Spitey Blighty sometimes lied, even to him.
Lachglass said nothing.
“Well.” Blight rubbed his hands together, like Pilate after condemning Christ. “There is the end of it. She’s gone; out of the country. Don’t speak the French myself, but could try and follow them, and—”
“To France. To France. To France!” A sharp pain cracked in Lachglass’s nose at his scream as the rage took him, but he barely felt it, even though blood dripped out his nostrils again. “You let the slut whore escape to France.”
Lachglass delicately pressed a fresh silk handkerchief to his bleeding nose.
Blight held up his hands defensively. “Ten soldiers. Ten of em, didn’t respect the law none at all, they didn’t. They rode right over the Bow Street Runner and—”
“She got away! You fucking let her get away!”
Mr. Blight submissively chose to make no further defense of himself, yet there was that in his manner which suggested to his master that Blighty considered the blame placed principally upon him entirely unreasonable.
Lachglass forced himself to calm.
Spitey Blighty had told him he ought to get the warrant first, and then bother Darcy. But he’d been too full of laughter and hope at the prospect of seizing Swinging Lizzy to listen.
He regretted it now, but he still loved the look on Darcy’s face as he sneered at the man for getting refused by a governess — a governess who was, in Lachglass’s disinterested opinion, a whore.
Lachglass would confess that in honesty, he considered all women whores, at least till they were so old that no one discriminating would want to rut with them.
He let out a breath and painted again in his mind the comforting thought: Marching that pretty governess out to the scaffold. Watching the hangman put the noose round her neck, as she whimpered and begged for mercy.
He could hear her whimpers: I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. Please, just let me live one more day.
With a thin smile Lachglass removed his handkerchief from his nose and looked at his red blood. It felt like the nose had stopped bleeding again. That was the best part of the fantasy: The whimpers of I don’t want to die. Pleases don’t make me die. But he then followed it with his mind the rest of the way through.
The lever pulled. The sharp crack of a neck breaking. The cheering of the crowd, as he stood on the platform and promised the rabble who’d gathered to see Miss Elizabeth Bennet off that he’d tap a barrel of wine for them to toast her death.
Lachglass let out a deep breath. His useless anger was gone.
But he hated that this vision in his mind might never come to pass. He needed to see her dead. Needed it more than he needed another woman.
It was the way he’d fought off the doctor’s demands that he take laudanum, by imagining her hanging again and again. He didn’t like laudanum. His father had been addicted to the poppy juice, and he did not want to follow down that dark path.
But it seemed to him that there was nothing he could do.
The French, tyrants they were, had treaties with most of their neighbors, and with the rebellious colonies in America where each side would hand over common criminals in their territory to the other if they were asked. But Britain, free independent Britain, glorious Britain had signed no such treaties. Which meant Elizabeth was gone, gone beyond his hope of revenge, unless he did hire a killer to stab her in the back.
But that was by no means certain… and Lord Lachglass flinched from that course. It would not satisfy him.
He wanted to watch her swing. He wanted to hear her whimpering for mercy that the hard court, that the hanging judge he would find to try her, would never give. Above all he wanted to see the despair in her eyes before she died; he wanted to watch those pretty sparkling eyes, so alive, go dark and glassy.
And he wanted to hear the wails and laments of those who loved that refusing whore.
“All right,” he said at last to Mr. Blight. “Have all her family watched — spend whatever is necessary. Know if they receive a letter from her, know if they behave different from their normal, know if they have a strange visitor. She will eventually long for England, and when the time happens, we will seize her and remand her to the crown.”
“Yes, milord.” Blight bowed, his Adam’s apple bouncing against his greasy cravat.
“Dismissed.”
Blight went to the heavy oak door with a fine nude with exceptional breasts painted onto it. Some classical allusion that Lachglass had long since forgotten was the excuse for the painting. Mythology, in Lachglass’s view, was of value solely because it let everyone stick statues and paintings bare as Eve’s arse in public areas.
“And Spitey Blighty?” Lachglass added, as the man opened the door, his hand hovering next to the egg white breasts of the nymph on the door.
Blight looked back at Lachglass, hopefully a little wary, though Lachglass didn’t think he was.
“Fail me again, and I’ll fucking bury you alive.”
Blight inclined his head in his own impassive manner, and there was something in the curl of the man’s lip that suggested the threat amused him rather than frightened.
Chapter Ten
Fitzwilliam Darcy did not, in the general course of experience, get sick on the sea. He watched Elizabeth vomit with first concern, and then with a fond affection for her when he realized that she was not relapsing, or in any particular danger, but simply sick in the very unpleasant way many, many people had been.
Elizabeth lay on the deck, looking up at the stars, with Darcy next to her, for a half hour. They did not talk, both lost in their thoughts.
But he found himself, almost as though by accident holding her hand.
She gripped his back tightly.
He wanted to marry her. He always did, but now more than ever.
After some time of commune with the cold salty stars, Elizabeth began to drift off to sleep, and Darcy roused her. She looked at him with a smile, such a smile. Her smile was felt more than seen in the dim starlight.
She trusted him to care for her.
