Smugglers’ business alert!

Elizabeth walked every morning. She was a woman of regular habits, whose energy required an outlet. She was out by seven most days, sometimes earlier, taking the paths around the park that Rosings bounded on its eastern side. She had been doing this since her first week in Kent.

I had thought, after the evening of Darcy’s proposal, that she might vary it. That the morning after might find her disinclined to walk the paths that ran near Rosings, near the possibility of encountering Darcy, near anything that required her to be composed before she had finished being angry. I had underestimated her. She was out at half past six the following morning, which I knew because I was in the study at half past six and heard the door.

The eastern path she favored ran along the boundary of Rosings Park, a distance of perhaps two miles from the parsonage gate to where it met the Elham road. For the first quarter mile it followed the lane in clear view of the village, but beyond that it entered the woods that bounded the park on that side. The path was well-maintained, Lady Catherine having strong opinions about the condition of her boundaries, but it ran through dense enough cover that a walker would be out of sight of both the village and Rosings itself for the better part of an hour. I had noted this during my first survey of the area. It was the kind of detail a man in my position notices.

What I did not know, and did not find out until it was already over, was that Annesley had learned of this habit of hers.

Pyke came to the parsonage at half past seven.

He came openly, through the front gate. The sexton of Hunsford calling on the rector of Hunsford is the kind of thing that happens several times a week and occasions no comment from anyone. Charlotte received him and brought him to the study and closed the door. The morning light from the hall window caught the edge of her expression as she closed the door behind him. She was composed, but I saw the alertness in her posture, the quality of a woman who has understood that something is wrong.

He stood in the study with his hat in his hands and told me what the Gofton boy had seen.

Annesley’s men on the eastern path. A cart. Elizabeth on her feet and making herself heard until she wasn’t. The direction of the cart: south, toward the Elham valley, toward the old Annesley farm buildings on the valley road that I had surveyed on my first mapping of the network’s geography.

I was already moving before Pyke had finished, to the sword cane beside the desk. I was thinking about the valley road and the farm buildings and their configuration, one entrance from the road and a second narrow exit at the back, and about how many men Annesley was likely to have and what their disposition would be when they saw who had come for them.

“Get word to Plough,” I said. “And whichever of the others you can raise on short notice. Horses. I want to move within the half hour.”

“As you say, Captain.”

I was almost to the study door, the sword cane in my hand, Pyke at my back, and the parson-mask so thoroughly absent it might never have existed. Then Charlotte knocked once and opened the door.

“Mr. Darcy,” she said, calmly, “is in the hall. He is…unhappy.”

Pyke went very still. He looked at me and waited.

I thought about what Darcy had seen or worked out to have arrived here at this hour in this state, and I made the calculation in approximately three seconds.

“Show him in,” I said.

Charlotte looked quietly pleased and not surprised, and she went to do it.

Darcy came into the study with the controlled energy of a man who has been moving fast and has arrived somewhere and is now determining what to do next. He was in his riding clothes, without a hat, although he had a white silk scarf draped carelessly over one shoulder. It had perhaps been around his neck when he walked out from Rosings this morning, and had very nearly gone the way of his hat in the meantime. He had the air of a man who has been putting things together on the walk over and has arrived at conclusions he does not yet know what to do with.

He looked at me. He looked at Pyke. He looked at the sword cane.

“Mr. Collins,” he said.

“Mr. Darcy,” I said. “Sit down.”

He did not sit. “In the distance, I heard Miss Bennet, screaming.” His voice trembled with emotion. “When I reached the place, there were only cart tracks leading inland, and a boy running towards the church. I followed the boy,” he said. “He went to your sexton. I followed your sexton here. Miss Bennet has been taken. You know this already.”

“I do,” I said.

“You know where they’re taking her.”

“I do.”

“Then I want to know,” he said, in the tone of a man keeping himself on a very short leash, “exactly what is happening and what you intend to do about it, and I want to know it now.”

Pyke slipped out of the room to execute my instructions.

I looked at Darcy for a moment. He looked back at me, eyes smoldering with anger. I thought: there is no version of the next ten minutes in which I maintain any fiction about what I am and what this is. The only question is how much I tell him and how quickly.

“The man who took Miss Bennet is Gerard Annesley. He is a connection of Lady Catherine’s late husband.”

“I know who he is,” Darcy said, his voice on the edge of a snarl.

“He has been part of a certain local arrangement for the past eighteen months, in a capacity I gave him and have been regretting for approximately the last two months. He has been operating outside his authority and this morning he has done something I cannot overlook and do not intend to. His intention was I believe to frighten her, not harm her: a warning, delivered in the only language he knows how to use.”

Darcy glared at me but said nothing. I went on.

“He has not yet thought badly enough to go further than that. But he is not thinking clearly, and frightened men have a way of thinking worse as the situation develops. She will be all right if we move now. Less certainly if we stand here.”

“What…local arrangement?” Darcy asked.

“The kind that has brought Lady Catherine tax-free Continental goods for the past three years and which she has taken considerable care never to formally acknowledge.”

Shock warred with disbelief in Darcy’s face. Shock had the victory.

I opened the study door, and found Pyke there with his face covered.

“Your sexton,” Darcy said, looking at Pyke.

“Cover your face,” I said to Darcy. “Now, if you please.”

He looked at me for a moment, then unwound the scarf from his neck and wrapped it around his face.

“On this business, I am called Spade,” Pyke said, as if he introduced himself this way to all Lady Catherine’s nephews.

Darcy looked at me.

