Page 44 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

Three weeks after the locket vanished, Richard rode up the Netherfield drive with a clerk from the Crown beside him. The clerk had brought pens, a traveling desk, and a great deal of paper. Tomorrow morning Lady Catherine de Bourgh was to swear her deposition.

Anne was waiting at the top of the stairs. She did not say good afternoon. "Cousin. Come up. Now, please."

He took the stairs two at a time and left the clerk to find his own way to the library. "What is it?"

"A physician came yesterday." Anne walked fast for Anne, one hand on the wall. "From London. He had a letter of introduction from your father. He said the Earl wished her ladyship examined before she gave her evidence, so the Crown might have a certificate that she was unfit to travel."

"My father sent a physician?"

"So the letter said. He examined her. He was very kind. He left her a composing draught, to settle her nerves before the swearing." Anne stopped outside the sickroom door. Her face was white with anger. "Three doses since yesterday noon. Mrs. Jenkinson gave them, because the letter was from the Earl and she did not like to refuse. Richard, look at her."

He went in.

Lady Catherine lay against the bolsters with her mouth a little open. Her good hand was loose on the coverlet. For weeks that hand had been a fist. Her eyes opened when he said her name, drifted toward him, and closed again.

"Aunt."

Her lips moved. Nothing came.

Mrs. Jenkinson stood by the window with a brown glass bottle in both hands. She had been crying. "I did not know, Colonel," she said. "He said it was only to calm her. A spoonful at each dose, he said. She would not take the first one. She told him it was muck. He said the Earl particularly wished it."

"May I?"

She gave him the bottle.

He drew the cork and smelled it, and his stomach turned. He had smelled that sweetness in field hospitals in Portugal. In the tents where men were kept quiet until they died. "Laudanum," he said. "And a great deal of it."

"He said a spoonful," Mrs. Jenkinson whispered. "Was that wrong, sir?"

"For nerves, a physician gives drops, ma'am. A few, in water." Richard held the bottle to the window. More than half of it was gone. "In Portugal I watched a surgeon give a man a spoonful before he took off his leg. Another night of this and she would have slept and not woken. Every physician in Hertfordshire would have written a second apoplexy on the certificate. Who questions a stroke in a woman who has already had one?"

Anne had come to stand at his elbow. "She has not practiced her words since yesterday. Not once. For weeks she has not missed a single night." Her voice shook and she let it. "Tomorrow she was to swear what she knows. He meant her never to see it."

Richard corked the bottle very carefully. His hands wanted to do something violent to it. "Where is this physician?"

"Gone back to London. He said he would call again on Thursday. To see how she did."

"To sign for her death, you mean." Richard's voice was flat. "He will not call again." He turned to Mrs. Jenkinson. "You still have the letter of introduction?"

"On the mantel, sir."

It was a single sheet, folded once, on good paper. Richard read it standing by the fire. The Earl of Matlock begs the favor of Lady Catherine de Bourgh's household in receiving his physician, who comes at his particular request. A secretary's signature he did not know.

He knew his father's secretary. He knew his father's seal. This was neither!

And the hand was small, angular, and careful.

Where had he seen that hand? Once, over Darcy's shoulder at Thornton's desk. Your officer will find these rooms adequate and discreet. A friend.

"Richard?" Anne said.

"My father has never sent a physician to anyone in his life," Richard said. "He sends bills. And my father's secretary cannot spell 'particular.' This man has spelled it correctly." He folded the letter into his coat. "Graves wrote this."

Anne sat down hard on the chair by the bed.

Richard was beside her before he had decided to move. "Anne."

"I let him in," she said. "I stood in that doorway and let him in, because he had your father's name. I have kept every door in this house for two months. I let him in."