Nadezhda joined the group to inquire, “How is Georgiana?”
“Recovering,” Bingley said, releasing his wife as she stepped away from him.
Jane wiped her eyes, and took a deep breath before looking up at the princess, in her Japanese silk robes and her golden circlet and her covered hair – “It was you.”
“Mrs. Bingley?”
“It was you,” Jane said, her shock laced with something else. Something meaner. “You taught my daughter these foreign things. You turned my little girl into ... whatever she is now.”
“Mrs. Bingley,” Brian said in a slightly harsher tone, “My wife did not – ” But he suddenly realized that his wife was not denying the charges as he was. “Nady?”
“Georgiana is no longer a child,” she said. “She can make her own choices.”
“No, she cannot!” Bingley said. “In case you’ve forgotten or never noticed, Your Highness, this is England! She’s an heiress and a respectable woman with a reputation that has to be maintained, if she’s ever – ,” he blinked away his tears, trying to focus on his anger instead of his pain. Darcy could see it, but he wasn’t used to Bingley being angry, or Jane, for that matter. He didn’t know what to do. He was too drained, too tired of being angry, as Bingley continued. “She has to at least be sane to be presentable in society. Any society! And I know I’ve been a bit permissive – I let her have that friendship with Mugin – ”
“I sent Mugin away,” Brian said. “He didn’t leave of his own will.”
“What?”
“It was nothing inappropriate, Nady was there. But he was – encouraging her. When I found out, I sent him back to Japan. That is probably why he ended his friendship with me,” Brian said. “But that was years ago. Five years, to be precise, since he was in England.”
Darcy had to state the obvious. “Then it was Nadezhda.”
All eyes turned to Nadezhda, who only said, “She asked me and I did train her to know how to defend herself. That she would take it to this extreme – ”
“You turned my daughter into a lunatic! Just because – ”
But as he stepped forward towards Nadezhda, Brian Maddox drew his sword, and Bingley stopped just in time to save his head.. “Please step back from my wife.”
“Mr. Maddox!” Darcy said, his voice calm but unquestionable. “This is Pemberley, not the Orient! You will not draw your sword in my house!”
Darcy had been pushed to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion, but he was still perfectly capable of slapping a man with his voice – especially within the great halls of Pemberley. Brian immediately replaced his sword, and bowed to Darcy, “My apologies, but he did threaten my wife.”
“I am allowed to accuse her of what should be a crime! I am a free man and you are not actually a samurai! You are English, not Japanese! You cannot take my head for insulting someone, you madman!” Bingley shouted, and turned to Nadezhda, though he did step away from her this time. “Your Highness, with all due respect, you brought this madness into my house and influenced my daughter so much that now she almost got herself killed – ”
“ – in order to save all of you incompetent Englishmen!” Nadezhda exclaimed. “Talking about contracts and bribes while Geoffrey was dying!”
“We should all be praising her,” Brian interrupted. “Incognito, she managed to spook the enemy, find Geoffrey, save Geoffrey, and eliminate Hatcher. She’s done more in the past twelve hours than we’ve done in three days! Since she was wholly responsible for salvaging the situation while we were drinking tea and worrying, I’m not inclined to care one bit how she was dressed while doing so!” He met their stares, his own indignation building. “You are all thinking she belongs in Bedlam, but as far as I can tell, she’s not insane at all. Everything she did was perfectly calculated and a lot better planned than anything we did. If I were the king and I knew about this, I would knight her for her courageous actions! So you may be dismissive of your own daughter, but I will not be!
“Your Highness, Mr. Maddox,” Darcy said, unable to disguise the anger in his own tone, “while we have established that her actions were successful, that is not the issue here. She has a larger reputation at stake!”
“We all know about reputations and we’ve heard enough of it!” Brian shouted back.
“What do you know about reputation?” Jane said. Her voice had a higher pitch, so it was heard above them all, even though it was softer. “You ruined yours and then your brother’s, ran from all of your responsibilities, and kept running at every opportunity! And now you try to redeem yourself by drawing a sword on my husband for daring to question your wife!”