He took her arm to help her up. They came to their feet, and he helped her to the cabin that had been set aside for General Fitzwilliam, but which the officer gallantly gave up for the sake of the lady. They didn’t have any servants with them, so Darcy looked at Elizabeth in confusion, not sure if he should leave her in the bed to… undress herself… or if he should help her in some way.
Elizabeth seemed to see his confusion and she said with a sweet voice, steadying herself on his shoulder against a sudden rocking of the ship, “I will be quite at my leisure here.”
“Are you certain you need no help?”
Elizabeth laughed. “Quite, quite certain.”
Darcy looked at her with a smile as in the flickering light of a sea lamp she used her hand to steady her way through the narrow room, and then she sat on the thin bed. He closed the door behind Elizabeth, the tin knob cold on his hand, and went back up to the deck.
General Fitzwilliam joined him, with a freshly lit cigar in his hand, the glowing ember of the end bright against the velvety field of stars high above, and the single sliver of moon.
“Thank you, thank you, and thank you again,” Darcy said to his cousin.
General Fitzwilliam grunted and smiled, leaning much of his weight on the smoothed railing of the ship. “My pleasure. Just invite me early to any future like occasions. I like to be involved.” He took a deep pull from his cigar, and then blew out the smoke which pleasantly curled with the astringent and almost sweet smell of Carolina tobacco around Darcy before the salty sea breeze took it away. “When shall you two marry?”
Darcy coughed.
“Don’t be daft, she adores you. You adore her. What is there to wait for?”
“I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” General Fitzwilliam ground his cigar out on the railing and peered closely at Darcy. “You don’t mean to say you’ve got a secret wife somewhere?�
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“Of course not!”
“Huh. Well after today, nothing from you will surprise me anymore. Hiding women in your townhouse… and telling me nothing about the matter. I’d tell you if I hid a woman in a townhouse.”
Darcy rolled his eyes. But his cousin had earned the opportunity to needle him. “You are the one who always goes on about the importance of family, didn’t think you’d like being put in opposition to Lechery.”
General Fitzwilliam snorted. “Of course I would, and you ought have known I would — is she secretly your father’s bastard?”
“What?” Darcy’s voice came out at a slightly high-pitched screech. “Who? No! Good god, no. No, no, no. What dark crevice of your mind spews forth such ideas?”
“Well then why aren’t you marrying her immediately? — does she have a secret husband?”
“No!” Then Darcy paused for a moment with a ridiculous and silly feeling of anxiety. Did Elizabeth have a secret husband somewhere?
And then Darcy laughed at the absurdity of the idea. “Stop with this — it should be clear to you. It is a matter of honor, she is dependent on me. She came to me for safety, and for protection, and she is now banished from England and her family, perhaps forever. I can’t… she refused me once, I can’t use her desperate situation, what gratitude she feels for me now to manipulate her into accepting me. I honor Elizabeth too much for that.”
General Fitzwilliam did not reply, but from the manner with which he pulled a match out, struck it on the railing, and relit his cigar, Darcy perceived his cousin rather thought he was an idiot for these compunctions.
But he was who he was, and Darcy would never seek to take advantage of the situation that had placed Elizabeth under his protection. That was what being a gentleman worthy of her meant. Besides… “I don’t want her gratitude, I want her love.”
General Fitzwilliam complacently puffed on his cigar, blowing out bursts of smoke that were blown away immediately. “Don’t drag things out so long that you annoy her, she deserves better than that.”
The two continued there, on the deck of the softly rocking ship, accompanied by the slapping of the waves against the ship’s sides, and the endless creaking of the wooden beams. The starry infinite sky high above them.
And they talked of other things, as old friends will.
Early the next morning their ship floated into the modest — by comparison with London, or Liverpool — but busy harbor of Calais. An ancient city, with long connection to England. Calais had been an important possession of the crown for centuries, and it remained in good English hands long after everything else that had been united to the crown of England in France had been lost during the Hundred Years War.
And then Queen Mary lost the city. Or King Philip II of Spain, if one was more accurate, and not intent upon being a wag about the deficiencies of female rulers.
A city of famed business importance, and the closest on the Continent to the island of Britannia.
Calais also was a city Darcy had never visited. When he was a young man inclined to travel, England had already entered its two decades of war — hopefully at a permanent finis — with France. Instead he visited the capitals of German speaking principalities during his Grand Tour, Berlin, Potsdam, Hamburg, and of course the King’s possession of Hannover. And then Vienna, hearing Herr Beethoven perform upon the piano, before the next day watching a performance of Mozart’s Don Juan and later that day hearing one of Handel’s fine symphonies — though Handel could be heard easily enough still in London.
He’d gone to the supposed wilds of the Habsburg crown’s Magyar holdings, which despite the prevalence of impressively large mustaches and the paranoia of the Turk to the south were mostly civilized.
Darcy travelled even further to the east, and he visited in winter the Russian capital of Moscow. That had been a foolish idea of his. Darcy thought he could stand any cold comfortably, coming from the cold hills of Derbyshire. After those two lovely, if almost frostbitten months, he was not in the slightest surprised when Napoleon’s army froze to death after capturing the city several years later. The company and conversation had been excellent, though the Russian mind tended towards the dourness demanded by the weather.
