Page 37 of A Matter of Murder
“Don’t come any closer!” Lizzie ordered. It was the strangestthing, but Lizzie could feel the floorboards beneath her groaning. She couldn’t see or feel anything beneath her right foot—it was dangling in the liminal space between floor and ceiling... and then a terrifying thought occurred to her: What if there was no ceiling below her? What if the plaster had all fallen, and the laths were rotted away, and nothing else was between here and the floor below but these rotting floorboards? She closed her eyes. The ceilings were nearly fifteen feet downstairs! Would a fall from that height kill her?
Very probable.
“Lizzie,” Charlotte said again, and Lizzie came back to herself. Guy was standing before her, licking her face very earnestly, and her best friend was huddled on the floor two paces away.
“I’m all right,” Lizzie said, which was true enough for now. “But I want you to crawl on your hands and knees toward the door. Carefully.”
“What about you?”
“I’m stuck. I need you to get help.”
“I can’t leave you!”
“You have to, Charlotte.”
Charlotte crawled forward hesitantly. “Don’t get too close to me,” Lizzie warned. “And call Guy.”
“Here, Guy,” Charlotte said in a thin, scared voice. The dog looked between the two ladies, uncertain. But he did as he was bidden and followed Charlotte. Lizzie watched with her heart in her throat as her best friend and dog made the long,slow, perilous journey down the rest of the hall. At every groan and creak, Lizzie had to grit her teeth and pray that Charlotte wouldn’t fall through as well. Finally, she made it to the door and twisted at the knob desperately. “It’s locked!” she cried.
“Bang on it!” Lizzie called back. “Someone will hear.”
Charlotte began knocking and banging, and then after a moment she started yelling, too. “Help! Can someone help? We’re in the east wing! Please, help!”
“Good, keep going!” Lizzie encouraged.
Her muscles were starting to burn. Her right leg was outstretched, sunk into the floor to the knee, and her left leg was folded under her. She had thrown her torso and arms down on the floor, too afraid to sit up and try to yank her leg loose because if she shifted her weight toward the rotting boards, she feared she’d fall all the way through. Now she dared to wiggle her right leg a little bit, and the groaning of the floorboard beneath her made her go still.
“Someone’s coming!” Charlotte shouted. “Hold on, Lizzie.”
“I’ve no intention of going anywhere,” she assured Charlotte, and then the most beautiful sound in the world floated her way: a key scraping the inside of the lock.
The door separating the east wing from the rest of the house swung open, revealing Mr. Grigson. “Miss Lucas?”
“Miss Bennet is stuck and needs help!” Charlotte shouted.
“Don’t come any closer!” Lizzie warned the butler, who was a very tall and somewhat stout man. “Get Mr. Darcy. And tell him to bring some rope.”
The butler disappeared without another word—he really deserved a raise and a lengthy holiday considering all he’d put up with lately—and Charlotte stood on the other side of the door, waiting and worrying while Guy barked in excitement. Lizzie could hear shouts and various cries of alarm, but hardly five minutes had gone by before Darcy appeared in the doorway.
“Lizzie!” he shouted.
The anguish on Darcy’s face sent her stomach plummeting—so much so that she dug her nails into the floorboards, certain she’d started to slip. But at the same time, she felt her breath become more even at the sight of him. Darcy was here. She was going to be all right.
“Hello,” she said in a surprisingly weak voice. “I seem to have taken a wrong turn.”
“Save your breath, and don’t move,” he ordered.
A crowd of footmen and various members of the house party had gathered beyond the door, and Lizzie couldn’t tell exactly what they were up to. Minutes seemed to drag by, and then when she looked up again, she saw Darcy carefully making his way toward her, a length of rope wrapped around his torso and another one in hand.
“Don’t come too close,” she warned. “I don’t want you to fall.”
Darcy ignored her, dropping to his knees and crawling when he was within ten paces. The floors creaked ominously beneath them, but he didn’t hesitate. When he was close enough to reach her, he said, “Push yourself up with your arms. I’m going to secure the rope around your waist.”
Lizzie did as she was told, very carefully easing herself up on her elbows, trying to ignore the creaking of the rotten boards, hyperaware of even the slightest give beneath her. “I didn’t mean to come to the east wing,” she said. “Charlotte and I found a corridor, and then we got lost, and we couldn’t go back, and so ended up moving forward and—”
“Explain when you’re safe,” Darcy whispered, brushing his lips against her right ear as he carefully worked to tie the rope snugly around her waist. Lizzie shivered. It had been days since she’d last felt his lips. She’d missed them. Something about dangling so close to peril made her feel rather silly for the cold shoulder she’d been giving him these past few days.
“All right,” she said, when he confirmed the rope was tied securely around her and anchored properly. “You might want to move back a bit.”