Page 50 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

"Because tomorrow the House hears her. He would rather they compared the two."

Darcy looked along the benches. Some of the peers were still nodding over Braithwaite's speech. The prisoner had won the day. Did any man in the hall doubt it?

The court adjourned. In the crush of the hall, Darcy kept Elizabeth's hand on his arm. His own body stayed between her and the crowd. They were nearly to the doors when the warders brought Braithwaite past, six feet away. It was close enough to smell bay leaves if there had been any left on him to smell. There were not. He smelled of nothing at all now.

His eyes found Elizabeth. It lasted a heartbeat, no more, and there was nothing in it that a warder could report. Merely a look. The look of a man measuring a thing he intended to break tomorrow.

Elizabeth did not look away. She inclined her head, an exact and social quarter-inch. It was the greeting owed a distant acquaintance of no particular importance. Then she walked on.

In the carriage she was quiet for a long while. London went by, coal-smoke and lamplight coming on.

"He is very good," she said at last. "The speech. Claiming it all a tale. His role, and declining it. They wanted to believe him, Fitzwilliam. I watched their faces. He is one of theirs. Half that chamber was looking for a reason to set him free."

"And tomorrow they will hear you."

"Yes." She turned from the window, and in the failing light her eyes were clear and steady and terrible. "He cannot resist instructing me. He has done it since the cellar, and he did it again last night, by a clerk's hand. Tomorrow he will try it in front of all of them. All those years of being obeyed. He cannot imagine a woman he cannot direct."

"Tomorrow he will meet one."

Elizabeth took his hand in the dark of the carriage and held it. Her grip was strong, and her voice, when it came, was almost gentle. "Tomorrow he may ask me whatever he likes. I have been answering him in my head for months."

The carriage rolled on toward Gracechurch Street. Darcy held his wife's hand and thought of the look in the hall. It was the measuring look of a man planning to break a thing. He almost pitied him. The man still believed that the woman on tomorrow's stand was the one he had chained in a cellar.

CHAPTER 17

They called her name at ten o'clock, and Elizabeth stood up to answer it.

The walk to the stand was thirty paces. She had counted them yesterday from the gallery, because counting gave the fear something to do, and she counted them now. The chamber was the largest room she had ever entered, and it made her small. Elizabeth was one woman in gray crossing a floor built for the trying of kings. She walked under the eyes of three hundred lords and every gallery London could cram with silk. Her mother would want to know afterward what the ladies in the galleries wore. Heavens! She would have to invent something.

Her hair was still short under her bonnet. Let them see it! It was the first exhibit, whether the Crown listed it or not.

She thought of the letter. A lady who is unwell may be excused.

She thought of her uncle at the kitchen table. You ought to walk in there knowing whom else you speak for. The women on the earlier sailings. They had names in England.

Her hands lay quiet on the rail. When had that happened?

She was sworn. The Book was warm from other hands. The Attorney General rose, made her a small bow, and asked her, in his dry unhurried voice, to tell the Lords what had happened to her, from the beginning.

She told them.

She had practiced nothing except the resolve not to practice. Thornton had wanted her rehearsed. She had refused. The Lords would have the truth in the order it happened, not a performance of it. She simply began at the road and went forward.

The carriage from Rosings, which was to have carried her to her uncle's house in London. The wood where it stopped instead. The big bearded man at the carriage door, who smelled of fish. The cottage at Hastingleigh. The man called Bart and the woman called Willow. They discussed her price over her head and never once spoke to her. The cellar. The damp stone. The chain, the iron cuff at her ankle, and the exact sound the links made when she moved. Elizabeth made it for the Lords with her own mouth, a small dragging clink of a sound. She had heard it in the dark night after night, and they should hear it once.

Somewhere in the scarlet ranks, a man cleared his throat and did not finish clearing it.

"They heated an iron in the kitchen fire," Elizabeth said. "I knew what it was for before they brought it, because Willow had told me. She said it the way a farmer speaks of earmarking lambs. It was a letter B, my lords, about the size of a guinea, on an iron handle. Bart carried it. A second man held my shoulders and turned me to the wall. Bart called him Lord Bee. He smelled of bay leaves, and he said one word to me. 'Quiet.'"

The word came back to her whole, and the cellar came with it.

The heat reached her before the iron did. She felt it on her bare back, a dry breath from the fire. Her cheek was pressed to the cold stone of the wall. His hands held her there, and they did not shake. She had screamed until her throat tore, and nobody came. Her own heartbeat had been so loud she could not hear the fire.

Here, in the chamber, her hands went cold. Smoke rose at the edges of her sight. Under the beeswax and the old timber she smelled it again, the smell she had never been able to scrub out of her memory. Her own skin, burning.

She found Fitzwilliam in the gallery. He had not moved. He was looking at her and at nobody else. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The smoke thinned, and the chamber was only a chamber again.

Her voice stayed level when she went on. She had sworn it would, and it did. "You hear it before you feel it. That is the thing I did not expect. It hisses. And then you smell it, and the smell is meat, and the meat is you. I fainted afterward, which Willow said was common."