by Anne Morris
It was getting harder even to consider speaking, though Fitzwilliam also had nothing to say. The place dulled all sense of being a man, being a living person, and Fitzwilliam felt so adrift in his head that he knew that it was possible for him to be so lost or give into the despair and go mad that he would never return to the mortal world, the living world, the present world. Fitzwilliam wondered about that. What happened to a living person who crossed into Purgatory but never returned? What would happen to his body in the living world?
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Their pace was decent along the wrong side of the river. Elizabeth clung to the colonel’s arm, the one bit of warmth in that repressive place and kept her eyes forward, seeking the next bridge which crossed over. Would a portal appear over any bridge because of the senior Mr. Darcy’s sacrifice? Or would they need to seek one of the two they had already seen? Would it appear on the east side looking over to the west or did they need to be on the other side of the river? There were still many unanswered questions.
The canal curved away, and the river which they had initially followed spurred north. The three figures turned in that direction, moving beside its banks in that gray, barren place where the light did not change, where time did not change, with only ancient landmarks to give any sense of place, with nothing green about them, or any light to provide a sense of life.
Elizabeth had been dismayed when Colonel Fitzwilliam had brought his news, but when she had gone to see Darcy laid out in Netherfield Hall’s best drawing-room, her world had ended. Elizabeth had such love for Fitzwilliam Darcy, had let it imbue her soul, let it fill her, complete her. Let it take over her flesh, so that the news of Darcy’s death had been as if the colonel had taken a knife and flailed her skin and muscle down to the bone, leaving just her skeleton. Elizabeth had not been able to believe the delivered message until she had seen Darcy’s beautiful form all laid on that table, remarkably handsome and still.
It had chased her out of the drawing-room and off to the woods in an attempt at one last farewell, leading them on this extraordinary journey. Elizabeth had not fled with the idea or hope that she would get him back. She had gone to take leave, but now Darcy walked beside her, pacing back towards life. Elizabeth turned to look at him.
Darcy’s shadowy figure was dimmer now than when they had left that small cottage a mile back. His father might have reprieved him, but maybe it was not possible for him to last long enough to cross again to the living world. He might be fated to remain in Purgatory despite his father’s love and sacrifice.
Darcy did not seem bothered by the cold or burdened by the character of this world—the atmosphere or the environment—in the way that Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth were. That was one fact that Elizabeth clung to as they walked. She clung to her living companion as Elizabeth watched the dead one next to her, wondering how her beloved was to come back to her and live again.
They came to a bridge, and Elizabeth remembered being on the other side and looking across it. When she and the colonel had been on the west side, there had not been a portal, and there was not one now that they were on the other side. Elizabeth faltered. Her limbs suddenly felt heavy and numb. The stiffness of her gate seemed to trip up the colonel, and despite the arm which Fitzwilliam held out to support her, the colonel did not catch her as her knees gave way. He could only lower her to the ground.
“Elizabeth!” Darcy called to her. Her lover could still feel, even if he could not touch her.
“I’m tired. I need to rest,” Elizabeth moaned. “I am very tired,” she repeated in a breathless whisper. She could not move from her position, sitting on her knees on the barren ground. The colonel let go of her arm, and Elizabeth slumped with her hands lying as though made of lead, her body weighed down with rocks; everything felt so heavy that Elizabeth did not believe she could lift her chin, let alone pick herself up now that she had crumpled to the ground. It was as though this place was attempting to make her one of its own.
Fitzwilliam looked around for a more decent place to sit, but there was no place for lady or mortal. He finally looked down at her. “Let me at least make you more comfortable.” Fitzwilliam lifted her slightly up and straightened her limbs as Darcy watched him move her legs out from under her.
“I’m so thirsty,” Elizabeth gasped.
“I fear there is nothing for us,” said the colonel.
Darcy, who did not feel the cold or the thirst or hunger, said nothing.
Elizabeth sat with her legs out in front of her, her hands at her side, gasping for breath. “It’s fighting me.”
