Page 46 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

The officer held up a page from the grate. Half of it was ash. Down the surviving edge ran a column of payments in a small, careful hand. Richard read the last line aloud. "To the doctor, for attendance in Hertfordshire."

Graves said nothing.

Richard held up the letter of introduction. "Did you write this?"

Graves glanced at it. His face did not change. "I am a solicitor, Colonel. I write a great many things."

"You forged my father's name to it. You sent a man to dose a paralyzed woman until she stopped breathing, and let the world call it apoplexy. Your hand is on this letter, on that account, and on a note in a prosecutor's drawer. Your clerk fetched the laudanum from Fetter Lane. It will hang your client, and it will do you no good at all."

"Then I shall not waste your time denying it." Graves took his coat from the back of his chair and put it on, quite unhurried. He held out his wrists to the officer. "Newgate, I suppose?"

"Newgate."

"It is very cold in November." He looked at the deed boxes, and at the officer on his knees by the grate. Something close to amusement crossed his pleasant face. "You have been thorough, Colonel. I congratulate you. But you are too late for one thing."

"And what is that?"

"My client is a gentleman of education," said Graves. "He has his own pen."

They took him down the stairs between them. The street was dark and nearly empty. A hackney was waiting at the curb.

Richard stood on the pavement after it had gone, with the smell of burned paper in his coat. He had got the man! He had got the boxes, or most of them. Thornton would be up all night reading.

So why did he feel no better?

He has his own pen.

Braithwaite sat in his cell without a solicitor now. He had no clerk, and no hand outside the walls that he could trust. A cornered man with nothing left to spend.

What did such a man write, Richard wondered, when there was no one left to write it for him?

CHAPTER 15

The trial was to begin on Monday, and by Sunday evening the whole of Elizabeth's world had moved itself to London.

Six weeks had passed since the locket vanished from Thornton's safe. Six weeks of letters and depositions and guards at gates. For the last three of them Graves had sat in Newgate while Thornton read his half-burned papers by candlelight. Now December lay gray and wet over the city. The Lords were convened, and there was nothing left to prepare.

The Darcy townhouse stood with its knocker off and its shutters closed. Thornton wanted the Crown's witnesses where no one would think to look, and a great house in Mayfair was the first place anyone would look.

Lady Catherine remained at Netherfield with Mrs. Jenkinson and four of Gill's men at the doors. Her deposition lay sworn in the Attorney General's box. Mr. Jones, the Meryton apothecary, had attended her since she came to Netherfield. Since the laudanum, he mixed every draught himself and let no one else near her cup. He said another journey might kill her, and for once no one had argued. Anne had stayed beside her mother. She had written to say she was sorry to miss the gallery, and that her mother needed her more.

Elizabeth had chosen the Gardiners'. Fitzwilliam had not argued. The narrow house on Gracechurch Street was where the search for Lydia had ended. Her own steadiness lived there, in the smell of tea and her aunt's unhurried hands. On the last nights before she stood up in front of England, she wanted her aunt's roof.

Mrs. Gardiner gave them the spare room. Alban had a truckle bed in the nursery, and Corporal Pratt a pallet inside the street door. Her father took rooms two streets off and walked over every morning before the children were up.

She went to bed at eleven. Fitzwilliam sat up over the case papers until past midnight, then fell asleep at last with one arm across her. At one, mind whirring, she slid out from under it.

The breakfast parlor still held the warmth of the banked fire, and it was not empty. Her uncle sat at the table in his dressing gown with a candle. Before him was a plate of bread and butter. He had plainly been arguing with the ceiling.

"I could not sleep either," Elizabeth said.

"I never can, the night before a ship comes in." He cut her a slice of bread. "Your aunt maintains I have not once slept the night before anything in six-and-twenty years. Sit."

She sat. The bread was good. The clock ticked.

Her uncle watched the candle for a while, and she could see him deciding something. "There is a thing I have never told you," he said at last. "I had meant to carry it to the grave, and then I heard you would stand before the Lords on Monday, and it has been sitting on my chest ever since."

"Tell me."