Page 56 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

The Attorney General rose. "The Crown had leave to read a sworn deposition, your Grace. The Crown will not read it. The witness is here, and will speak for herself. She has been some time upon the stairs."

"Who is the witness?"

The great doors at the bar of the House opened.

"Lady Catherine de Bourgh," the Attorney General said, into a silence that had already begun.

Richard let out a breath he had been holding since nine o'clock. They had done it. Anne had said eleven, and Anne was never late. She had run the most difficult sickroom in England for three months. She had planned this morning down to the warm bricks and the order of the doors.

A week ago Richard had offered to arrange matters. His cousin had looked at him with her pale level eyes. "You arranged the guards, cousin. The rest is ours." Now the rest had come through the doors of the House of Lords. Pride rose in him so hard it hurt.

Lady Catherine came in a wheeled chair, and it was Anne who pushed it. Mrs. Jenkinson walked at the side, gray and small and steady, carrying the shawls. They brought her the whole length of that ancient floor, under the banners, at the pace of a slow procession. Every lord in England watched her come. An old woman half-folded into herself, her left hand curled in her lap, her face fallen on one side, wrapped in dove-gray wool. Her chin was up.

Everyone knew her. That was the worst of it. Half the men in this room had dined at Rosings, or been lectured in its drawing room, or married a niece she had selected. They had known her in full sail. Now the chamber made a sound Richard had never heard from three hundred throats at once: an intaken breath that nobody released.

Somewhere behind him an aged peer said, in the whisper of the very deaf, "God bless me! It is Lady Catherine de Bourgh."

"It cannot be! The woman is at death's door."

"Well," the first said, after consideration, "she has brought the door with her."

Across the floor, among the scarlet, Richard's father had gone the color of tallow.

The Earl had not known. He had arranged for a paper. His sister had sworn one at last, a week after the laudanum. It held three bare lines about the folly and the pistol. It said not a word about who had hired whom. The Earl had read it and been satisfied. Richard had let him. That had been the whole design of it, argued out in a corridor at Netherfield weeks ago: he cannot suppress what he does not know. Now Richard watched his father learn, in public, that the family narrative had risen from its sickbed and wheeled itself into the one room he could not manage. How long had it been since anything had happened to the Earl of Matlock that he had not arranged? Richard was ashamed of how much he enjoyed it, and enjoyed it anyway.

In the dock, Braithwaite had risen to his feet. It was not required of him. Did he even know he had done it? Richard doubted it. He was staring at the woman in the chair, and for the second time in two days the beautiful composure slipped. A man might rehearse against a great deal, Richard supposed. Not against his own murdered patroness arriving insufficiently dead.

They helped her to the place appointed. A chair had been brought. The oath was administered. Lady Catherine took it in pieces, slowly, and the House waited through every piece without a sound.

The Attorney General's voice was more gentle than Richard had ever heard it. "Lady Catherine. Do you know the prisoner?"

"I know him."

Three words, wrung slowly out of the working half of a mouth. Somewhere behind Richard a man murmured something pitying, and Richard thought, wait!

"Will you tell the House how you come to know him?"

She gathered herself. Richard watched her do it, and he alone in that chamber, save Anne and Mrs. Jenkinson, knew what he was watching: three months of nights, the same sentences, over and over in the dark to an empty room. She had practiced this testimony one sentence at a time. Now she had to speak it. "I... hired him." The chamber went rigid. "To remove... the girl. Miss Bennet." A breath, hauled up from somewhere. "I knew... what he was. Not... what he would do."

The eruption came, from benches and galleries at once. The white staff came down and came down again before it broke into order.

Braithwaite's voice cut through the last of it, urbane, quick, fighting for the room. "My lords, I must object. The House was promised a paper, sworn and settled. Her infirmity is plain to every eye. Her words are dragged out at the rate of a funeral bell, and their lordships cannot know what mind, whole or broken, assembles them, nor whose interest has assembled it for her⁠—"

"The objection is refused." The Lord High Steward did not raise his voice. "The witness is the widow of a knight, sister to an earl, and by the prisoner's own defense this morning, a woman he has done nothing but pay a morning call upon. She testifies to her own actions and her own injury. Her infirmity goes to the House's compassion, my lord. Not to her competence. Proceed."

"He shot me," Lady Catherine said.

She said it before the Attorney General could ask anything at all. She had no patience left to spare for interruptions. It came out in the ruin of her old voice, the voice that had commanded drawing rooms. "At the folly. At Rosings. I asked him... what he had done. He had from me... where she was. And I... could name him." Breath. "He turned. He had a pistol. He called me... Cat. As he used to. I remember... the smoke. And the ground."

The chamber did not move. And she was not finished. Richard saw her right hand close on the arm of the chair. He saw her haul the next thing up all that long way, and he stopped breathing, along with three hundred other men. Whatever else she had rehearsed in the dark, he knew by her face that this was the sentence she had rehearsed longest.

"I hired..." The sentence broke. Her mouth worked and produced nothing, the living half straining against the dead. For three seconds the most feared voice in Kent could not make a sound in the largest room in England. Nobody moved. Mrs. Jenkinson took a half-step, and Anne's hand stopped her. Lady Catherine shut her eyes. Opened them.

She started the sentence again, from the beginning, the way she had started the hymn again, every night, for three months. "I hired a man... to ruin a girl." The words came one at a time, in front of everyone. "And he ruined... me."

No one erupted. No one whispered. Richard looked along the benches, and the pity had gone out of the faces. In its place he saw the thing she had wanted from every room she had ever entered.

Respect.