“You’re a fake and a liar,” Bingley seethed. “You never told me about Mugin.”
“And you’re a coward. All you did while your own nephew was missing was pat Darcy on the shoulder! And then, when it did come time for action, you failed to notice that one of your own children was missing! What kind of father is that?”
“At least I am a father!”
Darcy had spent years negotiating tenant disputes. He had spent his childhood watching how his cousin Richard separated him from Wickham during their infamous brawls. His competitive fencing team at Cambridge often got drunk with their opponents afterwards, to very negative results. All of that led to the instincts that saved the situation, now. He grabbed Nadezhda’s arm as she lifted it to strike Bingley, and Brian’s as he went for his sword, stepping between them and the Bingleys. “Your Highness and Mr. Maddox,” Darcy said authoritatively, “I am going to have to ask you to leave.”
“What?”
“I would ask the Bingleys to leave as well,” Darcy said, his voice so steady that it betrayed no emotion, not even sympathy, “but their daughter is lodged in my home and so is the doctor treating her. We are all very, very upset at all that has happened, but I will not tolerate violence in Pemberley under any circumstances, least of all between family.” With that, he released them, pushing so hard they stumbled. “I am truly sorry.” He bowed. “Please leave.”
“Of all the – ”
“Brian,” Nadezhda said, and said something to him in Romanian, or some other of the tongues they knew that everyone else did not. She curtseyed to Darcy – and a Princess of Transylvania did not curtsey to anyone. “We apologize for our actions to you, Mr. Darcy, for abusing your hospitality.” And with that, she dragged her husband out of Pemberley, so quietly it was shocking. She said nothing to the Bingleys, who Darcy knew he now had to face.
“I really would do it,” Darcy said. “I would send you home to calm down – with all due respect, Mrs. Bingley, your husband knows he cannot even appear to attack Nadezhda in front of Brian without suffering the consequences, however misplaced.” To her stunned silence, he added, “I am very sorry for all that has occurred under my roof, but I think your daughter needs you now. Being shot is not a pleasant experience.” That was Jane’s order to go to Georgiana’s room – and Darcy had never ordered Jane around before. Darcy turned to Bingley, and after she was gone, said, “Shake yourself out of this state, man.”
“Darcy, she – ,” but Bingley was not in a condition to form a sentence. “I don’t know – ”
“My son is upstairs,” Darcy said. “If he does not wake in the next few days, he will most likely die. If he does wake, he could be deaf for the rest of his life. And now I have thrown out the beloved brother and sister of the doctor who is treating him, who hardly needs any distractions right now. I will remind you that your daughter, who did save all of our lives, no matter how improper the manner, is also suffering and requires that same doctor. So I will not stand for anything else happening under Pemberley’s roof.” That was, of course, ignoring the fact that something had just happened, and he had not the slightest idea of how to resolve it, short of setting them apart and hoping tempers cooled on their own. “I can’t take it, Bingley. I can’t take anything else right now.”
Bingley nodded numbly.
“I must go speak to the c
onstable and hope my story is coherent enough to match up with Mr. Maddox’s. Take care of your wife and your daughter – and let everything else cool.”
Bingley nodded again, and Darcy turned on his heels and headed to where the constable was waiting for him.
*****************************************
As he sat down with Constable Morris, Darcy did something else unprecedented – he had a drink. The constable would think nothing of it, an Englishman having a stiff drink like brandy so early in the morning, but for Darcy, it was exceptional, and his manservant knew it and so stayed in the room until the constable forced him out. Darcy sat back in the chair of his study and told, as best he could, all of the events that had passed, beginning with his selling of the land to the Duke of Devonshire and the mining disaster, and ending with the doctor’s assessment the night before. It was so distant to him, as he told it so quietly, as if he were recounting a story that had happened to another man in another lifetime. That was comforting, in its own way. The constable was not too interested in the wolf, and anyway he knew it was not worth pursuing – Hatcher was dead, and that was the point.
