Miss Pelham followed her glance, then looked back at her with the beginning of a smile. “Miss Darcy says the strawberries are best when very dark.”
“So I find,” said Elizabeth, and forced herself to attend to the conversation.
Miss Pelham required very little encouragement to continue. She returned to the strawberry bed and their gardener’s long war against it. “He says the ground is wasted, and Elinor says it is not, and they have not been on speaking terms since Lady Day”—and Elizabeth nodded in the right places, ate the dark berries one after another and did not look at Mr. Darcy, or at Miss Bingley, or at the three feet of lawn the two of them happened to occupy.
She had not known a person could be kept so busy declining to see a single thing.
Between all the food and now the strawberries, Elizabeth was beginning to feel full and was forced to admit that Miss Bingley was not the problem. Miss Bingley was only doing what Miss Bingley did. A fortnight ago, Elizabeth might have watched the entire gambit with only a little twinge of regret.
Now she minded. But she could not deny that she had already declined Mr. Darcy’s offer, and he was unlikely to renew it. Especially not when she had refused with such zeal.
There. She had arrived, by way of a twice-dropped handkerchief and a sour strawberry, at a position of perfect absurdity, wanting the one thing she had taught him, most emphatically, never to offer her again. Papa would have found this diverting. Elizabeth could discover nothing diverting in it at all.
She took her eyes from the centre of the lawn down to the water. She would not give Miss Bingley the chance to glance over and see that she was attending.
Ever since luncheon the wind had been blowing under the canvas, which was why the footman had been set to watch the pegs. He had just crossed to the far corner and got both hands to the rope on that side, hauling it down to hold the corner against the breeze, when an enormous gust lifted the whole canopy like a sail.
The peg pulled clean out of the turf. The rope that held the canopy tore through the footman’s hands as it went, the sudden loss of tension throwing him off balance, and with that corner no longer secure, the canvas heaved up and dragged the tall centre pole off its footing.
Elizabeth saw, in the same instant, what no one else had—little Henry Atherton, still playing fisherman, directly beneath it. A pole of that height and weight could pose a danger for a grown man, let alone a boy of four.
She was on her feet with no memory of rising. Her plate went into the grass and the strawberries with it, red scattering over the linen and into the green. Miss Pelham’s sentence broke off behind her.
“Henry!” she shouted, already running.
Henry turned his head at the sound but not his body, his arm still over the bowl, the strawberries still uncaught.
The distance between the rugs and the marquee seemed to lengthen cruelly beneath her feet. Her half-boot caught in the grass, and she stumbled, recovered, did not slow.
And she was not the only one.
Mr. Darcy had remained by the lemonade table, Miss Bingley beside him, while Henry fished for strawberries. But now she could see from the corner of her eye that he was running in her direction. He had farther to come, but was quicker than Elizabeth, and his attention was fixed where hers was, upon the child.
For one instant Elizabeth saw not the proud man she had refused, nor the grave host of Pemberley, nor the gentleman Miss Bingley had been so determined to claim. She saw only the man who had heard her cry out. Who had moved when she moved.
Then the pole began to tip over.
CHAPTER 7
Darcy was moving before he had consciously understood why.
He had been at the far end of the lawn, a glass of lemonade going warm in his hand, enduring an account from Miss Bingley to which he could barely attend, when a sound came up from the direction of the marquee.
It was Miss Elizabeth, crying out a name.
He did not decide to go. Between one breath and the next, he was simply going, the glass abandoned he knew not where, the lawn tilting past him, Miss Bingley’s sentence left in the air behind.
She was running too, off to his right and nearer the table — ahead of him for the first few strides, but running straight in. To reach the boy, seize him, turn, and come out again would take too long. His own line was worse for distance but better for escape—across the lawn at an angle, towards the open end of the table, where he might take Henry without breaking stride and carry him on.
Ahead of them both, the canopy strained and cracked, one corner torn loose, the tall centre pole grinding off its footing. Beneath it, Henry Atherton balanced on a hamper, one arm holding something over the bowl of melted ice and strawberries, his head turned towards the cry.
Darcy ran faster.
Miss Elizabeth reached the boy first. She did not try to lift him. She caught his wrist, pulled his arm free of the bowl, and turned him bodily into Darcy’s path. Then she stepped aside.
It was enough. Darcy would not have to stop. But there was nowhere forherto go except back—which put her square beneath the pole.
Two steps later he had Henry round the waist, lifted, and carried still moving forward in the same line. A step after that, he caught Miss Elizabeth too as he passed, his right arm hard across her middle. The force of it took them all down together on the grass several feet beyond the table, the boy against his left side and Miss Elizabeth clutched to his right.