Elizabeth's Refuge

by Timothy Underwood

  Darcy studied the officer, who had the uniform of a major. While Lord Lechery and General Fitzwilliam looked a little similar, looking at this man was like looking at one of Richard’s brothers.

  “My aide de camp,” General Fitzwilliam introduced the officer to Darcy and Elizabeth, “Major Williams.”

  Darcy shook the officer’s hand, while Elizabeth smiled and inclined her head. “A pleasure to meet you, Major Williams,” she said in her clear, pleasant voice.

  “And likewise, madam.” He bowed smiling at the pretty woman, and Darcy had to suppress a jealous instinct.

  General Fitzwilliam studied the group of his men with satisfaction. He then said to Darcy’s butler, “Around, around now. The carriage.” He stepped to the window and peered out again with a frown. “Our friend Mr. Blight is gone. I suspect he is reporting the arrival of the men to his slaver.” He clapped his hands. “Let’s move. Quick now. Battle waits for no man.”

  Elizabeth had a decidedly amused smile.

  “What entertains you?” Darcy quietly said to her.

  “Just that I once considered you to be the one with the demanding, and commanding manner, and him to be the one who served at your leisure.” She smirked, mischievously so both dimples showed. “I clearly recall Colonel Fitzwilliam’s complaints upon how you put off the date of departure, which was a problem as you both travelled in your carriage.”

  “I had a particular reason to desire to stay in the neighborhood, as you may recall.” Darcy smiled back, unable to resist her amusement.

  “Now he is commanding your carriage. Such is the difference the rank of General makes.”

  “I hope, by Jove, I hope the General knows what he is about.”

  “I as well,” Elizabeth replied.

  “Rise, rise!” Colonel Fitzwilliam waved at them both. “Your conveyance awaits, Mrs. Benoit.”

  Elizabeth took Darcy’s offered arm, and she tottered forward. Every moment Darcy watched her, worried that she would become sick again, or faint, or something else horrible.

  A freezing wind whipped them, lashing through their heavy coats and scarves as they crossed the dozen feet from the entry steps, over the hard city cobblestones, to the waiting carriage. Elizabeth shivered, and she looked around, as if she was more frightened by the cold than the prospect of being hung.

  And then rushing towards them was Mr. Blight, shouting with hints of a Cockney accent, “Halt, stop. Belay that damned whore!” He leapt past General Fitzwilliam’s soldiers and hissed as he grabbed for Elizabeth.

  She shuddered back into Darcy’s arms as Darcy prepared to knock the man off his feet.

  A soldier grabbed Mr. Blight by the back of his coat and hurled him around onto the ground.

  Behind Mr. Blight two men in the uniforms of the Bow Street Runners, one of them pulling at the pistol in his belt, which he pointed at the man who’d manhandled Mr. Blight. “Stop, halt! As you serve King George, halt!”

  Elizabeth’s hand gripped Darcy’s arm like a claw. The two of them stepped forward quickly towards the carriage. Darcy dragged her forward.

  The carriage door was pulled open by the footman as soon as they reached it, and rather than letting Elizabeth try to find the steps and lift herself into the carriage, Darcy picked her up by the waist, and lowered her into the waiting conveyance. He ignored the Bow Street Runner shouting behind him, knowing that Richard’s troops all had pointed their muskets towards the officer of the law.

  Elizabeth’s waist was slender and firm underneath his hands.

  He immediately climbed into the warm interior of the carriage after Elizabeth, while General Fitzwilliam jumped in the other side.

  A Bow Street Runner pointed his pistol at the carriage, but the soldier who’d tossed Mr. Blight to the ground pointed his musket at the man and said in a thick Scot’s accent, “If ye point not tha’ dam’d toy elsewhere than at my general’s carriage, blow ye to hell, I will. By Jesu, I will blow ye to hell.”

  The Darcys’ driver, an old family retainer who was completely unflappable, shook the reins out, and clicked for the horses to move. The carriage rolled away as the confrontation continued. Half the soldiers continued to point their weapons at the Bow Street Runners and Mr. Blight, while the rest led by Major Williams mounted and formed up around the carriage to provide an escort through the city.