Darcy had only been called back to England by the letter which reached him, too late, with news of his father’s illness.
He had not had opportunity, or more accurately, inclination, to travel from England since gaining the estate. As he walked down the rough gangplank with Elizabeth’s arm nestled in his, he smiled to see her delightedly glance around and around at every sight in the harbor.
Elizabeth grinned with every fragment of conversation in French that came to them.
He would have the opportunity to explore a new, and greatly famed, country with Elizabeth at his side.
When they left the ship, they first went to the customs house, which was thick with the scent of a poorly ventilated fire and musty books. There was a difficulty there. The French clerk who managed the office was not impressed with the old passport of Darcy’s issued by the Foreign Office a decade ago. Darcy considered that rather ironic, as the British passport was written in French, and thus perfectly legible to the man.
“No description of the bearer, no information about your conditions or employment — no reference to the lady. No, no, no. This will not do.”
“I assure you, we are respectable British travelers,” Darcy replied rather annoyed with the man. Elizabeth frowned worriedly.
On the other hand Major Williams, who General Fitzwilliam had sent with them to ensure any problems were smoothed over, grinned.
“You ought to have applied for a proper passport from our embassy in London,” the Frenchman said with moderate outrage. He was a small bald man, with a wispy fringe of hair and dried out skin. “How can I know from this that you are not subversives, revolutionaries, symathetiques of the empereur! No, no, no! A proper passport. Why did you not go to the embassy in London and get a proper passport? Go back and get one! — Where are your servants? All most irregular.”
Major Williams patted the clerk on his shoulder, the man rather stiffly and prissily drew back from him. The officer said in French that was considerably worse accented than Darcy’s own. “Friend, friend. I vouch for them, as an officer of His Majesty. We aren’t bringing over sympathetics… uh… what is the word I want… uh…”
“Subversives? Revolutionaries? Radicals? Jacobins?” Darcy offered in French to General Fitzwilliam’s aide.
The young man snapped his fingers. “Exactly.”
He flashed a brilliant smile at Darcy, which again struck Darcy as a close imitation of General Fitzwilliam’s own smile, perhaps… but while he was a young man, Major Williams was much too old for there to be any chance that he was a by-blow of his cousin.
“We dislike Napoleon quite more than you do I would imagine.” Major Williams grinned widely. And as he spoke he pulled from somewhere a large yellow coin that Darcy believed was worth ten francs, which he rolled around his fingers with impressive dexterity.
The clerk watched the coin quite closely. He then said, “Well, Monsieur Darcy and you are of undoubted respectability… we can have a passport made here for Mrs. Benoit… you really ought to have followed procedure. That is the procedure for a good reason.”
“I know. I know.” Major Williams placed the coin on the desk and said again, “I am quite disapproving of Mrs. Benoit.”
He winked at Elizabeth.
“We have further servants who will come this afternoon on the Dover packet,” Darcy added, “but I have good hopes they will have acquired passports of their own.”
“Just send them here, if they do not.” He sighed. “You British, how did you ever win the war when you are so disorderly. By regulation, everything should be done by regulation.”
Major Williams laughed. “We won with money, we have a great big lot of the yellow stuff — Monsieur Darcy here more than most.”
The clerk disappeared
the coin Major Williams had put onto the desk into his pocket and he spoke to Darcy, “A two franc fee if you wish me to write up a passport valid for internal travel, and ten francs if you wish one that shall allow passage past borders.”
They paid, and then the man, carefully writing Elizabeth’s description into the passport, under the name of Mrs. Benoit, filled out the document, and then signed the bottom of it, and he had the chief of the office enter and give a final undersigning of the passport.
Now free of customs. Though when all of their trunks and carriage arrived they would be held here and Darcy would need to return to the office to pay the import fees on the carriage and allow the inspectors to look over his clothes and other belongings to ensure he was not a smuggler.
Based on the timetables for the regular packets to Dover, he’d asked the harbor master about the packets from Dover, Darcy expected to have his servants and carriages to arrive late in the afternoon.
They planned to stay in Calais at least until General Fitzwilliam gathered all his troops and set them off on a march towards Cambrai.
They picked their way along the streets lined with tall buildings painted in oranges and blues. Major Williams led them quite confidently. “First time in Calais, Mr. Darcy? Lovely city. Lovely people — too deuced talented with the use of cannons. Never liked that about them.”
“First time in France,” Darcy agreed.
“Here we are,” Major Williams said when they reached a fine park, with an excellent building taking up a large frontage of the street. Several carriages were parked out front, one of them being loaded as they watched. “Dessein’s. Best hotel in this city. Or so they say — the rooms being a little above my purse. They have the finest breakfast in town, and excellent wines. The General always dines here when he is in Calais.”
Though everyone referred to the hotel as Dessein’s the sign in large letters above the entrance to the building proclaimed it to be the Hôtel d'Angleterre. When they reached the coach yard, they found a fashionably dressed English gentleman with a face ruddy from too much drink and beer, waving a gold tipped cane as he oversaw the loading of his carriage.
Elizabeth's Refuge Page 10
