Page 144 of Faceless

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.”

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.