“I know,” the colonel replied. He knelt. Fitzwilliam could not squat, it was too painful, his limbs were too numb. He had to get down on his knees. “We must carry on,” the colonel told her, seeking Elizabeth’s eyes. There was something that came to him as though her failing had given him a little bit of strength. Elizabeth had pulled him when Fitzwilliam had felt the call to stay here. He had been wrestling with the place, and wrestling with his senses back when he had spoken to Uncle Darcy. Now that Elizabeth was in despair, Fitzwilliam was able to push on. The soldier in him had risen up. He was able to tap into years of training.
“Elizabeth.” Fitzwilliam dared to use her name. “Elizabeth, we can carry on. We must keep going. Life and light await us.”
He pushed himself up to stand, and then Fitzwilliam reached and grabbed her by the waist and pulled her up. He held her while Elizabeth wobbled on legs that threatened to buckle under her and with a head dizzy—dizzy with having been pulled upright, dizzy with emotions, dizzy with despair. Fitzwilliam held onto her until Elizabeth found the strength to stand on her feet.
Elizabeth’s arms came up to rest on his forearms. Her legs steadied underneath her. She raised her eyes to his face. Fitzwilliam stared back into her dark eyes imbuing her with all the strength that he could muster.
“We can make it, Elizabeth,” he said, and then Fitzwilliam gave her a little shake. Perhaps it was with annoyance; perhaps it was as if to get her moving, perhaps both. Elizabeth had, after all, led him to this place. Their fates were tied together as the only two mortal creatures in a world of the dead, tied together until they succeeded in passing back to the land of the living.
Elizabeth pulled her hands off of Colonel Fitzwilliam’s forearms and looked over at Darcy. He was standing a touch apart from them. It was difficult, Elizabeth suspected, for Darcy to be with them because he was still mist and spirit, hazy, gray, and growing dimmer. She thought Darcy looked even transparent—he had not been when Darcy had said goodbye to his father. Panic set in and it was enough, that spark of energy, as irrational fear pulsed inside, to spur her to move her feet.
“Are you ready Fitzwilliam?” Elizabeth asked. Such a question, oddly, did for both her companions. They both nodded to her in turn.
They headed north. Walking again beside a river which had water, but from which they dared not drink, and through a landscape which sought to oppress the two living among them and to keep them from ever seeing true light again.
There was one point which made both Elizabeth and the colonel stop as they recognized it as the bank where the hellhound had chased its prey to ground, or rather, to river. They stopped and carefully scanned the surrounding area—barren fields with a few hints of hedgerows—but there was no movement for which they were thankful, and they continued on.
The market town gave signs of its existence first with small cottages, shops, barns, and other outbuildings before they came to a crossroad. The footpath they had been following next to the river ended; there were buildings in the way. They made their way over to walk up the town’s High Street.
That was almost more terrifying than the barren landscapes they had passed through before. To see what should have been a lively and friendly and welcoming place—shops and houses—which should have had doors open, with people crowded inside or out on the streets was nothing. The buildings were all shades of gray, dull and lifeless, without people to imbue them w
ith a soul. It was sinister and disconcerting, and Elizabeth needed both of the colonel’s hands for support.
“Fitzwilliam,” Elizabeth stated, then corrected herself, “Darcy, can you feel it? Feel how wrong it is?”
“Yes,” Mr. Darcy replied. “I am not so gone that death does not affect me, disturb me.”
These imposing buildings, though only two stories, made them quicken their pace through town. Thankfully, once through the cluster of buildings, when they came to another set of crossroads, the town ended. The trio continued walking on the road rather than return to the riverside footpath.
There was something freeing about being out from under the arms of those craggy-limbed trees by the river, though walking through an open area was not warming. There was no sun overhead, no shadows, just a perpetual twilight that wore them down as they dragged their feet towards what they hoped was a portal home. Where the river bent, just ahead, they could see the road turning along with it. Their hopes lay there in the form of a gateway back.
