Excentryke's Musings

Daisy Chains

Part the Eleventh

The carriage was carrying the Lucases home when the tire got stuck.  At first the carriage lurched, but then it was still.

“What is all this?” Sir William demanded, disembarking and going to take a look.

Bella was really too tired from the strain of the evening to really care. 

There was some pushing and shoving and then the horses were untethered from the carriage.

“Come on, men!” Sir William exhorted them and then with a heave ho, the carriage was lurching.

Bella was sitting in the window.  She was not sure what was happening, but at one moment the carriage was upright, but the next moment, Bella was tipping out the window, the carriage falling on top of her.

Her breath left her in one fell swoop of her and she found herself crushed by the carriage, her body half in and half out.

All of a sudden there was a great deal of banging and Bella couldn’t breathe.  Her hand was pressed up against her face and she couldn’t even wiggle her fingers.  Her legs were hanging out of the carriage window or, rather, into the carriage, and someone took hold of them and tried to pull.

Bella screamed.

It came out as no more as a muffle.

Then the carriage began to rock as the occupants tried to climb out of it and Bella felt her bones crush even more.  Tears slipped down her face, if she was even still able to cry, and she prayed that her misery would just end.

Voices faded in and out and she was aware that someone was trying to lift the carriage off of her, but to no avail.

She slowly fell into unconsciousness. 

She wondered if this was her freedom from Darcy, being crushed on her way home from a ball.

Bella didn’t realize how correct she was.

Minutes turned into moments, moments stretched into hours, and soon the sounds of men and their attempts to free her came to nothing.  Bella drifted off to sleep.  Her only thought was for an end to the pain. 

Then, when she thought that it would all be finally over, the carriage was lifted off of her as if it weighed no more than a feather, and she gasped, her crushed lungs trying desperately to catch breath.  Her legs were swung out onto the ground, her slippers lost somewhere, and the carriage was set somewhere over to the right.

It was incomprehensible.

The moon was low in the sky and not a soul was around her.

Bella looked around her wildly, her head dug into the dirty, but her eyes were still able to dart around.  Then, just by a pond, she saw the figure of Carlisle Cullen standing and looking at her carefully.

Opening her mouth to speak, only a moan escaped her lips.

Immediately he was by her side.  “Don’t speak, Isabella,” he whispered to her in the moonlight.  “You’re dying.”

She closed her eyes.  She already knew this.

“You were crushed by a carriage on the way home from the Netherfield Ball.”

Shivering in the cold, Bella closed in on herself. 

“Do you want to live?” Carlisle asked her, and Bella opened her eyes again, barely slits, and looked at him in astonishment. 

How could he ask her that?  After everything that had happened?  After how Darcy had treated her?  How could she still live with such a man when death was now an option?

Hesitantly, Carlisle reached out and stroked her hair.

She could barely feel the sensation from the stickiness of blood that coated her scalp.

Bella was surprised she hadn’t fainted from the overwhelming smell of it.

“I love you,” Carlisle whispered, and Bella opened her eyes to look at him.  “If you could come and live with me, would you?”  Their gazes locked and hesitantly, Bella nodded, the barest of movements, but enough so Carlisle caught it.

He smiled at her, a small, private smile.

He gently reached out to pick her up, and she moaned as her broken bones slid against each other painfully.

“Hush, my love,” he whispered.  “I am taking you somewhere safe.”  Tucking her head under his chin, he looked around once to take in the lay of the land and then carried her quickly, so quickly Bella could not take in where they were going, off into the woods.

All Bella knew was that she was lying on a bed and that she was bathed, her arms and legs carefully reset.  The process was painful, but she only whimpered at Carlisle’s careful ministrations.

The sun came up over the cottage where he had taken her, and through the windows, Carlisle seemed almost to sparkle in the sunlight.

She drifted off to sleep at some point—and that was when the pain began. The searing, agonizing pain in her blood.  It was so painful that Bella wanted to scream her heart out, but if she knew that she did, she would never stop screaming until her lungs gave out.

So she lay there, silent, as the pain coursed through her, aware that Carlisle was sitting beside her the entire time, holding her hand.

Her white silk ballgown had been discarded long before this, torn and stained with blood, and Bella could feel the smooth texture of cotton against her skin.

Still the pain raged onward, her very blood licked with flames. 

Onward and onward and onward, until, one evening, her heart stopped and her eyes opened, and she was no longer herself anymore.

The End.