Chapter 16 #2
"Then we remove the reason." Damon's voice had taken on the precise, unhurried quality it carried when his mind was working a problem it had already half solved.
"Clark believes in this case — he has proven that already.
If he and the magistrate can be persuaded to offer Henry a reduced sentence in exchange for a full and formal confession, naming every man involved, then Henry has something worth the risk of speaking.
And if the sentence is served somewhere far enough from London — Scotland, or better still, Ireland — these men's reach becomes considerably shorter than it is here. "
"You thought of all of that," Elizabeth said, "in three days?"
"I had very little else to occupy me," Damon said.
"Beyond fear, and brandy, and a great deal of pacing.
We must move as quickly as the law will permit us to move.
Faster, if we can manage it. They convicted me in under three weeks precisely because speed left me no time to build a defense before the door had already shut.
I intend to return the favor." Something flickered behind his eyes — not quite triumph, but close to it.
"Let them discover, for once, what it feels like to run out of time before they have finished making their arrangements. "
Charles was nodding slowly by the time he finished. "It could work. It is not without risk, but it could work."
Elizabeth reached for Damon's hand.
"I love you," she said, quietly, apart from the strategy of the moment, as though she had been waiting for a pause large enough to say it properly.
"I love you as well," he said. "I have, I think, for rather longer than either of us has been willing to admit aloud." He held her gaze a moment. "Do we have enough to win this? If Henry names them?"
"I may have an answer." She drew a folded page from her satchel — the same satchel with the false bottom Charles had built for her years before believing, at the time, that its purpose was entirely theoretical.
"Four days before the attack, I found something in the records at the financial house. The company that supplies household security for estates across the city — the one whose guard list your household used, the one Henry's false name appeared on — is privately held. It is funded, in significant part, by military money.’’
Then she pointed one of the papers and said: "I found this. Duke of Alderton — the one Henry gave us, alongside the others."
Damon's face hardened the instant he saw it.
"That old snake." His voice had gone flat, cold. "We played cards together the night everything happened. He sat across the table from me for the better part of an hour."
"There was another name," Elizabeth said. "One that seems to hold the power behind closed doors. The one that makes the decisions is General Harwood."
Damon went very still.
"Harwood?" His eyes had sharpened, something old moving behind them. "The one with the scar along his chin?"
"You know him."
"I know precisely who he is." He was quiet for a moment, the shape of something long buried finally surfacing whole.
"Do you remember the story I told you — the maid, at my parents' function.
The one my mother defended, publicly, and my father banned the man responsible from every house he held influence over. "
"I remember," Elizabeth said.
"Harwood was that man." Damon said it slowly, as though testing whether the years had changed the weight of the name. "The one my mother humiliated without raising her voice. The one my father struck from every list, every club, every door that mattered to him."
Charles let out a slow breath. "That explains everything."
"He held that grudge for decades," Damon said. "Waiting, apparently, for precisely this."
"We can win this," Charles said, and there was something almost fierce in it now, a satisfaction he did not often permit himself to show. He looked at Elizabeth. "Well done, my dear. Truly."
He paused, and something gentler entered his voice.
"Though next time, I would ask that you not risk everything for a piece of evidence, however valuable. Whatever we win because of tonight is not worth what it might have cost."
"I know, Uncle."
Charles turned to Damon then, something like respect in his expression that had not been there quite so plainly before.
"And you," he said. "That was well reasoned. Quick, and sound, and precisely the sort of thinking this case has needed from the start."
Damon inclined his head. "I learned from the best."
Charles collected his coat.
"I will speak with Clark," he said. "And the magistrate, if Clark can be persuaded first. If there is any way to strike this bargain before Harwood and his old snake of a duke realize how close we have come, I intend to find it tonight rather than tomorrow."
He was at the door before either of them answered.
"Do try," he added, glancing back, "not to have any further adventures while I am gone."
Then he was gone, and the house was quiet again, and for the first time in a great while, the quiet did not feel like something either of them needed to fear.
◆◆◆
Once the door had shut behind Charles, Elizabeth crossed to Damon and kissed him — unhurried, certain, the kind of kiss that carried no fear in it at all.
"Say it," Elizabeth said. "Whatever you have been carrying these three days. I would rather have it now than watch you decide against it for my sake."
Damon was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was level, and that was somehow worse than anger would have been.
"I keep returning to the coat."
"The coat?"
"You came home with a new coat, and I admired it.
I told you the color suited you — and it did, and I meant it — and the whole time there was a name in the bottom of your satchel that men have since tried to kill you for carrying.
" He did not raise his voice. He did not move toward her.
"I am not angry that you dug, Elizabeth.
I would have done the same, and we both know it.
I am not even angry that you concealed it — though we shall have to disagree, someday, about whether declining to volunteer is truly different from lying.
What I cannot set down is this." He looked at her directly.
"I have performed for every room I have ever entered.
Every room but the ones with you in them.
You are the one person alive I stopped performing for.
And for weeks, you were performing for me — and you were good at it, and I never once saw it, and three days ago I learned from your uncle that the woman I love had been attacked. "
Elizabeth did not flinch, and she did not look away, because she had spent three days knowing this conversation was owed and had decided, somewhere in the course of them, that she would not cheapen it by defending herself first.
"If I had told you, you would not have stopped me — I know that now, though I did not trust it then.
But you would have insisted on carrying it with me.
Or in my place. You had guards at your door and your neck barely out of the noose, and every hour you spent fearing for me was an hour those men won without lifting a finger.
" Her voice remained steady, but something underneath it had begun to cost her.
"And there is a truer answer beneath that one, which you have earned.
I built my whole life on a distinction — that withholding is not deceit.
It has served me in every courtroom and every drawing room in London.
I did not notice that it had followed me home until I was in that lane, with a stranger's hand around my arm, thinking — of all the things a person might think at such a moment — that if I died there, you would learn everything from my uncle afterward, and the last true thing I had ever shown you would be a coat. "
The words sat in the room between them.
"I would like to ask you to promise me it will not happen again," Damon said at last.
"I would like to promise it," Elizabeth said. "I am not certain I would keep it. I will not hand you a comfortable lie simply to close an argument — you would see through it within a week, and then we would be here again, with less honesty than we have now.''