“Michael Hatcher,” he said, “was a Radical. A Spencean.”
“So I gathered,” Darcy said, leaving alone the implication that he’d only just found that out, even though he had actually gathered that information weeks ago.
“He escaped the noose because his name isn’t Michael Hatcher. His name is Michael Amsted, or so I’ve been told, which is one of the names that appears on the list of Spenceans who confessed to a membership roll while under investigation. He had escaped, and they stopped looking after Peterloo, when they were concerned with other things. The Spenceans didn’t seem to exist anymore.”
“These were the people that believed that land should be communal?”
“Yes. Anyway, we have little on Mr. Amsted, or Mr. Hatcher if you will, but if he’s survived this long and he’s the man you described – he was likely very good at getting away. They caught most of them – almost everyone on that list, which was kept secret. The only reason they sent me was because I was a junior member of the investigation, and when you wrote to London about your son and mentioned a Spencean, they sent me.”
Hence the delay, of course. “Why do you think he came here?” Darcy said.
“He was probably heading north anyway, and came across the mining disaster. You said that was Darcy land for a long time?”
“Since at least my grandfather’s generation, yes. It had only recently changed ownership, and only because of the mine.”
“Mines are worth a lot of money.”
“Lives are worth more. And land is always a steady investment, especially in Derbyshire,” Darcy said. “Hence the trade between Duke Devonshire and myself.”
“And had he turned up in the county, would most of the people still have felt you were responsible?”
“Unlikely, but the connection could be made. I sent care packages to the families, but Mr. Hatcher seems to have overlooked that.”
“Yes,” the constable said, looking over his notes. “And you provided free coal in the winter.”
“To the truly needy, yes.”
“And His Grace did not?”
“The Duke has many holdings. The man is worth ten times what I am and is hardly ever this far north. I have no idea of his doings here, which are all carried out by one of his many stewards.”
The constable scribbled more notes. The sound was loud against the quiet of the room, especially after all of the shouting outside, but the warm fuzz in Darcy’s head helped him weather it and all of the questions. “So I think we can safely reconstruct what happened, or might have happened, based on your testimony, Mr. Maddox’s, Mr. Jenkins’s, and of course, Mr. Wallace’s.”
“How is he?”
“He’ll likely face deportation; he can claim he was an accessory and he did not actually attack any of you. So – Mr. Hatcher comes into the general Lambton area and begins his own little people’s rebellion, or so he thinks. Gets a crowd worked up about their land, alters his philosophy by what they want to hear. He even develops a little gang, but he realizes he’s in heady waters so he gets himself a hideout near a place no one would dare to go – the mines. Tells no one about this. Then one day, his gang is out to talk to Mr. Jenkins about contributing to their cause, and your son shows up. According to Mr. Wallace, your son’s dog – ”
“Gawain.”
“What?”
“His name,” Darcy said, “is Sir Gawain. After the Arthurian myth.”
The constable went on, “So the dog attacked Mr. Hatcher, and Wallace instinctively shot him. Mr. Geoffrey reacted as any boy would to his dog being shot, which was by taking a swing at Mr. Hatcher, or so both Jenkins and Wallace testify. Hatcher responds but he hits him too hard, and suddenly he’s got the landlord’s son on the ground, wounded. And he has a witness, Mr. Jenkins. So he decided to make off with both of them and hope for the best.”
“I offered him money,” Darcy said, “for Geoffrey’s return. He did not even want to hear of it. He brought up this land nonsense.”
“He had to. He had promised Mr. Wallace and the late Mr. Graham the deeds to their land for going through with the mess and not turning him in, as they were initially inclined to do. The young Mr. Blackwood, still missing, was a transient and Hatcher promised him treasures from Pemberley, or something. Apparently Mr. Hatcher was a persuasive talker, but he talked himself into a corner, when Mr. Geoffrey couldn’t wake to sign the papers.”