  One of the other Bow Street Runners ran in front of the carriage, and pulled his pistol out to aim at one of the horses, but before he could shoot, a soldier batted him calmly in the head with the stock of his musket, as if the presence of the pistol was not of the slightest moment, and the man went down easily. The carriage driver carefully and slowly directed his horses around the downed man, as he started to come to his fours, so that he wasn’t trampled under.

  The Bow Street Runner who had first shouted put his pistol away, but he yelled pointing at the carriage, “That woman is under arrest for theft and assault upon a peer of the realm. If you do not wish to be charged with a crime as an accomplice, you will stop and let me take her into custody! As you love the king!”

  The Scottish soldier spat. “I love me the king. But ye, I believe ye not. Ye are just a common highwayman wearin’ some fancy get up, I ‘spect.”

  The Bow Street Runner pulled out a piece of paper to wave at the soldier as the carriage turned around the corner. The last look Darcy had of the two was the soldier spitting on the warrant paper and shouting, “I cannae read ye fuul, but I be sure ye wish to put some forgery on me.”

  And after just another two minutes they were out into the big avenue of Piccadilly Street.

  The interior of his carriage was almost stuffy and over warm from the profusion of wrapped heating bricks and hot water bottles that had been prepared to ensure Elizabeth would stay comfortable. Darcy closed his eyes and breathed in. He could smell Elizabeth’s scent, and that comforted him.

  General Fitzwilliam laughed. “Did you hear that? Ferguson can read better than any of us, except you, I dare say, Mrs. Benoit. They take their grammar seriously in Scotland, being Presbyterians — but that fool man’ll never know. Hopefully we’ll be on ship, and floating down the Thames by the time the runners can catch up to us again — by the way, Darcy, I will need a fair amount of money from you. I gave orders to the ship to take its departure the instant we all get up on her, but there’ll not be time to gather all the men aboard before time, so I’ve given orders to Major Williams to lay out the regiment’s money and credit for the rest of the soldiers to get private transport to Calais, and to meet the rest of the regiment there before we march to Cambrai. You are going to reimburse the regiment for that expense.”

  Darcy laughed. “My money will at last be good for something. How much are we talking?”

  “Private transit across the channel for at least a hundred fifty, more like two hundred men? That will run you between three and six hundred guineas I suspect.”

  “Just have the bill sent over. Just have it sent over. Or, soon as we have a stable writing surface, I’ll write you a check against my Childe’s Bank account for six hundred, and trust your honor to return me any change.”

  “I swoon at the trust you give me.”

  “So much!” Elizabeth screeched. “You surely cannot spend so much upon me.”

  “Shhh.” Darcy smiled at her. “Relax. It is nothing to me.”

  “It is something to me.”

  “You both are only humoring me,” General Fitzwilliam said, “by providing an opportunity to laugh at Lord Lechery, and spoil the cream in one of his schemes.”

  “I am happy to nearly beat a peer of the realm to death, anytime you wish,” Elizabeth replied aseptically. “But six hundred pounds is still six hundred pounds.”

  “A fine tautology.”

  Darcy placed his hand on Elizabeth’s arm. If his cousin wasn’t here he would have placed his arm around Elizabeth’s shoulder and pulled her closer against him.

  “I swear, Elizabeth, I swear by all the trees and sheep in D
erbyshire, that you are worth anything to me, to rescue and protect. The money I spend to protect your life shall be the finest money I have ever spent.”

  “Well, if it is an oath upon sheep and trees, then it appears I have no choice but to accept your aid.”

  “Not only any sheep and trees,” Darcy replied dryly. “The sheep and trees of my home county, the finest in all England, Derbyshire. And a goodly proportion of those sheep and trees belong to me, and it is from that income that I am paying the ferry’s bill. So you certainly have no choice but to accept my oath.”

  She sighed.

  Elizabeth leaned back and her head comfortably rested on Darcy’s shoulder. She closed her eyes as the carriage rocked them all back and forward. “I do not fear our Lord of Lechery, but I think my six hours in the London cold in naught but a day dress have left me with such a terror of cold weather that it will take more than one long winter walk to cure me.”

