Page 42 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

"Settled. I told you so. Do not make me say it twice!"

Fitzwilliam laughed against her mouth and kissed her again, slower this time. His hand found the small of her back and drew her in against him. There was no space left between them for anything unsaid.

He rode for London at first light, with Richard beside him, to make the trial ready.

Two nights later, a little after two in the morning, the screaming began. Elizabeth was out of bed before she understood what she was hearing. A person? No. A horse. The cry was high, furious, and young. It rang off every wall of the yard. Under it came the boom of small hooves against stall boards and a man's voice shouting in the yard.

Nell!

And Alban slept in that stall! She had allowed it because Henson slept at the end of the aisle and Pratt over the tack room. The stable had seemed the best-guarded place at Netherfield.

Elizabeth was down the stairs with her wrapper half on and her feet bare on the cold stone. She had the side door open before reason caught up with her. A woman in her nightclothes, reason suggested, was not the reinforcement the situation wanted. Reason was too late.

The stable yard was lantern-light and moving shadows. Corporal Pratt stood at the paddock fence with a pistol in his hand, pointed at nothing, because the nothing had already gone. Mr. Henson was at the stable door in his shirt, a lamp held high. Behind him stood Leo Darter, thirteen and barefoot, holding a pitchfork the wrong way up. And in the doorway of Miss Maisie's stall stood Alban, broom leveled at the dark. Nell was behind him, still screaming her small head off, and Miss Maisie was behind Nell, wearing the expression of a mother who intended to bite the next thing that moved.

"Alban."

"I am not hurt." He said it before she could ask, which meant he knew why she had come running. "Nell heard him first."

"Heard whom?"

"A man at the west fence, ma'am." Pratt uncocked the pistol and let his arm down. He was breathing hard. "Coming over quiet, along the hedge, out of the moon. Making for the stable, ma'am, not the house. I'd not have seen him for another minute. But the young one there set up a noise to wake the parish, and he broke and ran. There was a horse waiting for him in the lane. He was gone before I reached the gate."

"Did you see his face?"

"No, ma'am. Dark clothes. Moved light. That were no vagrant after hens."

Henson lifted the lamp toward the west fence and said nothing, and his silence agreed. How had the man known where to come? Someone had watched long enough to learn where the boy slept.

Elizabeth stood in the freezing yard with her heart hammering, and made herself look at each thing in turn. The fence. The lane. The boy, whole, indignant, and gloriously alive. The foal, who had stopped screaming now that the excitement was over and was attempting to eat the head of Alban's broom.

"She smelled him," Alban said. His voice was fierce with pride. "I told you, Mrs. Darcy. I told you she would know the bad ones. She is not even a fortnight old and she caught him and Mr. Pratt has a pistol and never caught him."

"That will do," said Pratt, without heat.

"She ought to have extra oats."

"It is two in the morning," Elizabeth said. "Nobody is having oats!"

Nell abandoned the broom and bit Henson.

It was, all told, a strange company that stood in the lantern-light at two in the morning. A corporal, a stable master and a barefoot lady stood beside two boys armed with a broom and a pitchfork. All of them had been saved the trouble of tragedy by a creature too young and too stupid to know what danger was, who had simply objected, at the top of her lungs, to a smell she did not like.

Elizabeth did not sleep again that night. Graves had slashed Mrs. Darter's silk. Tonight his man had come over a fence thirty yards from the boy Elizabeth had begun to think of as her son.

She sat at her window and watched the yard until the sky went from black to iron. The question turned over and over with her heartbeat. Three times now. A rider watching the house, a man asking at the gate by daylight, and a man coming over the fence by dark. What did it mean, when a careful man stopped being careful?

It meant he was in a hurry. But why?

She learned why at eleven the next morning, when Fitzwilliam's groom rode in from London.

She knew Fitzwilliam's hand before the servant crossed the room. From the direction, bold, fast and heavier than his custom, she knew the news was bad. He had been back in London three days, at Thornton's elbow, making the trial ready. Jane was with her in the morning room. Elizabeth broke the seal and read standing.

My dearest Elizabeth,

I promised you bad news undressed, so here it is, plain. The locket is gone.

It was not a broken window. Graves does not break windows. He found Thornton's junior clerk, a young man called Fenner, underpaid and in debt to a gaming house in Holborn. Someone paid the debt. Last night Fenner opened the safe he was trusted with, took the locket, and altered two entries in the evidence log. By morning his lodgings were empty. Graves did not reach into the safe. He reached into the man.