Page 2 of Elizabeth’s Refuge (Mr. Underwood’s Elizabeth & Darcy Stories #16)

Driven by all her terror and all her determination to not lose to this horrible creature, she brought it down on his head.

Amidst shards of shattered fine china, Lachglass dropped like a sack of manure.

Elizabeth’s eyes swam. She could not see anything. She panted hard. He wasn’t moving. She was dizzy.

Not moving at all.

What now?

A new fear took her, and Elizabeth knelt down to the earl’s body. She couldn’t see him breathing. There was no sound of air moving in and out, his chest was still.

Elizabeth tremblingly moved her hand to hold over his still mouth, to feel if there was any breath.

A hard knock on the bedroom door startled her up.

“Milord, Milord, are you well?” Mr. Blight’s nasal voice called out.

Lachglass’s still and silent body made no reply.

They’d hang her for this.

And Elizabeth had no liking for the notion of being hung.

She had to escape. Now. The apartment suite door must be unlocked again if Mr. Blight was at the bedroom door.

Elizabeth silently stepped on the balls of her feet next to the door.

Mr. Blight cautiously opened the door, saying, “Milord, apologies, sir,” again as he did so.

And as the gentleman’s gentleman blinked at the earl’s still body, Elizabeth struck him in the jaw, just below an ugly scar on his face, with a hurled elbow, the force in it gained by twisting her body as hard and fast as she could.

She’d kept her palm open, as taught, so that the bones in her arm pounded into him.

The sharp point of the elbow gashed open his skin.

The pugilist had told her that if she was ever in any serious danger, she must hit far harder than she even thought she could.

She could not leave any shred of muscle power unused if she wished to protect herself.

And he’d taught her that the elbow was a vastly better weapon than her soft and easily breakable hands.

Elizabeth ran past Mr. Blight, not giving him a chance to recover, and she didn’t want to attack him with another weapon and kill a second man. The door was open, as she’d hoped, and she ran through it, and stumbling, hurled herself down the stairs.

She tripped at the bottom and fell down the last four steps, but though she thought her foot should have been twisted from the fall, she peculiarly felt no pain.

And then she was up, to the main door. Thrown open. The world seemed to appear in moments caught in portraiture or pencil sketches rather than as a smooth reality.

She ran.

The earl’s house was on a fashionable square, with an oval gated park in the middle surrounded by quiet cobblestoned streets shaded by tall elms and oaks.

The buildings were made of a handsome grey and brown stone.

The day had a grey sleety February sky. Elizabeth did not pause as she dashed out the house and down the staircase to the building’s entrance.

She took the first street that turned away from the garden in the middle of the square.

Elizabeth ran.

Mr. Blight would recover, and come after her with anger and blood.

And she ran from the dead sack of manure of a body she’d left behind in the room. Elizabeth took another turn, at random, except she was confident this alleyway kept her running away from the house. Then yet another turn. She barely had a sense of where she was.

Without meaning to she hit a major road. Bond Street, emptier than in summer, but still full of carriages, and fashionable ladies and gentlemen strolling up and down and stopping in the expensive shops.

Tall white plastered buildings, and handsome red brick facades on either side.

She must appear so strange. The people she saw from the corners of her eyes stared at her. She full of fright ran across the road, without properly looking to both sides, or waiting.

A careening carriage carrying two ladies gripping their ostrich feather hats tightly to keep them from flying away, and a laughing gentleman in a beaver hat missed her by bare inches. The extra thrill of coming close to death only made her run faster once more.

Elizabeth had always been athletic, and she liked to run when she was in a park and not observed, but it had been years since she had run very much.

In the cold air her lungs ached. They felt like they would collapse.

They hurt so much, but she was still terrified, and she needed to get as far from the house as possible. As far away. Just get away.

Her legs were rubbery and they wanted to give up with every hurtling step.

She ran.

She ran down a thin street lined on both sides with handsome buildings, and reached Grosvenor square, with its tall palatial buildings and townhouses, and the large garden square with many benches.

She ran past the fronts of the expensive houses, a blue streak conscious of the curious who may be observing her.

Her footsteps were strangely soft for how fast she ran, as she was wearing house slippers instead of proper boots.