  “Soon it will be spring,” Darcy replied.

  General Fitzwilliam constantly glanced at the windows, and then every minute or so, he looked backwards through the window in the back of the carriage.

  After they had been upon the road for about twenty minutes, he swore. “We are being followed once more.”

  He knocked on the back of the driver’s box, and shouted through it, “Faster, man, don’t stop, though they throw all the law at you.”

  The thin voice echoed back, “Don’t teach your old grandpa to suck eggs, General.”

  General Fitzwilliam laughed, and nodded at the other two inhabitants of the carriage. “Good man, your driver. Deuced good man. We’ll make it through to the docks safe and right.”

  But belying his stated confidence, General Fitzwilliam patted all three pistols in his jacket several times, but he stilled himself, took a deep breath. He glanced back the road and smiled.

  Darcy looked back at those following them. “Three Bow Street Runners. I recognize the uniform and Mr. Blight.”

  “We’ll ignore the warrant again. They don’t have the force to threaten us, and then on the ship, and out of London. Jove, I hope Mr. Blight tries something that will let me shoot him.”

  Elizabeth shuddered. “I do not.”

  “There is a story; he once killed a milkmaid who was sounding out that the earl had raped her. The girl was found, throat slit, with signs of having been despoiled. She had simply been tossed, blood soaking through the straw, onto a haystack in the barn of the big tenant farmer who employed her. The story said that he killed her, as he was seen in the village earlier that day, and then again afterwards. But the thing that chilled me, the physician who examined the corpse. He thought the pretty girl had not been forced before she had died, but after he’d already slit her throat.”

  Elizabeth shivered at the story.

  “Jove!” Darcy exclaimed, pale faced. “Jove, why did you share that tale with Elizabeth?”

  “Is it her who is too scared to hear the tale, or you?”

  “Nobody needs to hear such stories.”

  “Someone needs to act on such stories. Great nobles accumulate violent and vicious hangers on. The sort who hear, ‘who will rid me of this chattering milk maid,’ and who then go on to do that.”

  “The murderers of Thomas à Becket were not a fraction so monstrous as you imply Mr. Blight to be.”

  “That places a low value upon the sanctity of church and clergy,” General Fitzwilliam replied sardonically.

  The carriage continued to bounce along rattling them up and down, despite the fine springs.

  Elizabeth asked, “Where are we? Stuffed between you two like meat between bread, I can barely see the windows. Are we close to the Thames yet?”

  “Close, yes, another mile to reach our docks at Wapping.”

  The other soldiers had joined up around the carriage, but they did nothing to threaten the Bow Street Runners again, at least not yet.

  The white knuckled carriage ride shook through the endless cobblestoned streets of the great city of London. Workmen dodged out of their way as they did not slow at the intersections, instead having two of the soldiers ride ahead to stop the traffic at each intersection so they could pass by freely.

  Darcy could barely breathe. His own safety was nothing. Elizabeth’s was everything.

  They burst into an open area along the Thames, with vast docks finished only ten years ago. Ships almost two hundred feet long, with towering furled masts stood in lines within the vast wet dock.

  The carriage followed Major Williams who pointed the way to go. They were stopped at the gate to the dock complex by several guards in the red and white uniform with a six-inch brimmed hat of royal naval marines.

  General Fitzwilliam leaped from the rolling carriage as it came to a stop. He looked deeply commanding in his general’s uniform with gleaming gold buttons and long epaulettes. “Open the damned gate. Quick!”

  “I must see your authorization.”

  General Fitzwilliam annoyedly stuffed a sheaf of papers in the guard’s face. “My regiment is on the Orion waiting to take sail the instant I arrive.”

  Behind them clattered up the Bow Street Runners and Mr. Blight. Darcy had at some time, without quite realizing it, put his arms around Elizabeth, and he held her tightly against himself.

  He thought it was more to comfort himself than her. He had a pistol as well hidden in a compartment of his carriage, but he knew that would be no use against the entirety of England. He could shoot as many Bow Street Runners as he wished, and the only end it would bring was to have him hung whether they kept Lizzy from the noose or not.