Elizabeth thought about how quickly the concentration of buildings lessened. They had gone from bareness, and dirt (with a cottage or two); to a concentration along the High Street in the town, then back to bareness again. The more she walked, the more the open expanse of field and sky around and above her disturbed her—as though there was no defense against such a thing. And the sky was not…sky…above them, just an oppressive grayness.
Movement caught her eye, and as with the other earlier incidents, it was that black and gray dog. Its stealth-like movements were herding a person.
All three of them stopped as they looked up the road, past where it curved. This man was easier to distinguish for he wore a red coat—his station in life was easier to detect. Something in her chest cramped up, coming together tightly, and then—like lead—fell forcefully, though it stuck at the bottom of her ribs, hurting her. Elizabeth thought that she knew who that figure in red was. Her feet began to move.
“Elizabeth!” Darcy called to her.
“Miss Bennet,” Fitzwilliam called as Elizabeth pulled her hand away from his arm, and she moved with quickened steps. Elizabeth moved more freely than she had in hours, not sure what she suspected, but she moved down the road towards the dog and the man.
The dog teased and taunted the figure as it had with its previous prey, swooping effortlessly from one side to the other, herding him with malice, but with thoughtfulness towards the river. It pushed the figure towards the corner where the river bent slightly towards the west. Towards, Elizabeth hoped (an indecent hope), a place where a portal lay which would take the three of them back across to the living world. Now she wondered if there would be no portal, but a well instead, deranged, unnatural, and beyond description—an abominable well in the water instead.
Elizabeth could sense Fitzwilliam and Darcy keeping up with her as they too were mesmerized by the workings of the dog as it chased its prey ever closer, and as all of them zeroed in on a single point beside the river. Elizabeth stopped moving when she was sure that it was Mr. Wickham. Like the other man, Wickham had eyes only for the hellhound; Wickham’s back was to their party, but at one point he swerved, because of the dog, altered his step and turned, and in turning, caught sight of them.
“Help me!” George Wickham shouted. “Darcy!”
Elizabeth wondered if he could not see her and Colonel Fitzwilliam, or if for some reason it was some last appeal to Darcy’s goodness from the wicked George Wickham.
“Help me!” screamed George Wickham again, though he dared not keep his back to the dog. Wickham turned around, realized how close the hellhound was, and stepped again, closer to the river.
It stirred something in Darcy. Darcy had not seen the final end of that other man (Darcy did not know Wickham’s fate in that accursed well), so he was not stirred by preventing such an outcome. Fitzwilliam Darcy seemed to be aroused by some internal compassion and began to move. He was not burdened by flesh and blood as the colonel and Elizabeth were.
The road they had been on moved north, curving around the river (which wandered slightly west) before the road peeled away to shoot north again. That spur had been the path which Wickham had bolted down. But as they all approached the river on what was its north bank, they saw that small plank bridge and the farmhouse which Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam had admired from the opposite side, standing as a mute destination.
The plank bridge lay rickety and home-made, yet it had a shimmer over it which gave Elizabeth hope. But her heart plunged to despair because next to it was a black void. They all met on the bank of the river, four figures and a dog. Two living mortals, two dead, and one hellhound, all at the confluence where a river had chosen to meander—it refused to flow straight because it had a mind of its own.
The colonel caught up to Elizabeth and took hold of her arm rather forcefully, moving to shield her from the hellhound with his body. Fitzwilliam turned to put himself in the dog’s path. It was pure instinct on the soldier’s part, though he turned his head to track the movements of the dog. Those fiery ember eyes flickered over the living pair but moved back to their targeted prey: Wickham.
George Wickham was facing the hellhound, his hands up in supplication, but they could not hear him pleading as if Wickham knew that to plead with such a creature would get him nowhere. But the fixed eyes of the hellhound, like those of any sighthound, bored into Wickham and forced him to step continually backwards, ever closer to the river.
