Page 57 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

Braithwaite did not cross-examine. Richard watched him calculate it. Could he be seen pressing questions on a broken old woman? She had just handed the Lords his motive, his acquaintance, and his pistol, all in her own confessed disgrace. No.

He had built his whole defense on the absence of anyone who had seen his face. His patroness had seen his face over the barrel of his own gun. "No questions," he said, and his voice arrived a quarter-second late.

They came to wheel her down. But Lady Catherine de Bourgh had commanded rooms for forty years, and she was not to be wheeled anywhere before the room was done being hers. Her head turned, slow and imperious, the ruin of a gesture Richard had seen terrorize a hundred dinner tables. She found the gallery, and she found Elizabeth.

The two women looked at each other down the length of the House of Lords. The woman who had ordered it, shawled and folded in a wheeled chair. The woman who had survived it, straight-backed in gray, with her shorn hair pinned up under her bonnet.

"You are... braver than I," Lady Catherine said.

Five words. Not an apology. Nothing so cheap. And in the gallery Elizabeth Darcy rose to her feet and stood, and bowed to Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Anne turned the chair. Her arms shook on the handles, and she waved off the usher who stepped forward to help. Mrs. Jenkinson gathered the shawls. The procession went back up the floor at its own pace, unhurried, all the way, and the doors closed behind it.

The Lord High Steward announced that the House would retire, and named the morrow for its judgment. The chamber rose, three hundred men all talking at once. Richard sat still in the middle of it. He had not been so wrung out since the bridge in Spain. He watched his father across the floor. The Earl of Matlock was not talking to the men beside him. He was looking at the closed doors. On his face was an expression Richard had never seen there and would have wagered against. It was his mother's expression, from thirty years ago, at chapel. Then the Earl rose and walked out past a dozen men who wanted his opinion. He gave not one of them a word. Had the Earl of Matlock ever left a room he had not managed? Richard would not have wagered on that either.

Darcy leaned across Elizabeth and looked Richard in the eye. "You knew."

"I knew," Richard said.

"You might have warned me."

"She forbade it." His voice was not entirely steady, and he did not much care. "She said, and I am quoting her exactly, for it took her a full minute to say it: no one... is to be told. I am not... a rescue. I am... artillery."

Darcy looked at the doors. Elizabeth began to laugh, silently, helplessly, with her hand pressed hard over her mouth and tears standing in her eyes. Below them the lords of England filed out to decide whether any doubt remained.

Richard rather thought it did not.

He went down to see to his aunt's carriage. There he found Anne sitting on the carriage step with her head down, fighting for breath. Her hands shook in her lap. She held up one finger before he could speak. "I pushed her the whole way, Richard. Both ways. Do not dare tell me I ought not."

"I was going to say I never saw anything finer in my life."

Anne looked up at him, gray-faced and triumphant. "That is not all you were going to say, cousin. You have been about to say something for a month. You walk differently when you are carrying something. Like a man with dispatches."

Richard's mouth went dry. Ten years of campaigns, and he could not find his voice on a carriage step. "Then I will deliver them," he said. "I love you, Anne. I have loved you for years. Since before Kent, I think, since the winter you corrected my chess and let your mother believe I had won. I did not speak because I was a younger son with a sword and no fortune. You were meant for Darcy, and then you were ill, and there was never an hour that belonged to us."

He took her hands in both of his. They were small and cold. They did not shake now. "There is an hour now. I know your health is not strong. I do not care. No, that is wrong. I care more than any man alive, and I mean to be there for every day of it. I would rather have ten years beside you than forty beside anyone else. Marry me."

Anne looked at him. There was color in her gray face at last. "My mother would have forbidden it," she said.

"You have just wheeled your mother into the House of Lords after she made a bargain with a devil that ended in her being shot. I think she has lost the right to forbid anything."

Anne laughed. It was not the dry half-laugh she allowed herself in sickrooms. It came out young and astonished. Nobody had heard that laugh from her in fifteen years. Richard decided, on a carriage step in Old Palace Yard, to spend the rest of his life provoking it.

"You may spare us the counting of years, cousin," she said, when she had her breath. "I have Rosings. You have a sword. Between us we are provided for, and anyone who calls you a fortune-hunter may apply to my mother. Yes. Before you say anything else and spoil it. Yes."

From inside the carriage came a single word, thick and imperious. "Anne."

Anne did not let go of his hands. "She has been practicing that one," she said. "Now you may help me into the carriage."

CHAPTER 21

The Lords voted standing, each man in his turn, from the junior baron upward through the whole order of the peerage. Each man said the same four words. Westminster Hall heard them two hundred and eighty-six times. "Guilty, upon my honor."

Darcy counted the first dozen. Somewhere after the fortieth the counting stopped mattering. Darcy sat with Elizabeth's hand in his. He let the word come, over and over, from the barons to the viscounts to the earls.

"That is the barons done," Richard murmured at his shoulder. "Not one of them blinked. Watch the viscounts now. Viscounts do like a show."

The viscounts did not provide one. Guilty, upon my honor, man after man, straight down the roll.