Her cheeks blushed rosier in the cold. “I misled you when we met. Darcy and I are bound. It is a secret. You sense that binding.” She set out at a brisk walk. “If apologies are due for last night, they are owed to you. Darcy gave you little choice about revealing your secret. It is fair that we share ours. I will show you when we are back at Chathford.” After a few steps, she added, “My husband was close to his mother. He blames himself for her death. He is determined to save you.”
I cocked an eyebrow. “I do not require saving. But I am excited to remind gentlemen of their mothers. That is a fine accomplishment.” Lizzy laughed merrily, and I remembered how much I had enjoyed her before… everything.
We followed as our party turned onto a street that hugged the Thames. This was a shipping district. Burly men shouted orders, slinging sacks or rolling barrels to a queue of horse-drawn carts. Skiffs and barges sat motionless at the river’s edge, trapped by the freeze. The main channel was deserted, the ice so thin it was dark and glasslike. A few feet of wispy fog hung above the surface.
The gentlemen and Harriet abruptly stopped. As Lizzy and I caught up, Mr. Knightley said, “I should escort Miss Smith by another route.” Ahead, a group of rough-looking men were milling, holding signs and shouting. Pro-slavers, all with cropped hair and belted black coats. An equal number of men in sailors and soldiers’ uniforms shouted back, many of them dark skinned.
“We encountered pro-slavers before,” I said, squinting to make out their signs. They had not been dressed alike, though. “We simply walked past.”
“That would distress Miss Smith,” Mr. Knightley said. He offered his arm to Harriet. She accepted, and her posture straightened nicely.
“After yesterday, we should be cautious—” Mr. Darcy began.
Ribbed bronze wings that spanned six feet whooshed low over our heads. The taloned feet barely cleared Mr. Darcy’s hat. We all ducked, rather too late.
“A drake,” Lizzy said, turning to watch. The firedrake veered upward, soaring toward the river.
The bronze glow of his binding filled me, but with it, suffering. Pain. “His bound wyfe is hurt!”
The bronze glow pointed toward the river. I followed it and spotted her at the end of a short dock, a simple walkway of floated planks extending a dozen feet into the river. She stood hunched in a dirty blanket, an invisible sliver of London’s poor. Her eyes were sunken, her hair filthy, her skin pallid.
The urge to help—and the race to preempt the miasma—filled me. I ran toward her. She saw me and thrust out her hand, clutching something small. “Stay away!” She had a lady’s diction, but her voice was excruciatingly hoarse.
I stopped at the riverbank. Mr. Knightley pounded to a halt beside me, then Lizzy and Mr. Darcy on my other side.
The woman pointed her clenched hand at Lizzy, waving her fist like she held a weapon. She backed from the planks onto the frozen river. “He ordered me to kill you. But I could not. Now he will punish me.” The blanket fell from her shoulders, leaving only a thin chemise streaked with dirt.
A pendant hung from her neck, incongruously bright with gold and emeralds.
Mr. Knightley uttered a soft oath when her blanket fell. He shucked his coat onto his arm and held out his hand. “Come back. The ice is not safe.”
A crowd was gathering, and there were concerned gasps and ribald jokes. A rude man shouted, “Get that Negro away!”
“Let me help,” I said and stepped past Mr. Knightley onto the ice. The patch under my feet sank slightly with a woodish creak that made me hold still.
The woman backed farther. She was ten yards from shore. Dangerously deep if the ice broke. Shouted warnings joined the catcalls from the crowd.
“I am the lightest,” Lizzy said and stepped off the dock.
Like her touch was a stone thrown into a pond, a ripple rushed outward from her foot. Instead of diminishing, it strengthened as it crossed the river, making the ice look fluid but trailing ominous crackles and hisses.
The river groaned, a grumble I felt through my shoes. The crowd gasped and fell deathly quiet, anticipating disaster.
The wisps of fog hugging the ice sank and turned to silver hoarfrost on the glassy surface, the filigrees and feathers lengthening before our eyes. There was another creaking groan, but not in fracture. The ice was thickening. I felt it rise and harden beneath me. The dark glass turned opaque, then whitish-blue. Ridges pushed up, inches thick with strange, cold steam that trickled down their raised edges.
Amazed cries rose from the crowd, but frightened shouts also.
Lizzy’s pose softened, then she sank to her knees. Mr. Darcy rushed to her and helped her to the dock where she sat weakly. She shook her head. “I am fine! Go help her.”
In her ruined voice, the woman cried, “You are what they said! The Darcywitch!” Her tone was triumphant—joyous—but the crowd echoed “witch” with fear.
The woman turned and began a broken run across the river. The back of her chemise was ripped, exposing skin crisscrossed with ugly red lines. Mr. Knightley bellowed a furious, wordless sound—a shouted gasp—and I saw the red lines were crusted, ragged cuts.
The terrible wounds wrenched my mind.
Miasma erupted, flooding from the moored skiffs until it poured over the gunwales in a deluge of colorless sickness. Lizzy, groggy on the boards, spoke to her kneeling husband, but her words were a wracking cough. Her shoulders hunched and her back distorted, matching the woman’s injuries.
My vision darkened. I was fainting, like at the salon. But this time, the scarlet strength was close. I dragged at my left glove, yanking until the long sleeve fell away.