The colonel pulled Elizabeth along as close to the edge of the river as he dared, his eyes never leaving that heinous dog and its prey as Fitzwilliam tried to reach the bridge, the crossing, the portal home. Elizabeth struggled in the colonel’s grip; his body shielded her from being able to see Mr. Wickham and the dog, but it also shielded her view of her beloved.
“Darcy!” Elizabeth screamed as she twisted her body, though the colonel’s grip was tight on her arm and waist. Elizabeth stopped moving and turned to attempt to look around the colonel to spy where her beloved was. Fitzwilliam repositioned himself as they both turned to see where Darcy was and saw that he had moved near Wickham.
“Help me!” Wickham bellowed again just as Darcy came up beside him.
“No!” screamed Elizabeth. “There’s no help for him.”
Fitzwilliam tightened his grip as Elizabeth moved to go towards Darcy. She stopped her struggles and his grip loosened as they stood mesmerized while the hellhound moved back and forth forcing Wickham and Darcy ever closer to the edge of the river as a mist spilled up from the dark, gaping void where that hole in the water waited. The abomination was so unnerving and unsettling that it made Elizabeth dizzy with just a glimpse at it. A well in the river was such an unnatural sight that her senses reeled inside.
Her breath was shallow, the air was not functional, not sufficient, so Elizabeth had to take another and another and another as she clutched at whatever part of Colonel Fitzwilliam that she was holding and watched as the hellhound assuredly herded its prey.
“Darcy!” gasped Wickham.
Elizabeth looked at the man, the cause of all of this. Wickham was dressed as a soldier and looked like the man she remembered in outline, but the colors were wrong. Though his hair was in a queue, it was disheveled. Wickham looked like he’d wiped a hand against his face and left fingerprints of mud there in a moment of despair. The knees of his pants were ripped, his boots were scuffed at toe and heel. The red coat was no longer neatly brushed, the braid not gilt, but tarnished and dull; he was muddied and dirty.
The entire effect, the entire man, was of something left in a room to fade over decades in harsh sunlight. It added to her discomfort.
But as Elizabeth looked at her beloved, she thought his light shone with greater intensity. Elizabeth recalled how his father’s light had become brighter when Mr. Darcy Senior had said he would pay his son’s penance. Back then, Darcy had been so dim that Elizabeth feared he might fade from existence before they were able to return to the living world. But Darcy had f
illed in now; he appeared solid and bright beside the faded and worn-looking Wickham. But her beloved was also two steps away from the riverbank, and Elizabeth thought he was not aware of the danger behind him.
The two living beings were about a yard from the edge of the plank bridge. Wickham was six or seven feet beyond them just at the river’s edge, with Darcy on the other side of his old adversary, well out of their reach, though they could not grab at him even if they wished. To them, Darcy was mist and shadow, and Elizabeth or Fitzwilliam could no more clasp Darcy than they could clasp at or hold cigar smoke.
But Darcy could grasp Wickham, and he did that as the sighthound turned into a herd dog and moved within inches of Wickham. Darcy put a hand out roughly to Wickham’s shoulder and pulled him sideways; the pair of them turned in concert, away from the edge of the river. The hellhound growled, though there was no sound. They could only see the ripple of those massive lips on those jaws and feel the threat waft their way through the air. The dog stalked again to the other side of the dead pair to herd them back to their destination.
Fitzwilliam watched and wondered if the hellhound did not care about the justice of who was swallowed in that blank, dark void so long as its mission was accomplished. He was not going to allow this incredible journey to have been for naught. Fitzwilliam stepped closer to the bridge, pushing Elizabeth behind him.
“Step through, Elizabeth,” yelled the colonel. “Return while you can.”
“No!” she cried. “Not without both of you.” Her hands were on Fitzwilliam’s back as Elizabeth stood behind him to watch the dog and the dead men.
The dog circled around towards Darcy’s side, coming right up to him, sighthound now as the hellhound stared him down, attempting to force both him and Wickham into the bottomless well which led straight down to an evil end. Darcy instead stepped sideways to the river, but no closer to it. The hellhound moved again, and Darcy and Wickham stepped again, a wicked sort of dance.