heard Jane calling to them from the window, and Elizabeth stepped where she could see her sister. “We are not injured; we are well!” she called.
“Thank God for that,” came the colonel’s deeper voice. He was hurrying around the tree and came to a stop, apparently astonished at the identity of the housebreaker, or the result of the gunfire, or both.
“Wickham???”
“Colonel Fitzwilliam, are my sister and Georgiana still locked in their rooms?” Elizabeth asked. “Georgie must be sick with worry.”
He responded, “A maid was just running up the stairs with a ring full of keys as I was running down. They should be free by now.”
Elizabeth got confirmation of that statement just a moment later, when Georgiana ran around the corner and flung herself at her brother. Mr. Darcy likely wished to shield her from seeing Wickham’s body even more than he wished to protect Elizabeth from the sight; at any rate, he scooped up Georgiana and said, “Miss Elizabeth, please come inside with us.” He strode out of the shrubbery, past the tree.
Turning her eyes to Mr. Wickham, Elizabeth saw enough blood to convince her to immediately look away and follow the Darcys into the house. Of course, she then raced up to be with Jane.
Her sister certainly could not stay in a room with a broken door and window, and Elizabeth was happy to see that Mrs. Nicholls was already dealing with this need to change rooms. She assured Elizabeth that the room on the far side of her own was now being aired and made ready for Jane. “Shall I send a footman to help with the move?” the housekeeper asked Jane.
“No, I thank you, but I am well enough to walk a short distance, and I have very few possessions here. Molly, my sister, and I will easily be able to pack up and carry the little bit I have.”
“Can you stay with Miss Elizabeth in her room until we have swept up any shards of glass?”
Jane promptly agreed, and the sisters went to Elizabeth’s room; Molly stayed back to help sweep and clean.
Jane whispered, “You must tell me everything, Lizzy! What has been happening today?”
Elizabeth wished she could tell her everything, but she did not know enough. However, she did tell Jane that she assumed that Miss Bingley had locked them in—Georgiana as well as the two of them—but that apparently Mr. Wickham had armed himself, broken and then climbed up to the window of Jane’s room, and then, after descending the rope again, accidentally shot himself. “He is dead,” Elizabeth told her sister.
Jane looked more horrified than relieved that the man who had broken into her bedroom was incapable of harming anyone ever again. Elizabeth said to her, “I cannot imagine why he broke into your room. What did he say?”
“When hefirstclimbed into the window, the man—Mr. Wickham—said, ‘You are not Georgie!’ And then the colonel started shouting and trying to break down the door, and Mr. Wickham looked out of the broken window, and then he checked the other window…I am not sure all what he was doing, but he was saying a lot of ugly words, and it looked as if he was trying to pull at something.”
“If he was upset that you are not Georgie, it seems as if he climbed up to the wrong window,” Elizabeth said. She knew the history of Mr. Wickham and Georgiana Darcy, but Jane did not, and so she immediately distracted her sister, asking another question: “So I am hoping that he did not touch you or take anything?”
“No, not at all.”
