A/N: New story.

Leg-Shackled

Chapter One: Purgatory

Darcy's ankle throbbed. His head too. His wrist.

Bottom to top: throb, throb, throb.

But the pain in his right ankle seemed external, a tightness, a cool tightness. His left wrist too. The pain in his head seemed like a headache, massive, internal. Except that the headache felt liquid, but slow-moving, as if his head had been filled with oil, something fat, greasy, unctuous.

Unpleasant.

And then he knew what it was. Laudanum. He'd been dosed with it before, by his physician in Derbyshire, when badly injured after falling from his horse, and once by a London physician when ill and too feverish to rest.

He hated the stuff, hated the way it made him feel. Damn soporific tincture!

Darcy, this is no time for four-syllable words, he chided himself.

Gah. The way laudanum made him feel — oily and sleepy: the way he now felt. Except for his ankle. And his wrist. Those cool tightnesses were not the effects of laudanum.

Metal.

"Charlotte?" A quiet voice from beside him, female, the dearest voice in all the world.

"Charlotte?" Louder.

"Elizabeth?" Darcy spoke as he blinked, trying to clear his distorted, darkened vision. Surely not!

"Mr. Collins? Sir?"

Darcy felt pained by her misrecognition. "No Elizabeth, Darcy. Not Mr. Collins." Infinitely not Mr. Collins.

"I am sorry, sir. Forgive my confusion. My thoughts…" A stretch of quiet. Darcy waited for Elizabeth to speak again. She must have been dosed with Laudanum too.

"Mr. Darcy?"

"Yes."

"Where are we, and why can't I move?"

Darcy twisted himself and tried to focus his vision, first on his wrist (nearer).

As he blinked, adjusting to the moonlight from the small window, he could discern the chain extended from his left wrist to the wall. He jerked against it — and succeeded only in hurting his wrist. The wrist already felt swollen, tender. Cursing silently, he looked down, at his foot (farther).

He was shackled, leg-shackled, to Elizabeth. His right leg, her left leg: shackled. Not figuratively.

Literally.

Her right hand was chained to the wall, mirroring the predicament of his left hand.

"Preposterous!" Darcy quietly spat the word through clenched teeth.

"What?"

Darcy shook his head at himself then bent his shackled leg. Elizabeth whimpered in response. "Ouch! What is that?"

"We are leg-shackled, Elizabeth."

It took her a minute. She giggled, the sound slightly mad, ragged, then cut herself off. "Leg-shackled? Like prisoners?"

"Like spouses. And, yes, like prisoners."

"You and I? Our…limbs…are attached? To each other?" She moved her leg, rattling the chain, pulling it taut.

Darcy tugged back. "Apparently."

"For what sin is this penance?" Elizabeth asked in a bitter whisper. But Darcy heard.

Lately, his conviction that Elizabeth liked him, that she was awaiting his addresses, had grown shaky. Waned. And now…I am a penance, a punishment. He was not guessing anymore; he could feel her dissatisfaction with him radiating off her, ripples of disinclination.

Self-disbelief crept into his heart.

Silence claimed them again, broken only by chain rattlings as one or the other of them shifted position slightly.

"Have you read Dante, Mr. Darcy?"

"What?" he asked with more asperity than he intended, bemused. "Dante? Are we now to talk of books?" He had not intended to sound petulant.

He heard her sigh; she understood his question. "I was just thinking of Purgatory, the purgings for the deadly sins."

"Have you read this recently?"

"No, long ago, and never complete. I was in a hurry to climb from Inferno to Paradise. I could not spare much time for Purgatory."

"Then why are you thinking of the purgings?" Darcy asked warily, unsure why they needed to have this conversation. There were more pressing matters. Chains and shackles.

And he sensed he was not going to like whatever Elizabeth had to say about the deadly sins. He kept his vision on the ceiling.

But Elizabeth dropped Dante. "What is the last thing you remember, sir? Before the shackling?"

"I was walking to the parsonage, along the familiar path from Rosings." He and she had walked it together numerous times, courting. At least, he had once been sure that was what they were doing.

"But were you not supposed to be dining at Rosings? And was it not raining?"

Darcy considered dishonest answers, fearing where the truth might lead him, leading him to divulge his purpose in walking to the parsonage, in abandoning dinner at Rosings.

But he answered honestly. Lies were his aversion. "Yes, and yes." A long interval of silence.

Nerves made his hands wander; he could feel that his clothes were damp — the rain.

He tried to pre-empt her likely next question of why? by asking her her question: "What is the last thing you remember?"

She did not answer immediately, as if she were searching her memory. "Tea. I was drinking a cup of willow bark tea, hoping it would relieve my headache. It tasted…odd, there was a cloying aftertaste, but I thought it was perhaps a variety of willow bark unfamiliar to me."

"Do you now feel odd?"

"Yes, I do. Like I drank too much Assembly punch, too quickly."

"I believe we have both been given laudanum." Darcy reached up to touch his head and found a large lump there. The throbbing in his head was not all internal. He looked at his hand, no blood.

Someone had done him violence. But who? Why? He decided not to mention that to Elizabeth, not yet, although he was unsure he could keep it from her for long.

"What is the point of this? Of giving us both laudanum and shackling us together while we slept? What gain could this be to anyone?" Her confusion caused her voice to rise in pitch.

"Perhaps their gain is our loss — "

Before Darcy could continue, Elizabeth interrupted, speaking more to herself than to him. "It must be someone who knows our mutual dislike" She paused, sighed. "Mutual hatred. We are each other's punishment — our loss is their gain. It is everything cruel." Tears dampened and sank her voice.

Being mistaken for Mr. Collins was one thing, but for Elizabeth to believe he disliked her, for her to dislike him. Hatred. Darcy hated no one but Wickham.

He loved Elizabeth.

His heart ached and his stomach knotted. Those changes, combined with the effects of the laudanum, made Darcy fear casting up his accounts. But he would have to do it on himself or Elizabeth.

He battled the nausea, squeezing his eyes shut, and breathing hard. She hates me. She believes I hate her. His earlier intuition, resisted but strengthening, had been correct.

Even though he now desperately wanted to avoid explaining his stroll to the parsonage, he more desperately wanted to correct Elizabeth's misapprehension. His walk to the parsonage was a walk to a betrothal. A bridegroom-to-be's walk.

Or so he had thought.

But since she hates me…she would have refused me. Maybe it was good that someone kept me from her.

Except they did not keep me from her. They kept me from proposing but I am now leg-shackled to a woman who would never marry me. And I don't know where I am.

Or do I?

Purgatory.

A bleak bitterness of spirit washed over him and he devoutly wished for another dose of laudanum — or another blow to the head.

A/N: I've been sick for a long time and that's kept me from updating The Resurrection at Rosings and The Names of Darcy's Horses. I will return to the first soon.

Look for Chapter Two of this story over the weekend. The story will gradually come into focus.