“Yes,” Darcy replied.
“His last chance was to cut and run. He couldn’t leave witnesses, so he planned to take your money and kill the three of you – until this wolf-man showed up. Mr. Jenkins said he was – some man with a grudge against Hatcher.
As Mr. Jenkins had been told to say. “Mr. Hatcher was the sort of man who attracted enemies – even in animals.”
“That’s the part I really can’t figure out – but again, we can’t account for this man’s whereabouts for years, so unless you want to pursue something beyond pressing charges against Mr. Wallace – ”
“Nothing beyond that, no.”
“And Mr. Jenkins?”
“Nothing. He was as much a victim as my son in many ways.” And they needed him to tow the line. He knew about Georgiana.
“As you like, Mr. Darcy.”
But Mr. Darcy still didn’t like it very much.
*****************************************
Georgiana eyed George as he entered to visit her bedside. She was still not allowed to see Geoffrey, who had not woken in the two days since his return. She was still badly hurt, and in more pain than she would admit, and she didn’t like the way the drugs dulled her mind, but it was still sharp enough to know when something was wrong – and something was wrong, from the look on George’s face. “What did they say?”
“Who?”
“Don’t play with me. Doctor Maddox and the other one. What did they say?”
George sighed uncomfortably and took the seat beside her bed. “You’re not even supposed to be sitting up.”
“I’m not supposed to sock you either, but I will if you don’t tell me.” It was an empty threat and they both knew it, but she could, and probably would, at least injure herself trying.
“They’re not – telling anyone. Or, I don’t know who they’re telling. I just overheard it, so don’t say anything.” He glanced up and seemed to shrivel at her intense gaze of impatience. “He’s – his heartbeat is slowing down. His breathing is shallow. He needs sustenance or he’ll whither away.”
“Is there any way to make him drink?”
He shook his head. “We can’t make him swallow, or he’ll just choke on it.”
She frowned, “Will you tell him something for me?”
“He can’t hear us. Even if he was awake, I don’t think he could.”
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s ... unlikely. Especially because of
his ears. One is completely blown. The other is inflamed. Doctor Fergus put a tube in to keep it open.” He looked at his cousin with concern and swallowed. “Georgiana – ”
“What?” Then she noticed George’s eyes were red and watery.
“ – I’m sorry. I don’t really have anything to say beyond that.”
“Then will you just tell him something? Even if he can’t hear?”
He sighed. “All right. What?”
“If he dies, I’ll kill him. I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way. I promise him that.”
George managed a smile. “I’ll tell him you said that.”
Chapter 18 – Geoffrey’s World
If not for the pain, he would not have remembered.
He was asleep in his bed, wrapped in clean sheets, with his faithful hound asleep at his side. He could feel a weight– not large enough to be human, but sizable none the less – on his bed, and knew it was Gawain . It was a normal morning, except for all of the ringing, not of multiple church bells but of one, piercing, long ring. He waited, in what he thought was a patient manner, for it to subside, but it did not. Beyond that, there was only pain and silence.
Pain sapped his energy and prevented him from opening his eyes. He managed only one fully, the other pressed down by an impossible weight, and there was not much to look at; his room was lit by candles, so it was night. He was not hung over – this was much worse. He remembered being cold, and wet, something about a wolf, a gun, and that man named Hatchet or Hatching, and old man Jenkins. The coal! Did he deliver the coal?
It took him some time to realize the movement was Dr. Maddox speaking to him. His lips were moving but no sound was coming out. There was something plugging his left ear, and he raised his hand to move it, only to have the doctor grab it, and hold it down. Lips moving again, another explanation lost in the air between the doctor and him. Geoffrey couldn’t read the expression – it was too blurry. He could only feel the hand pressing his back down, and his faithful hound moving on the bed, licking his face. Gawain hadn’t done that since he was a puppy. Geoffrey opened his mouth to talk but his throat was too dry to speak.
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