He continued, relentless. “Tell me, ‘Miss Bennet,’ when you wrote this letter, did you consider—for even a moment—that the men who killed the Prime Minister might still be watching your friends? That they might not have fallen for the same ‘holiday with the Queen’ ruse that fooled your father? That there are people who do not wish for you to speak?”
She hesitated. It was brief. Almost imperceptible.
But he saw it. And he felt sick.
Because she had not thought of it then.
She had not thought of it at all.
She swallowed, her eyes flashing up to him. “And what would you have had me do? Pretend my friends do not exist? Let them worry for me? Assume I have vanished off the face of the earth?”
“Yes,” he said flatly.
Her nostrils flared. “That is—”
“Necessary.”
She let out a sharp breath, lurching back in her chair as if he had struck her.
Darcy turned away, pacing a few steps. He could not bear to look at her just now, not when anger still clawed at his chest like an unrelenting beast.
Not when fear still gripped him, despite his best efforts to force it down.
“I thought it would help.”
Darcy whirled. “What?”
Elizabeth closed her eyes, and a single tear leaked down her cheek. Genuine or not, at this point, he did not care. Or, at least, heshouldnot care.
“I thought if Charlotte had word from me, she would not worry. That she would corroborate the story put out by Her Majesty, and no one would be the wiser.”
Darcy’s shoulders sagged. “Truly? Or are you inventing this tale now, after you have been found out, to make yourself look less culpable?”
She raised her gaze to him. “You hold such a dim view of a lady’s intellect that you truly believe such a creature wouldnotbe suspicious if her friend disappeared? You think a woman like Lady Charlotte Wrexham, or her mother, the Duchess—whobothknew what I saw that day in the House of Commons—would not find it slightly alarming that I was suddenly ‘spirited away with the Queen’s ladies’?.”
Darcy swallowed. “I am certain Her Majesty—”
“Knows nothing of me!” she finished for him. “Do you suppose Her Majesty knows how I part my hair? Whether I prefer cream or lemon in my tea? That I have my own funny way of crossing my writing in correspondence, that I misspell the word ‘harbor’ every third time I write it?”
He stared at her. Of course not. He had not thought—had not cared—about cream or lemon. About the quirks of handwriting or the pattern of errors in a word. He cared only for her safety. For silence. For simplicity.
Elizabeth pushed on, her voice trembling but firm. “Do you imagine her secretaries can forge a friendship? The kind that knows when you are frightened from the way you sign your name?”
Darcy opened his mouth, but there was nothing to say.
He turned from her, jaw tight, the letter still crumpled slightly in his fingers. The blasted thing had compromised everything—and yet she sat there, explaining how she had meant well, as if that erased the danger.
“It was not your place,” he muttered, barely trusting himself to speak at all.
“And yetIwas the one who was taken,” she said. “Not you. Not Her Majesty.Me.”
Darcy’s spine stiffened. She was right.
It did not make her actions less reckless. It did not absolve the risk. But it reminded him that all his caution, all his careful guarding, had come after the fact. She was the one who had witnessed a horror, and had her life upended because of it.
“Iwastrying to help,” she added softly, the light catching the shards of amber in her eyes as she turned her face toward the window. “To keep someone from worrying unnecessarily and stirring up the sort of gossip we wished to avoid.”
Darcy stared at her profile—so calm, so stubborn. She had disobeyed his orders—orders meant to keep her alive. She had endangered herself, as well as the entire Bennet family. But in her mind, she had done it to protect the thin lie that was currently keeping her hidden.
