They both knew the love which bound them together.They both knew that their future would be the two of them together.It was an unspoken thing; it waited for the right moment, a moment when Darcy felt his duty of honor to protect her had been fulfilled.But if he waited too long for such a moment, Elizabeth thought to herself saucily, she would just use her arts and allurements to convince him that it was time.
Chapter Nine
Lord Lachglass stood in the alcove of a mullioned window in his large townhouse.The light from the afternoon sun fell on his back, keeping his face and his broken nose in shadow.Lachglass kept his face impassive as Mr.Blight snivelingly sniveled out his report.
He always kept his ruined face still and impassive now, because it hurt less.And Lord Lachglass tired of the taste of his own blood occasionally dribbling out the back of his nostrils and down his throat.
Why did he keep a man like Blight as his man of business if Blight couldn’tdo what was demanded?Spitey Blighty had uselessly trailed the carriage, and waved Miss Bennet a fare-thee-well, as she and Mr.Darcy sailed away.With his cousin Soldier Dickie— Lachglass’s mind, like an ostrich hiding its head in the sand, pushed all thought of General Fitzwilliam away.Don’t remember how he looked.Soldier Dickie wouldn’t ever really kill you, Aunt Fitzwilly loves me too much to let her son do that.
Mr.Blight finished.Spitey Blighty.
The man of business observed his still master, who carefully breathed through his mouth.Blight’s beady eyes looked vaguely worried.He was clearly angry himself at his sniveling failing.Blighty’s cheekbone had not broken, but there was still a giant swollen blue bruise, which made the scar swell up grotesquely.Blight had told Lachglass his father had cut that scar in his face before he killed the man.Lachglass did not believe that story though.
Spitey Blighty sometimes lied, even to him.
Lachglass said nothing.
“Well.”Blight rubbed his hands together, like Pilate after condemning Christ.“There is the end of it.She’s gone; out of the country.Don’t speak the French myself, but could try and follow them, and—”
“To France.To France.To France!”A sharp pain cracked in Lachglass’s nose at his scream as the rage took him, but he barely felt it, even though blood dripped out his nostrils again.“You let theslut whoreescape to France.”
Lachglass delicately pressed a fresh silk handkerchief to his bleeding nose.
Blight held up his hands defensively.“Ten soldiers.Ten of em, didn’t respect the law none at all, they didn’t.They rode right over the Bow Street Runner and—”
“She got away!You fucking let her get away!”
Mr.Blight submissively chose to make no further defense of himself, yet there was that in his manner which suggested to his master that Blighty considered the blame placed principally upon him entirely unreasonable.
Lachglass forced himself to calm.
Spitey Blighty had told him he ought to get the warrant first, andthenbother Darcy.But he’d been too full of laughter and hope at the prospect of seizing Swinging Lizzy to listen.
He regretted it now, but he still loved the look on Darcy’s face as he sneered at the man for getting refused by agoverness— a governess who was, in Lachglass’s disinterested opinion, a whore.
Lachglass would confess that in honesty, he consideredallwomen whores, at least till they were so old that no one discriminating would want to rut with them.
He let out a breath and painted again in his mind the comforting thought: Marching that pretty governess out to the scaffold.Watching the hangman put the noose round her neck, as she whimpered and begged for mercy.
He could hear her whimpers:I don’t want to die.I don’t want to die.Please, just let me live one more day.
With a thin smile Lachglass removed his handkerchief from his nose and looked at his red blood.It felt like the nose had stopped bleeding again.That was the best part of the fantasy: The whimpers ofI don’t want to die.Pleases don’t make me die.But he then followed it with his mind the rest of the way through.
The lever pulled.The sharp crack of a neck breaking.The cheering of the crowd, as he stood on the platform and promised the rabble who’d gathered to see Miss Elizabeth Bennet off that he’d tap a barrel of wine for them to toast her death.
Lachglass let out a deep breath.His useless anger was gone.
But he hated that this vision in his mind might never come to pass.Heneededto see her dead.Needed it more than he needed another woman.
It was the way he’d fought off the doctor’s demands that he take laudanum, by imagining her hanging again and again.He didn’t like laudanum.His father had been addicted to the poppy juice, and he did not want to follow down that dark path.
But it seemed to him that there was nothing he could do.
The French, tyrants they were, had treaties with most of their neighbors, and with the rebellious colonies in America where each side would hand over common criminals in their territory to the other if they were asked.But Britain, free independent Britain, glorious Britain had signed no such treaties.Which meant Elizabeth was gone, gone beyond his hope of revenge, unless he did hire a killer to stab her in the back.
But that was by no means certain… and Lord Lachglass flinched from that course.It would not satisfy him.
He wanted to watch her swing.He wanted to hear her whimpering for mercy that the hard court, that the hanging judge he would find to try her, would never give.Above all he wanted to see the despair in her eyes before she died; he wanted to watch those pretty sparkling eyes, so alive, go dark and glassy.
