“I am,” she said.
Darcy’s lungs opened again; he could breathe, he could focus on the rogues before him. “That was ill done,” he called to them, keeping his voice even. “You have wasted your charge.”
The leader blinked through the drifting smoke. His empty pistol wavered in his hand. For the first time, real fear sat naked upon his face.
“You may observe,” Darcy continued in the same level tone, “that your friend there has a club, not a gun, and that both your pieces are now spent.Mine is a double-barrelled pistol. I have two shots yet to fire.” The change in their expressions offered him hope that there were no additional men hiding in the shrubbery.
He heard Miss Bennet draw a slow breath.
The man with the club cast a glance at the leader that was not respectful.
“There are still four of us, and only the three of them,” he muttered. “And one must hold the horses.”
“Unlike your friends,” Darcy said, his gaze fixed upon the leader, “I hit what I aim at. Which would leave you at a disadvantage in numbers.” His smile was grim. “Which two shall it be?”
The club man cursed under his breath. His boots shifted on the frozen ground. A look passed between him and the man who had been near the horses but had scampered back when the shots frightened them.
For a moment no one moved, held there in a tense tableau. Darcy felt the weight of the pistol in his hand, the heat in his injured arm, Miss Bennet’s presence behind him. He did not wish to shoot a man, but he would put a ball through the chest of any man who took another step towards her.
The hollow was so quiet that the sound at first seemed part of the ringing in his ears. Then it grew, a horn blast, long and high. Then hoof beats. Horses were coming down the road behind the bend at a brisk pace.
The lookout, who had been a silent shadow upon the bank, straightened.
“Mail coach,” he called.
A mail coach was heavily armed. It was also granted the right of way. “Move the carriage to the side of the road,” he called out to Anders.
Even as he spoke, the horn sounded a second time, clear and long from somewhere beyond the curve. The note slid along the sides of the hollow and came back upon itself, so that for a moment it seemed as if the air was full of warning.
The leader’s expression altered. He looked at the felled limb, at the coach, at Darcy’s pistol. He did not look up towards the bank, but Darcy could see him imagining it: the armed guard, the extra men, the driver who would not relish pulling up in a blocked road to find strangers with guns in their hands.
The club-man spat into the snow. “We are not armed for a mail coach,” he said bitterly. “Especially not now.”
“Their guard will have a blunderbuss,” Darcy said. “He will fire into the midst of you and count it a good morning’s work.”
Miss Bennet stood very still, but her hand touched the small of his back.
The horn sounded again, nearer this time. The horses tossed their heads, ears pricked, but Anders and Johnson had managed to lead them to the side. Not one man had moved to stop them.
There was an exchange of looks, a rapid, uneasy shifting of eyes. The leader swore once, low and vicious.
“Off,” he snapped at his men. “Quick now.”
The would-be abductors wasted no time. The man from the horses’ heads scrambled up the side of the hollow, clutching at gorse and roots. The man with the club followed, his boots slipping on frozen clods. The others went after them in a scramble of dark coats and rough hands, until the hedge and broken brush had swallowed them all. Only the trace of their feet in the snow showed where they had been.
“Into the coach, Miss Bennet,” Darcy commanded.
She did not argue. Whatever courage had brought her to his side in the first instance did not extend to remaining. He followed her as she set her hand for an instant upon his sound arm as she mounted the step and disappeared within.
He closed the door, took a deep breath, and turned at once to the horses.
Darcy lowered his pistol slowly, his hand remarkably steady considering the turmoil still churning in his chest. He should be thinking strategically, but his mind circled one inescapable fact: he had been willing to die for her. Not out of gentlemanly obligation, not from abstract duty, but from a raw, visceral need to keep her safe. The realization unsettled him more than the pistols had. Fraud or princess, liar or victim—somehow, she had become important to him in a way he did not understand and could not reason away.
The sound of the horn reached his ears. It was much closer. “Johnson, run up the rise and signal them to slow. We have made room, but the tree is still blocking their way.”
Johnson, who had been standing stiff against the coach as if he feared to breathe, set off at a trot towards the bend.
The pain in Darcy’s arm was more noticeable now. He tucked the weapon back into the inner pocket of his coat, the movement tugging at the sleeve of his left arm and sending a fresh throb along the line where the ball—or a shard of rock—had cut through his coat and grazed him.