Out of the square.

Her chest ached hideously with each and every gasping difficult breath.

Elizabeth’s brain still dwelled on the sensation as the vase cracked over his head, splintering and leaving the top in her hands, pieces turning around in her palms and nearly cutting her. The thud of his body hitting the ground. Blood from his crumpled nose and head. So much blood.

Elizabeth burst into a giant park.

Gravel pathways and tree-lined boulevards were almost empty due to the cold of the day. A thin frozen drizzle wisped from the skies. In shady spots under grey, denuded trees patches of snow remained from a snowfall a week before. The cold sweat stuck to Elizabeth’s body and dress.

Despite its dourness, nature, even nature trimmed to its best effect, was to Elizabeth an old, comforting friend.

Gasping breaths.

Elizabeth collapsed onto a wrought iron bench hidden by two trees overlooking the Serpentine lake in the middle of Hyde Park, where royal swans swam, and where in December the pregnant wife of Byron’s atheist friend Percy Shelley, abandoned by her new lover, had thrown herself in the lake and been found water logged and very dead the next day.

Her lungs ached.

Her fingers tingled. Her legs shook and screamed with pain. The twisted foot, after supporting her for the entire run, ached deep inside.

Elizabeth was cold.

Drizzles of rain mixed with ice and the occasional flurry of snow attacked her. The frozen water melted instantly on the ground or her soaked through cotton dress.

The light crinkling sound of a breaking vase. The vase striking his head. Was that crack she now clearly remembered his head breaking, or the ceramic of the vase breaking?

The earl’s mobile, lively, self-indulgent face. Still and bloody.

Elizabeth vomited, leaving acid and food on the brown winter ground. Her vomit steamed in the cold for a moment. Her throat burned. She looked around her sightlessly.

Still seeing the still earl. Still trying to know if she had killed him.

She probably had.

The pugilist master that had told her how easy it was to accidentally kill a man with a blow to the head.

She’d had no choice.

Her head was sore. Elizabeth touched for a moment the top of her unbonneted hair, and flinched her hand away. The top of her head felt bruised and sore where she had struck his face. This brought a smirk to her face for a moment. If her forehead hurt this much, he would hurt far more.

Except he couldn’t.

Elizabeth forced herself to stand.

Cold grey sleety day. She had neither coat, nor gloves, nor boots.

Her indoor slippers had been mutilated by her run.

No purse, no reticule, no money, no anything that would do as a substitute.

The day was not cold enough that she would freeze to death — perhaps not even after night fell — but she was miserably cold and shivering.

Elizabeth could barely stand. The injured foot twisted under her, and the other leg felt rubbery and shook under the weight of her body.

Elizabeth collapsed back onto the weathered wooden slats of the bench.

She closed her eyes, and tears started to prickle in her eyes. She should just sit here for a while.

Too cold to sit still; too hurt to move.

She would go numb and stiff if she stayed long. Bizarrely, given the weather, she and her dress had become soaked in sweat during her run, and she smelled like an untidy barn now.

The Gardiners. They were a long walk away, and she needed to start now.

A few overcoated walkers took advantage of the beauty of the park, giving her strange glances from across their sideburns.

Less than a mile to the south-east was St. James’s Park, with the Queen’s House in the old Buckingham House on one side of the park, and St. James’s Palace on the other side.

To the south of that were the houses of parliament, and to the east were the slums around Covent Garden, and past that the old city of London, with Gracechurch Street right in the center, a few hundred feet from the Thames and the old London Bridge.

She would walk there as fast as she could.

Perhaps it was already too late, but she thought if she hurried to Gracechurch Street she would be able to get there before anyone raised a proper alarm and soldiers or Bow Street Runners were directed by the servants and Mr. Blight to wait for her at her aunt and uncle’s house.

She would be able to gain from them some ready cash, a coat, and some food before she had to figure out how to disappear from the chase that would seek to find and hang the murderer of an earl.

Elizabeth stood once again on her unsteady feet.

She would not be able to walk the entire distance this way, but a branch on one of the overhanging oaks was thin enough for her to snap off in the cold that made the branch brittle and dry.

Elizabeth hobbled to the tree, and gripped her chosen staff.