Page 51 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

The chamber had gone very quiet.

She did not look at Braithwaite. Not yet. She had an order and she was keeping to it. "They kept me in the root cellar. I lost count of the days. I was given bread, and water when they remembered. There was a child in that house, my lords. I saw him on my first evening there, a small boy with a limp. I did not know his name then. At night, when the house slept, he poured water through the slats of the cellar door. It is my belief that the water was his own ration." A breath. "He is six years old now, and he is in London, and he sleeps with a broom beside his bed."

She told the rest. The cart at night. The river smell. The dock, and the ship that was to carry her to a port where women had numbers instead of names. A man at each arm, walking her to the gangplank. Her husband running, and the men letting go. "And I was not the only woman meant for that ship, my lords," she said. "There were others aboard her that night, and they were found. But that ship had sailed for Bombay before. My uncle has the dates of those sailings. The women who went on them were never traced. I never learned their names. I am the one who was found. I ask your lordships to remember the ones who were not."

The clerks' pens scratched on. In the gallery her uncle sat with his head bowed. Elizabeth kept her voice steady for him. The words were his, and she said them for him.

The Attorney General asked his questions, drew out the dates and the places, and sat down.

And then Lord Braithwaite rose to cross-examine. Elizabeth turned, at last, and looked at the man who had worn her hair in a locket.

He made her a bow of beautiful correctness. Ten feet away. Scrubbed, pressed, and courteous, with his hands loose at his sides. His voice, when it came, was the voice from the cellar. "Mrs. Darcy. You have described a terrible ordeal, and I am sorry for your suffering." A pause, exactly long enough to sound like feeling. "If you find yourself unwell, madam, the House will excuse you. No one here would think the less of you for it."

Elizabeth had read those words three times since one o'clock on Monday morning. Did he imagine she had forgotten them?

"I thank your lordship," she said. "I had the same kind assurance in writing, the night before this trial began. A lady who is unwell may be excused. No one would think the less of you for it. It came to my aunt's kitchen door at one in the morning, from a friend who did not sign his name." She turned to the Lord High Steward. "The Attorney General has it, my lord."

The Attorney General was already on his feet with the paper in his hand. The Clerk read it aloud. The physicians. The quiet establishments in the country. The ladies are seldom seen again. And then, at the close, the very sentence the prisoner had just spoken to the House.

Nobody coughed. Three hundred men had heard it twice in five minutes, once from a stranger and once from Lord Braithwaite.

Braithwaite's face did not move. But Elizabeth was ten feet away, and she saw the faint whitening at the corners of his mouth. "A common courtesy, my lords," he said. "I offer it to any lady in distress. Half the gentlemen in England might have written such a phrase."

"Half the gentlemen in England are not on trial for my abduction," Elizabeth said.

The staff came down, once. The Lord High Steward did not look at the prisoner. "The House has heard the document and the prisoner's words. It will weigh both. Proceed, my lord."

Braithwaite bowed. "Then I must ask," he said. "Did you see my face, at any point during your captivity?"

"Not clearly. I saw a mustache and spectacles by the light of the iron."

"I wear no spectacles, madam, as the House may see. Did you hear my voice?"

The mist stirred at the edges of the hall, smoke and damp stone, the old cellar reaching for her even here. No! Not here, of all places. Elizabeth set her thumb against the grain of the rail and followed it, one ridge of oak at a time. The hall stayed a hall.

Months of answering this man in her head. Now then. "I did," she said. "One word. I am hearing it now. And you reached for me afterward, too. You sent carved ivory earrings after me to my dressmaker's shop, by a liveried footman. You sent a locket engraved with the letter B, and inside it was my own hair, my lords, the hair they cut from me at the cottage, coiled behind glass."

"Gifts?" Braithwaite's eyebrows rose, gently, regretfully. "I sent no gifts, madam. As for bay leaves, half the gentlemen in Hertfordshire might smell of a kitchen herb. I confess I had hoped for evidence of greater substance."

"So had I," Elizabeth said. "It was in a solicitor's safe. It was stolen six weeks ago by a clerk your Mr. Graves bought."

A ripple ran along the benches. The Lord High Steward's staff came down, one measured knock, and the ripple died. Braithwaite's expression did not change, but he let a moment pass. Had that struck home? Elizabeth watched him fold that line of questioning closed and open another.

"Let us speak of your family, Mrs. Darcy. You have, I understand, lately suffered a domestic difficulty. A young sister, was it not, who was discovered in London under" — the pause was a small work of art — "irregular circumstances?"

So there it was. The blow he had bought with Wickham's hire, the blow he had built for months, arriving at last in front of the assembled peerage of England. The chamber leaned in by a quarter of an inch. The silk galleries went still and hungry. He had saved her sister for the second act, had he? Elizabeth was almost amused.

She did not flinch. She had known this question was coming since a locked box in a girl's bedroom. "My sister is sixteen years old," she said. "She is not a witness in this House, and she is not on trial in it. I will not discuss her." She turned to the Lord High Steward. "I ask your lordship's direction that her name not be spoken here."

"The young lady is not before the House," the Lord High Steward said. "Her name will not be spoken in it. The Attorney General will see that it is understood."

"I thank your lordship." She let one beat pass. "I fail to see the relevance to the brand on my body, my lord."

"Do you not?" Braithwaite smiled. It was a smile that never reached higher than his mouth. "I merely note that the Darcy family has of late had cause to seek a villain for its misfortunes. Misfortunes have authors, or else they are merely misfortunes, and that is a hard thing for a proud family to bear. I wonder, madam, whether I am not simply... convenient."

And there it was, the whole of him. Half a year of terror, a cellar, an iron, a ship, a stolen locket, a bought clerk, a slashed shop, a letter through a kitchen door. And at the end of it all he stood before the highest court in the kingdom and offered himself as an innocent man inconvenienced by other people's suffering. The gall of him!

Elizabeth looked at him. She had never truly done so, not eye to eye, not without a cellar's dark or a nightmare between them. She did it now. The gray eyes looked back at her, patient, amused, and certain. Yet the man behind them had grown small. In the cellar he had been the size of the dark. Here he was a man of middle years in a well-cut coat, sweating faintly along the hairline, and he could not reach her.