Page 13 of Elizabeth’s Refuge (Mr. Underwood’s Elizabeth & Darcy Stories #16)
“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 hair 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?”