Pride and Premeditation (Jane Austen Murder Mystery #1)(67)

“Does it matter?” she asked with a throaty laugh.

“Perhaps,” Lizzie hedged.

“I’ll shoot your young man. I need your skills.”

Lizzie wavered. Darcy was hardly her young man, but she wasn’t going to let him get shot. “What about Wickham?”

“What about him? He’s more useless than a stray dog you’d pluck from the river. If I’d known that, I never would have rescued him from his sinking ship.” She gestured with her pistol. “Now come along, or I start shooting.”

“Don’t move,” Darcy instructed her.

“Don’t be absurd—” Lizzie started to say, and she took a step toward the boat, but then Wickham made his move. He lunged to her right and Darcy yelled, “Lizzie, down!”

“No!”

Crack!

Lizzie hit the cobblestones, uncertain at first whether instinct or the impact of a bullet had driven her to the ground. Her heart slammed in her chest, and as she looked about, she saw another figure—Wickham—take off toward where the schooner was docked. Another crack! split the air, and he doubled over. Lizzie screamed, and Wickham crumpled to the ground. But he was so close to the water that he disappeared over the edge of the dock, and Lizzie heard a heavy splash.

She scrambled to her feet, praying that Lady Catherine didn’t have another pistol and that she wasn’t reloading. She would have run to where she saw Wickham disappear if strong arms hadn’t closed around her and dragged her behind a stack of shipping crates, out of Lady Catherine’s line of sight.

“No,” she gasped. “No, no, no!”

“Elizabeth, wait. Where are you hurt?” She struggled in Darcy’s arms until he loosened his grip, but he didn’t let go of her entirely. “Are you injured?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. But Wickham!”

Lizzie fully expected Darcy to say, “Let him drown!” It was on the tip of her tongue to plead with him, to insist he was their only witness, but Darcy said nothing. He simply released her and said, “Stay back!” and then ran to the edge of the dock where Wickham had gone over. He removed his jacket and kicked off his boots, peered over, and then jumped in.

Lizzie looked up to see if Lady Catherine was readying her next round. But the schooner was not in the same place it had been just a moment earlier. It was drifting away from the docks, slipping out of reach between a ship’s tender and another boat. She stood at the edge of the dock and tried in vain to read the ship’s name, but it was too dark and the schooner was already too far away. Then she looked down into the black waters and shouted, “Darcy!”

She could hear splashing but couldn’t see anything at all. Don’t let him drown, she prayed. Please, please don’t let him drown. “Darcy! Where are you?”

She looked around frantically for something, anything, to throw down to him, but the coil of tarred rope twenty paces away was too heavy for her to yank to the dock’s edge. She thought of screaming for help, but that might bring every nighttime criminal and vagrant to her, and all she had was her brooch, still clutched in her hand, for defense. Foolish, she thought. She had gotten everything horribly wrong, and now Abigail was dead and Wickham was shot and Darcy might drown trying to fish him out and it was all her fault.

“Darcy!” she screamed into the dark water. “If you drown, I will be very angry with you!”

More splashing and a cough that might have been a laugh drifted up to her ten paces down from where Darcy had disappeared into the water. Lizzie ran in the direction of the sound and discovered a ladder built into the dock and Darcy a meter below, Wickham slung over his shoulder. Slowly, he pulled himself up, and when Wickham was within reaching distance, Lizzie pulled him toward her. When he was safely on the dock, she extended an arm to Darcy, who gratefully took it, and pulled him to safety as well.

Wickham’s eyes were closed and his face exceedingly pale. “Wickham!” Lizzie began slapping his face to revive him. She stopped when she saw the blood on his left shoulder. It had been difficult to see in the dark, but when she pulled away his jacket, it bloomed bright and vivid against the white of his shirt.

“No, no,” Lizzie whispered, and shrugged out of her spencer, pressing the fabric against Wickham’s wound. He groaned at the pressure, but that just made Lizzie push against it even harder.

“Wake up,” she ordered him. “You need to live. You need to tell the judge the truth.”

She looked at Darcy. “We need a surgeon.”

Darcy, however, shook his head. “Elizabeth. It’s too late.”

“No!” she snapped. “You’re just saying that because you don’t like him.”

“I’m not, Elizabeth. Look.”

She looked down and knew he was right when she saw that her hands were completely soaked in Wickham’s blood. The wound was bleeding far more rapidly than they could compress, although Lizzie tried. But falling into the water and bleeding out into the Thames had done Wickham no favors.

“Miss Bennet?” Wickham’s voice was whisper-thin, barely audible over his wet, labored breaths.

“You’re all right,” she said.

“Liar,” he rasped. “I didn’t kill Hurst.”

“Shh,” she said. “Conserve your breath.”