  His nerves seized up as he gripped Elizabeth’s slim form in his arms. She, though, straightened up, carefully watching the action.

  “Halt these men!” the Bow Street Runner shouted at the marines, hoping they had at last found someone who would listen to the voice of authority. “By the authority of King George they are all under arrest.”

  The marine examining General Fitzwilliam’s papers looked up from them, glanced at the Bow Street Runners, glanced at General Fitzwilliam, and then looked at the carriage with Darcy and Elizabeth staring palely out at him through the windows.

  He shrugged. “Papers in order, General. Papers in order. Open the gate!” he shouted to the other soldiers. He stabbed his thumb dismissively at the Bow Street Runners. “Thems with you?”

  “No, not at all. I’d not admit them if they don’t have proper authorization. I suspect,” General Fitzwilliam lowered his voice, “I suspect they may be infiltrators trying to destroy our ships and are part of one of those groups of agitators, like the Hampstead clubs, or those people who want Napoleon to rule Britain. Best give them a run around before you send for the Captain on duty to look at their papers.”

  General Fitzwilliam handed the man a coin. The marine nodded, bit the coin, and waved General Fitzwilliam’s soldiers and the Darcy carriage through.

  “Stop, in the name of the king, stop them! For fuck’s sake.” The leader of the runners threw his short top hat to the ground in anger. “Are all you all here criminals? These men are disobeying the law and must be arrested.”

  “He is definitely,” said the royal marine, enunciating every syllable, to the Bow Street Runner, “a proper and auth-en-tic general. Now are you calling a general of his majesty's army a criminal?”

  “That woman tried to murder a peer of the realm!”

  And their carriage rolled them away, towards where a giant ship that had been designed along the same lines as the most modern East Indiamen, with long trees trunks making up the sweeping line of the deck, a smattering of canons stuck in a single line along the gun deck, and beautiful black paint on gold making up the coloration. The sterncastle was painted blue, and the flag of the united Great Britain flapped in the wind.

  A wide gangplank made of hewn yellow planks led up to the ship. The railings were lined by red-coated soldiers with their muskets out and settled calmly on the wooden planking of the deck. The cold wind blew stray h
air about, but the soldiers kept a firm formation on the mostly stable platform of the ship.

  The soldiers who had escorted them dismounted and formed up an honor guard. General Fitzwilliam stepped out into the cold wind; the temperature of the day was cold enough that their breath formed clouds. The slightly rotted, even in winter, smell of the Thames greeted them. Darcy took Elizabeth’s arm to help her out of the carriage. To his surprise, and pride, she smiled at him, and she was completely steady.

  “A fine adventure, Mr. Darcy,” she said, “but one I hope is over, and that we shall not repeat.”

  “I was never so terrified in my life as when the marine would not open the gate.”

  Elizabeth smiled softly at him as she let him lift her to the ground from the carriage. “You took our escape with rather less composure than me.”

  “You merely hazarded your own life, I hazarded yours.” His voice was low.

  The drummer on the ship took up a rolling military beat to greet the return of the general. The three of them walked up the gangplank together. Elizabeth was now steady and firm in her steps, as though the fear of the last hour had scared away, at least for the moment, any lingering aches and weakness from her illness.

  They reached the deck of the ship, and the gangway was pulled in.

  The captain of the ship was a bald man with a grey fringe of hair and a vicious scar an inch wide going up his forehead and disappearing under his slightly askew bicorn hat. He wore a coat of a blue wool that was at least half an inch thick. And he was angry.

  “What the damned tarnation is the matter with you, Fitzwilliam,” he ranted at Darcy’s cousin. “Thought you were a reasonable man when we settled matters. In all tarnations! Ordering us off onto sea on an instant. You can’t prepare a ship like this to sail without some warning. It just isn’t done.”

  “Do you have the pilot, and all preparations under way? Can we cast off?”

  “Damnations, man. Yes I have the pilot. Had to promise him a bottle of my best whiskey and an extra six guineas to show up on such notice. A different ship is being held an extra hour so that we can be guided out, and the stores are not prepared. Damnations and tarnations, man.”