Page 49 of Mr. Darcy’s Victorious Bride

Darcy looked down. He was crushing his hat. He unclenched his hand and set the thing on his knee. Beside him sat Elizabeth, in her dark gray dress with the plain collar. She reached over and laid two fingers on his wrist. Her hands were warm. He had expected to spend this day steadying her. Who was steadying whom now?

Across the hall, in the ranks of scarlet, the Earl of Matlock sat with a face that gave away nothing.

At half-nine the procession entered. Serjeants, heralds, the Clerk of the Parliaments, and at the last the Lord High Steward himself, Lord Eldon, with the white staff of his office carried before him. The chamber went silent. The commission was read, and the Serjeant-at-Arms cried silence. The court was in session for the first time in a generation.

And then they brought in Braithwaite.

Darcy had last seen him in a Meryton cell, chained, with his ear mangled and dove droppings on his forehead. The man who walked to the bar of the House of Lords bore no relation to that memory. He was groomed to a polish. His coat was dark and faultless, his linen white, his bearing unhurried. He bowed to the Lord High Steward with exactly the degree of deference owed by one great man to another, and not one inch more.

"Every inch a lord," Richard said, very low. "That is the defense. He is wearing it."

The words rose up in Darcy as they always rose, the letter he had written in his head a hundred times and never on paper. You took my wife. You reached for a child. He folded them away. Not yet. This was the Crown's day, not his.

That distinction had cost Darcy something to learn. He had petitioned, gathered, financed, and driven this prosecution for months. Now, at the end of it, the case did not belong to him. The Attorney General rose for the King, not for the Darcys. The charges were England's quarrel now. Darcy sat in the gallery with the other spectators, holding his crushed hat, forbidden to do anything but watch. Richard had put it to him plainly the night before. "It is better so. A vendetta can be forgiven. The King's justice cannot."

The Clerk read the indictment. Abduction. Branding. The procurement and conveyance of women for sale beyond the seas. Conspiracy. Murder. And the attempted murder of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Darcy watched the peers' faces as each charge landed. These men had dined with Braithwaite. Some had shot with him, gambled with him, married their cousins to his cousins. How was such a man to be a monster? Abduction they could perhaps disbelieve. Branding they did not wish to imagine. But the last charge — the attempted murder of a great lady, his own patroness, lying even now half-paralyzed in a Hertfordshire sickroom — that one moved visibly along the scarlet ranks.

"How say you, Thomas, Lord Braithwaite? Guilty, or not guilty?"

"Not guilty." His voice carried without effort.

"How will your lordship be tried?"

"By God and my peers."

By God! Darcy's hand closed on the brim of the hat resting on his knee. Elizabeth's fingers pressed his wrist once, a small, firm pressure. I know. Hold.

The Lord High Steward addressed the prisoner. "The court is informed that the prisoner's solicitor has been removed from the case and committed to Newgate. Does your lordship desire that advisory counsel be appointed?"

"I thank your Grace, no." Braithwaite let his gaze travel, unhurried, along the benches of his peers. "I have lately had cause to review the quality of the assistance available to me. I find I prefer my own. A man who is innocent requires no architecture, my lords. Only a hearing."

It was well done, blast him! Darcy hated how well done it was. Two sentences, and he had turned his own solicitor's disgrace into a robe of injured innocence.

Then Braithwaite was granted leave to address the House on the nature of the case. He did, and it was worse. "My lords. You will hear, in the days to come, a tale of Gothic horror. Cellars and chains and branding irons, in Kent, within a day's drive of this chamber." A pause, judged to the half-second. "You will hear it principally from three witnesses. A young woman who has suffered, I do not doubt, a genuine ordeal, and who has been encouraged by her family to give that ordeal my name. A child of six, an orphan, a former mute, coached these several months in a wealthy man's stable yard. And a great lady whom I have served and honored, who has been robbed of half her speech by an apoplexy, and whose broken words will reach you on a paper, written out for her by the very family that stands to profit. There is no crime scene, my lords. There is no man who will say he saw me commit any act charged. There is a gentleman of vast fortune who has decided that his family's misfortunes require an author, and has done me the honor of the appointment. I am to be the villain of the Darcys' tale. I decline the role."

The chamber stirred, and not all of it with outrage. Darcy could hear it, the small rustle of men finding a story they could live with. What lord wished to believe that one of their own number branded women and sold them across the sea? Braithwaite was offering them a door out of that belief.

Elizabeth's face was composed and white. Darcy knew that composure. She wore it when the mist was at the edges and she would not let anyone see.

Her fingers had left his wrist. He looked down. Her hands were locked in her lap, and her thumb was moving along the seam of her glove, one stitch at a time. She was counting her way back into the room.

"He called it a tale," she said, very low, without turning her head. "The cellar. In front of all of them."

"I know."

"I could smell it when he said it. The damp, and the smoke." Her breath went short, once. Then she lifted her chin and looked straight at the dock, and did not look away.

Darcy laid his hand over hers. She turned her hand under his and held on hard.

Richard had gone very still.

Then the Attorney General rose. He was a dry, heavy man with an unhurried voice, and he did not answer the speech at all. He read the particulars of each charge into the record, slowly, and sat down. The Crown would call its first witness in the morning.

"He is letting it stand," Richard murmured. "Overnight."

"Why?"