The Deception at Lyme: Or, the Peril of Persuasion (Mr. And Mrs. Darcy Mysteries) Read Online Free Page B

remaining distance to safety. Drops of water landed on her: two on her arm, another on her neck. Were they sea spray, or had rain begun to fall?
    She moved faster with each step to keep pace with Darcy’s ever-lengthening strides. They approached the curve, rounded it—
    And stopped.
    The solitary woman they had seen standing on the upper Cobb now blocked their path on the lower. Her back to them, she did not turn this time. Indeed, she took no notice of them at all. And her cape no longer billowed about her.
    It covered her body, lying motionless on the cold, hard stone.

 
    Three
The horror of that moment to all who stood around!
—Persuasion
    There is never a particularly good time to stumble upon a body, but Darcy could not help thinking that this was one of the worst. The sky had darkened to the state of dusk, and the droplets that struck the pavement could no longer be dismissed as sea spray by even the most optimistic observer. Thunder sounded again.
    Sir Laurence came up beside him. “Is she dead?”
    “I see no blood,” Darcy said, “but she does not appear to be breathing.” He transferred Lily-Anne to Elizabeth, who tried to shield the child’s view while he approached the prostrate form.
    Lily-Anne, however, seemed intent on watching him. She wrestled against Elizabeth’s embrace. “See!”
    “Not now, Lily.” Elizabeth drew their daughter closer to her.
    Darcy knelt beside the inanimate form tossed on the ground like one of Lily-Anne’s rag dolls. The lady’s right arm was trapped beneath her, the other hidden with her bent knees somewhere beneath her long cape.
    “She must have tried to descend Granny’s Teeth to escape the storm,” Sir Laurence said.
    “Granny’s Teeth?”
    The baronet nodded toward the wall. Beside them rose a set of steps so narrow that they had escaped Darcy’s notice entirely when they passed them above. “Steps,” in fact, was too generous a word to describe the weathered rectangular stones protruding at uneven intervals from the sheer face of the wall. The flight was so steep and treacherous that only the most intrepid—or foolhardy—individual would hazard it in trousers and fair weather, let alone skirts in a storm.
    Darcy put his hand on the woman’s back and detected a slight rise and fall. “She breathes. I feel broken ribs, however.” The lady likely suffered other broken bones as well, but Darcy could not with propriety examine her. He turned to Elizabeth, who was already consigning their daughter to Georgiana.
    As his wife moved to the other side of the injured lady, Darcy looked about. Had nobody else noticed the inert figure lying on the wet pavement? The quay’s warehouses blocked this stretch of the Cobb from the view of most of the dockworkers, and the attention of those within sight was consumed by the frantic activity of launching rescue efforts and battening down hatches before the storm unleashed its full fury.
    “Good heavens.”
    Elizabeth’s words wrenched his attention back to her. She had lifted the woman’s cape, and now raised her gaze to his. “She is with child.”
    “Is the baby—”
    She reached toward the woman’s abdomen and was silent for several very long minutes. “Yet alive,” she said at last. “I feel movement. She needs a surgeon.”
    “Sir Laurence,” Darcy said, “if you would escort my family to our lodgings and send a surgeon hither, I would be most obliged.”
    “Nay, I should be the one who remains.”
    Much as Darcy would prefer to conduct his family safely home himself, the baronet was the logical choice to go. “You are more familiar with Lyme. You know better than I the fastest way back through the town and where a surgeon might be found.”
    “You will be escorting only Miss Darcy and Lily-Anne,” Elizabeth added.
    Both gentlemen objected to her not seeking shelter, but she refused to yield. “This woman is unconscious, with child, and has just suffered a traumatic accident. If something occurs