Fight #2
It was Richard. She had not heard him come.
She had not seen him appear. He had her against him with one arm locked across her body and his hand crushed over her lips, and he was stronger than she had imagined any man being, and she could not have made a sound if her life had depended on it, and for one wild moment she fought him — twisted, pushed, tried to wrench free and go down the stair to the man whose name had just been spoken aloud in a stranger’s mouth — and Richard only tightened his hold and bore her backward into the shadow of the passage and held her there.
“What are they doing? How did they —” The colonel moved to look past her, no doubt trying to hear or see what was going on below, and she saw her opportunity. She slipped his grasp and tore free.
She had got halfway down the back stair before he caught her again, and the next step would have put her past the turn and into sight of the parlour door, which stood open.
“What the devil are you trying to do, get you both killed?” he growled under his breath. “Stay here!”
“But how did they —”
His hand clamped over her mouth again. Elizabeth’s heart was pulsing in her throat.
Richard’s hand stayed over her mouth — he did not trust her to even breathe on her own — and all she could do was watch and listen.
Through the gap, she could see them — three uniformed backs in a half-circle, the lieutenant in profile holding a folded paper, and beyond him, between two of the soldiers, the dark coat and the line of shoulder she would have known in any room.
Darcy. Standing in his shirtsleeves and his unfastened waistcoat.
Not yet in his coat. Not yet taken hold of.
She shook her head and got her mouth open.
Richard’s hand was over it before the cry left her, and his arm came round her waist and lifted her bodily off the stair, and he carried her two strides backward into the dark of the upper passage and pinned her against the wall there with the whole of his weight before she could brace herself. “Not a sound!” he hissed.
She fought him. She drove her elbow back into his ribs and got nothing but a tightening of his grip; she clawed at the hand over her mouth, and his fingers only pressed harder; she got one foot free and kicked at his shin, and he absorbed it without a sound.
“Devil take it!” He swore close to her ear. “For God’s sake, be quiet and listen. They came up from Craighead. Must have been only an hour or two behind me, and when they found Auchengray abandoned, they followed us here. I came up to warn Darcy, but it was too late to get him out.”
The voice that answered the lieutenant from below was level and unhurried, and it carried clearly enough that she heard each word through the boards.
“You have the advantage of me, sir. I do not know that name.”
“You will not deny it has been given you.”
“I will deny anything that is not put before me as a question. Whose name am I being given, and on what evidence?”
“A warrant from the Home Office on a charge of high treason. You will come with us.”
“I shall come with you on any warrant lawfully presented. I shall not answer to a name I have not been shown reason to claim. You may put that on your record before we leave this room.”
She heaved against Richard’s arm with everything she had left and got a strangled half-sound out from under his palm before he crushed it back.
He hauled her further into the passage, away from the head of the stair, and his mouth came down to her ear, and his whisper was fierce and low and utterly without softness.
“Mrs Darcy!”
She went still.
Not by choice. The two words went into her body before they reached her mind.
She had never been called it. Not once, in six months.
The name she had married into and never been permitted to own growled from his cousin’s mouth like a hand closing on the back of her neck, and her body answered to it before her will had assembled itself. She stopped fighting him.
“Listen to me.” His whisper was at her ear, his hand still over her mouth, his arm still locked across her ribs.
“The reason he is down there, right now, is because he would rather let them arrest him in his shirt sleeves than let them come to the room and find you with him. The moment those soldiers know you are here, see you together, you make yourself a target, too. He is buying your safety down there with every word he is not saying. Your part is not to throw it away. Do you understand me?”
She could not answer. His hand was on her mouth.
He shook her once, hard. “Do you understand me? You are an intelligent woman, Mrs Darcy. You have to trust him.”
She nodded against his palm. It was all the movement he had left her.
His hand came away from her mouth slowly, testing, ready to clamp down again. She did not cry out. She drew breath through her teeth, and the breath shook, and she did not cry out.
She could not see her husband from where Richard had pinned her, but she knew it — knew it the way she knew the sound of his step, knew that he was standing in the parlour being arrested.
Richard’s hand was at her elbow now, no longer pinning her, only holding her in place against the wall.
He had moved enough that she could see past him to the head of the back stair.
She could not see Darcy from this angle.
She could see only the flicker of candlelight from the parlour and the shadow of one soldier crossing it.
“They will bring him out the front,” Richard breathed against her temple. “Not this way. Stay where you are.”