“They call me The Captain,” I said.

“Of course they do,” Darcy said dryly. Outside, the April morning continued its business: birdsong, the distant sound of the village, the world proceeding with its customary indifference to the conversations occurring in my study. Charlotte stood in the hall, watching us.

“One thing,” I said, before we went out. “What happens after, we will discuss after. Not before and not during. Do you understand me?”

He held my gaze for a moment. “I understand you,” he said, in the tone of a man who is agreeing to a treaty he intends to renegotiate at the earliest opportunity.

“Good,” I said, and we went out into the April morning, where Gofton and Dawkins were waiting for us with the horses.

We overtook the cart on the road an hour later. Annesley was riding beside it, with three men I knew as free-traders from the network. Two were on horseback, the third a teenaged boy driving the cart. They were Annesley’s people, wearing the association of the old days like clothing kept in a chest and now tried on again to see if it still fit. There was a blanket over the figure in the cart. She was struggling to sit up. I left Gofton and Dawkins to block the road back to Hunsford, and rode ahead of the cart with Darcy and Pyke to block the road ahead. The cart stopped with a jerk, and Elizabeth shook off the blanket. Her arms were bound behind her. Her hair was coming down, and she wore an expression that combined fury and relief in roughly equal measure.

Annesley and his men got down off their horses. They knew they were trapped. The teenager climbed down from the cart and held the reins for the other men’s horses. The placid cart horses stood still.

My group dismounted. I drew the blade from the cane, a clean pull, the steel catching the morning light.

They saw the blade and they saw me. Their faces were almost comical: the faces of men who had backed something and were discovering the odds had shifted.

“The Captain,” said the teenaged boy. He stood up a little straighter.

“The Captain,” I agreed, pleasantly.

Annesley stepped forward. Darcy was already moving past me. He crossed the distance in three strides, and hit Annesley with the neat, economical force of a man who has spent considerable time at Gentleman Jackson’s and knows precisely what he is doing. Annesley went down.

Elizabeth looked at the blade. She looked at Pyke and Gofton, masked. She looked at Darcy, masked, and I watched her take in his height and his bearing and the quality of his fury, which was not easily disguised by a scarf, and arrive at a conclusion she did not voice. Instead, she addressed herself to the only man here with a bare face.

“Mr. Collins,” she said steadily. “I had wondered if you might appear.”

“Miss Bennet,” I said. “I apologize for the delay.”

She did not answer me. Darcy had reached her, and she shifted so that he could reach the knot at her wrists more easily.

“I had nearly worked it free myself,” Elizabeth said. Her voice shook. “Two hours. I was very nearly through it.”

I knew Annesley’s men. I also knew their work. The knot they would have used on a prisoner’s wrists was not a knot that yielded to two hours of effort from behind one’s own back. But she had tried, in a jostling cart, and for two hours she had not stopped trying.

“There,” Darcy said, very quietly, as the rope came free.

Elizabeth brought her arms forward. She looked at her wrists for a moment and then looked up at Darcy, who was close, and the shaky quality in her voice when she spoke was not entirely accounted for by the cold or the two hours or the rope.

“Thank you,” she said, “for finishing the job.”

There was something that bordered on vulnerable in Darcy’s stance when he received her thanks.

Behind me I heard Annesley get up. I turned. He was on his feet with a knife in his hand, moving toward Darcy’s back, and Darcy was looking at Elizabeth.

My own blade was already drawn. I had it at Annesley’s throat the moment he reached me. Annesley’s eyes found mine. In his eyes was an expression of genuine uncertainty.

“No,” I said.

Pyke relieved him of the knife with the efficiency of a man tidying after a meal.

I glanced towards the cart. Elizabeth’s eyes were wide, and Darcy had turned and seen at the tableau Annesley and I formed. He stared at the blade. He did not say anything. Gofton hurried up and took the rope that Darcy was still holding.

“Secure the Cornet,” I said to Gofton, and turned back to Elizabeth.

She was still watching. She had seen all of it: Annesley’s face, the knife in his hand, the blade at his throat, the one word that had been sufficient. She was not afraid of The Captain, which was to her credit. She was only startled to find a man like him hiding behind foolish, boring Mr. Collins of Hunsford.

I held her gaze for a moment and then looked away.

“Can you ride?” I asked.

“I am no horsewoman, but I think I can manage this cart if someone will stand at the horses’ heads when I turn them,” she said.

Darcy was the one to do so. Of course he would be. I dismissed the Annesley men, who were eager to be gone. The teenaged boy rode Annesley’s horse. Gofton and Dawkins put Annesley himself in the cart, bound hand and foot, and threw the blanket over him. We went back the way we came, with the cart at the rear, Pyke and myself in the middle, and Gofton and Dawkins at the front.

Darcy rode beside the cart, of course, and he and Elizabeth talked to each other all the way back in low voices. Only for a few minutes did they raise their voices enough for me to hear what they were saying.

“…I must apologize for what I said yesterday evening about your family. With my aunt being hand in glove with the smugglers, I had no right to criticize anybody’s relations…”

“My family has perhaps the advantage of yours in the smuggling trade. Your aunt may be hand in glove with them, but my cousin seems to be the head of their organization!”

“I truly had no idea of that when I spoke to you last night. I have greatly misjudged him.”

“Could you have been equally mistaken concerning my sister’s feelings for your friend?”

His response was too quiet to make out the words, but it did not sound like a no to me. I urged my horse forward a little way, and Pyke did the same. Whatever was happening behind us was none of our business.