Despite its dourness, nature, even nature trimmed to its best effect, was to Elizabeth an old, comforting friend.
Gasping breaths.
Elizabeth collapsed onto a wrought iron bench hidden by two trees overlooking the Serpentine lake in the middle of Hyde Park, where royal swans swam, and where in December the pregnant wife of Byron’s atheist friend Percy Shelley, abandoned by her new lover, had thrown herself in the lake and been found water logged and very dead the next day.
Her lungs ached.
Her fingers tingled.Her legs shook and screamed with pain.The twisted foot, after supporting her for the entire run, ached deep inside.
Elizabeth was cold.
Drizzles of rain mixed with ice and the occasional flurry of snow attacked her.The frozen water melted instantly on the ground or her soaked through cotton dress.
The light crinkling sound of a breaking vase.The vase striking his head.Was that crack she now clearly remembered his head breaking, or the ceramic of the vase breaking?
The earl’s mobile, lively, self-indulgent face.Still and bloody.
Elizabeth vomited, leaving acid and food on the brown winter ground.Her vomit steamed in the cold for a moment.Her throat burned.She looked around her sightlessly.
Still seeing the still earl.Still trying to know if she had killed him.
She probably had.
The pugilist master that had told her how easy it was to accidentally kill a man with a blow to the head.
She’d had no choice.
Her head was sore.Elizabeth touched for a moment the top of her unbonneted hair, and flinched her hand away.The top of her head felt bruised and sore where she had struck his face.This brought a smirk to her face for a moment.If her forehead hurt this much, he would hurt far more.
Except he couldn’t.
Elizabeth forced herself to stand.
Cold grey sleety day.She had neither coat, nor gloves, nor boots.Her indoor slippers had been mutilated by her run.No purse, no reticule, no money, no anything that would do as a substitute.The day was not cold enough that she would freeze to death — perhaps not even after night fell — but she was miserably cold and shivering.
Elizabeth could barely stand.The injured foot twisted under her, and the other leg felt rubbery and shook under the weight of her body.
Elizabeth collapsed back onto the weathered wooden slats of the bench.
She closed her eyes, and tears started to prickle in her eyes.She should just sit here for a while.
Too cold to sit still; too hurt to move.
She would go numb and stiff if she stayed long.Bizarrely, given the weather, she and her dress had become soaked in sweat during her run, and she smelled like an untidy barn now.
The Gardiners.They were a long walk away, and she needed to start now.
A few overcoated walkers took advantage of the beauty of the park, giving her strange glances from across their sideburns.
Less than a mile to the south-east was St.James’s Park, with the Queen’s House in the old Buckingham House on one side of the park, and St.James’s Palace on the other side.To the south of that were the houses of parliament, and to the east were the slums around Covent Garden, and past that the old city of London, with Gracechurch Street right in the center, a few hundred feet from the Thames and the old London Bridge.
She would walk there as fast as she could.Perhaps it was already too late, but she thought if she hurried to Gracechurch Street she would be able to get there before anyone raised a proper alarm and soldiers or Bow Street Runners were directed by the servants and Mr.Blight to wait for her at her aunt and uncle’s house.She would be able to gain from them some ready cash, a coat, and some food before she had to figure out how to disappear from the chase that would seek to find and hang the murderer of an earl.
Elizabeth stood once again on her unsteady feet.
She would not be able to walk the entire distance this way, but a branch on one of the overhanging oaks was thin enough for her to snap off in the cold that made the branch brittle and dry.
Elizabeth hobbled to the tree, and gripped her chosen staff.
