Page 58 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

The Earl of Matlock stood in his turn. "Guilty, upon my honor." No louder and no softer than any other man's vote. Was that meant for an apology? From the Earl, Darcy supposed, it was as near as one came.

Elizabeth's hand tightened on his once, at the beginning, and did not tremble after. On her far side sat Alban, scrubbed and combed within an inch of his life, in a coat Mrs. Gardiner's maid had pressed twice. Elizabeth had ruled that the boy had earned the ending, and nobody had cared to argue with her. Beside Alban sat Mr. Bennet. Beside Mr. Bennet, in a bonnet that could have shaded a regiment, sat Mrs. Bennet.

She had arrived from Hertfordshire the previous evening, unannounced and unstoppable. Her own daughter's tormentor was being tried, and no power in England would keep her from the gallery. Mr. Bennet had not attempted to be a power in England. He had secured her a seat. On his authority as her husband of five-and-twenty years, he had instructed her to hold her tongue. By some miracle of awe and upholstery, she was holding it.

Mostly.

"Two hundred!" she whispered, in the whisper that had carried across three counties of assembly rooms. "Two hundred, Mr. Bennet, and not one of them has said anything different⁠—"

"That is rather the point of it, my dear."

Then the counts. The Clerk read each charge and the finding upon it. The abduction of Elizabeth Darcy. The branding. The procurement and conveyance of women for sale beyond the seas. The conspiracy. The murders of Willow Gibbs and of her husband, called Bart. The attempted murder of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Guilty, upon every one.

Braithwaite stood at the bar to receive it, and Darcy watched him, because Darcy had earned the watching.

He stood well. That much could be said for him, and it was likely the only thing left that could. He stood straight, in his beautiful coat, with his hands quiet, while the Clerk took his life apart count by count.

Then the Lord High Steward spoke the sentence. There was only one sentence the law knew for it, and he spoke it slowly, without relish.

Death. By hanging. A peer of the realm, to hang from the neck. It was the same death the law gave forgers at Newgate.

The Lord High Steward stood. He took the white staff of his office in both hands and broke it. The crack rang through the silent hall, and the court that tries peers ceased to exist.

It was over.

The warders formed up around Braithwaite to take him down. His path to the stair ran, as it had run every day of the trial, below the end of the gallery where Darcy sat. Darcy rose without quite deciding to, and went to the rail.

Since October he had carried the letter in his head. Darcy had written it in the Gardiners' spare room with Elizabeth breathing beside him. He had written it in Thornton's offices, on the Netherfield stairs, and in this gallery at every recess. You took my wife. She still screams at night. You burned a family. You reached for a child. Darcy had every word by heart. The man who had earned them was passing below him now, close enough and slow enough for all of it.

Braithwaite looked up.

The gray eyes found Darcy's and held them. Braithwaite said nothing. He had said nothing at the bar and nothing at the sentence. That voice had filled cottages, cells, drawing rooms, and threatening letters. Braithwaite, who had a word for everything, had run out of words at last.

And Darcy, standing at the rail with half a year of words in his mouth, found he did not want to spend them. What was there left to say to the man? Nothing. The law had said it. Darcy let Braithwaite go down the stair in silence. The door closed on him, and that was the last of Lord Bee.

Darcy turned back to the gallery and looked for his wife. He had done so at the end of every hard thing since the spring. He meant to keep doing it.

Elizabeth was on her feet. Her hands were pressed over her mouth, and her eyes above them were wide and bright and swimming. Alban stood on the bench beside her. He stood on the bench, in Westminster Hall, before three hundred peers, several bishops, and God. Who on earth was going to stop him? Good God, Darcy thought, and found that he was smiling.

The boy tugged her sleeve. "We got 'im," Alban said.

We. Darcy watched the word land. Elizabeth's tears spilled over. What came out of her was not weeping but a laugh, one real, helpless, ringing laugh. The laugh was scandalous in the emptying solemnity of Westminster Hall. It was the most beautiful sound Darcy had heard in all these months of listening.

The peers filed out. The galleries drained. In the great corridor the family gathered itself into a knot: Elizabeth with Alban's hand fast in hers, Richard shouldering through with his hat crushed under his arm, Mr. Bennet steering Mrs. Bennet, the Gardiners arriving from the far stair. The news ran past them and around them the whole time, out of the hall and into London. Braithwaite. Guilty. All charges. The staff broken.

Mrs. Bennet stood in the middle of it. For the first time in the five-and-twenty years of her husband's close acquaintance with the phenomenon, she was speechless. Her mouth opened. It closed. Her bonnet trembled with the enormity of all the things not being said.

Then she rallied, magnificently, and delivered her verdict to the corridor at large. "Well! I always said that man was no good!"

Mr. Bennet caught Elizabeth's eye over his wife's bonnet. One eyebrow rose, a fraction, in the old dry signal.

"You did say so, Mama," Elizabeth agreed, and kissed her cheek.

The Attorney General passed them in the press, going out with his clerks, and paused to give Elizabeth the small bow he had given her at the stand. "Madam," he said, in the dry unhurried voice. "The accounts are square." And he was gone down the corridor.

Where was the triumph? Darcy searched himself and found none. Half a year of hunting, and at the end of it nothing at all to savor.

Outside, the December afternoon had gone gold at the edges, and the party came down the steps of Westminster into the last of the light.