Fight #3
Boots — several pairs, moved to the door as a unit.
She heard Darcy’s voice once more, quieter now, saying something she could not make out.
The sound of the front door being opened.
The cold draught of it moving through the inn even up here.
Then boots on the cobbles in the yard. Then horses, moving off down the road.
Richard turned her from the stair with both hands on her shoulders.
“Listen to me,” he said, his voice flat with containment.
“We cannot stay. They will take him to Aberdeen at first light. He is too important a prisoner to ride south overland — they will put him on a naval cutter and run him to the Thames under sealed orders, which means a vessel is already lying in Aberdeen harbour waiting for them. They will sail with the evening tide at the latest. We have until then, and not a moment past it, to be out of this country ourselves. There is a London packet that takes the morning tide out of Aberdeen — a commercial run, passengers and mail, the usual traffic. If we ride now, we will reach the harbour before dawn, and I can buy us passage in coin. We will be at sea before they bring him down to the dock. Do you understand me?”
She nodded.
“And what are your intentions, Mrs Darcy?”
Elizabeth blinked. “My… what do you mean, my intentions?”
“I mean precisely what I have said. I am putting you on that packet at first light. We will be in London by the end of the week, weather permitting. Three days, four if the wind turns. What I do with you after that depends entirely upon the answer you give me now, so think before you speak.”
“Colonel, I do not see what there is to think about. He is my husband!”
“That is not an answer. Many a woman has had a husband and very little notion of what to do with him once he was in trouble. I am asking you what you intend to do with yours.”
She stared at him.
“I will tell you what your choices are, since you appear not to know them. I can take you to your uncle in Pentonville. You will be received there with kindness and no questions, and you will pass the next months in retirement until the matter is concluded one way or another, and your name will be kept clear of it so far as I can manage. If that is what you want, say so now, and I shall see to it. You will be safe. You will see your sisters. You will have nothing to do with what happens to him until the verdict is read, and possibly not even then.”
“That is not —”
“I have not finished. The other option is that I take you to Matlock House.
To my father. You will not be received with kindness there because my father is a fair man, but not one who deals in kindness.
You will not be in retirement because there will be no retirement available to a woman who has chosen the other path.
You will be brought into a fight, Mrs Darcy.
You will be asked to give evidence of the most humiliating kind.
You will be asked questions by solicitors and barristers and by men of considerably less polish than those, and you will be expected to answer them without flinching.
You will visit my cousin in the Tower of London, in a room with a guard in it, in front of strangers, and you will conduct yourself as becomes the name
Mrs Darcy. You will do this for as many weeks or months as it takes, and at the end of it, he may still hang, and you will have spent yourself for nothing.”
He stopped. “Pentonville is the kinder option. I shall not think less of you if you choose it. But I need to know now, before we are on the road, because the two roads do not run together and I cannot turn the carriage round once we are halfway down one of them.”
She drew in a breath. “Colonel —”
“Not yet. Think, Mrs Darcy.”
She thought.
She thought of the house in Pentonville — of the small fire in the parlour and Mary at the pianoforte and Kitty at her drawing and Aunt Gardiner calling in twice a week to manage her mother’s nerves.
She thought of being received there in mourning clothes for a man whose death had not yet happened and might yet not, of sitting in a parlour while the verdict was decided by other people in other rooms, of being told the outcome by letter weeks after it was final.
She thought of Matlock House. Of a family she had never met. Of being put into a coach to the Tower in a borrowed gown. Of barristers’ questions. Of strangers’ eyes. Of conducting herself, in a guarded room, as the wife of a man who was supposed to be dead.
She had her answer before she had finished thinking. She had had it on the half-landing with Richard’s hand on her mouth, possibly before. The thinking was only the ordering of what she already knew.
“Take me to your father, Colonel. I am going to fight for my husband.”
Richard held her eyes for an instant longer. Then he gave one short nod, the kind of nod a soldier gives to another soldier who has just enlisted for an action neither of them is going to enjoy.
“Then we ride. Now. Get dressed.”