Sanditon: A Sisterhood Forms

62

Further afield — Hemlock Hall

It felt so different, now, seated in a carriage next to her, the rattling of wheels interrupting thoughts so poisonous they turned his stomach. Sidney Parker felt as if his head would burst from the pressure—for he had just caught sight of her again: Charlotte, staring resolutely ahead, looking like a variation of herself he had never met.

It was enough to make him want to do foolish things, the look upon her face. Enough to set his hand on the seat between them. Enough to convince himself that it would go unnoticed as his eyes locked upon her fingers, twisting together in her lap, two hands twined into one. It was nearly too much to take; and yet, for a time, he remained fixed, a fresh wave of trepidation washing over him, drifting down to his abdomen, where it stubbornly refused to subside.

It was the sound of Charles Bicknell's cane, tapping squarely upon the carriage floor with scrupulous precision, that brought him to; and he saw, now, that he had been staring for too long. Long enough for Bicknell's eyes to follow the path of his gaze; to land upon the very place his own eyes had just been.

Beads of sweat formed feverishly at his neck and brow as Sidney sought out the fourth passenger in the carriage, looking to the corner opposite, where Linton sat rigid and unmoving. There was a time, he remembered, not so long ago, when the man he had known all his life would have scolded him with a single glance for staring at Charlotte in that way, brow stern enough to incite a sudden straightening of the spine, a quickening of the pulse—as if he had been no more than a child. But today there were no stern glances as Linton looked back at him. There was a softness about the eyes; an alarmingly doleful expression; and perhaps most uncharacteristic of all... silence.

The sound of Sidney's own breathing filled his ears, the air moving in and out of his body, a fresh sort of poison in the clarity it brought him as he turned away, back to the fields, the reeds, to all that lay between the main road and Hemlock Hall, the Campions' stately home.

For no matter what he did from this moment on, the damage, he feared, had been done:

You must trust that... there was no other way.

The words had been like oil to water, floating visible on the surface after Charlotte had spoken them, Bicknell and Linton standing by as if they could not quite absorb what had been said. And yet, the sight of Linton then, swaying in the wind as her words pooled at his feet—Linton without the slightest notion of what to say—had begun to trigger something in him.

Bridges had captured her—would surely have taken her life if he had lived. Surely, he had thought, they would have understood.

But it was Charles Bicknell who had planted the twinge of disquiet in his heart: The man who had been by all appearances at his wit's end had gone still as he spotted the body of George Bridges, his eyes taking in the scene before them—the punctures that bloomed upon waistcoat and shirt, the trail of blood diluted by the rain. And Sidney had been left to watch in horror as Bicknell's gaze moved from the body, drawing a line down the trail of blood, back to the very person who stood nearest to it, a dark wash of rust clinging to her skirts, black in the semi-darkness.

Charlotte.

He had had a sense, then. Something deep within. A sense to spring into action, and take her away from this place.

It was what had prompted him to regain his bearings, to look beyond Charles Bicknell and Linton, beyond the carriage—far enough to reach the very sight that had nearly stopped his heart.