Mr Sullivan rose and tousled Kirby’s hair. “You and I will speak another time. A judge will want to be assured that you understand right from wrong, but then we will all want to hear what you have to say about your uncle’s crimes. Can you do that?”
Darcy watched Kirby’s gaze drift to where his uncle was being led away. “Absolutely.”
“Congratulations, Mr Sullivan,” Darcy said. “Although it took you long enough to come to our rescue.”
He laughed. “If three minutes from the time you walked down the road is long!”
“It felt longer.”
Mr Sullivan picked up the dropped dark lantern and fidgeted with its shutter. “A trying situation for you, certainly. Me, I prefer to be active than be a clerk behind a desk. Sadly, the job requires more of the latter. In any event, your plan worked beautifully.”
“Miss Bennet deserves the credit,” he said. “And it worked except for the part that Markle always intended to kill them both, and I sent her right to him.”
One of the excise officers came up to them. “There is no one in the shed or the offices, and no one in the yard. Colonel Fitzwilliam is looking again, but there are no signs of her.”
Darcy felt terror grip his heart. Where had she spent the last ten minutes? Was Elizabeth still alive?
“Where could she be?” Mr Sullivan mused. “Could she have never been here at all?”
“She was in there,” Kirby pointed to the offices above the woodshed. “I heard her talking to my uncle. She said that Mr Darcy would pay for her. And that was right before your man found me.”
Markle might have stabbed her and they would find her body somewhere amongst the sawn planks and raw logs. Or he drowned her in the river right before Darcy arrived to negotiate for her release. Darcy bent at the waist and tried to breathe in and out as a wave of terror washed over him.
“We will find her,” Mr Sullivan said with his typical enthusiasm that did nothing to comfort him.
Darcy stood upright again, catching sight of the tall chimney of the dry-house, visible over the roof of the shed. Markle and Conway had been walking from the direction of it when he and Kirby arrived. A sick feeling settled in his stomach, and it took him a moment to find his voice.
“Mr Sullivan, you said drying the wood can take days. So, someone has to feed the furnace?”
His expression brightened. “Yes! Fascinating process. It can take several days for the fire to even get hot enough. I tend to learn all about the things that I find interest?—”
“Shut up. If no one is working in the yard, there is no one to keep the fire going. Who is tending to the furnace? Has it been burning this whole time?”
Mr Sullivan shrugged, shaking his head. Darcy turned to Kirby, who looked pale. “I don’t think that it was smoking when I first looked round,” he said, “but it’s been smoking since we talked with my uncle.”
Darcy exchanged a horrified look with Mr Sullivan, and then they both ran to the dry-house. Kirby screamed for help, and Colonel Fitzwilliam and two of the officers came running.
“Go round the dry-house and put out the fire!” Mr Sullivan cried.
Kirby and the others went to the firebox and began filling buckets from the Thames. Darcy came to a wide door that was carried nearly twice as tall as he was. There was no lock, but a large hewn log had been placed before it. It took him and Mr Sullivan far too long to work together to roll it away.
He wrenched the door open to run inside and nearly tripped. Elizabeth was sprawled on the slatted floor amid stacks of wood directly before the door. The fire was now out, but the room was oppressively hot and filled with a smoky haze. Darcy picked her up to take her clear of the smoke as his cousin came from around the dry-house, the look of horror on his face likely matching his own.
“Is she…?” Fitzwilliam asked in a cracked voice.
There was soot all around Elizabeth’s nose, but she was breathing. “Go for a surgeon! Then ride ahead to Cheapside to prepare her family!”
As his cousin ran off, Mr Sullivan opened the lantern shutter, and Darcy saw Elizabeth’s mouth was gagged and her wristswere bound, and in that moment, he knew the blazes of hell were not hot enough for Markle.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Elizabeth heard voices all around her long before she felt capable of joining the conversation. She was saved from the furnace and knew she was now in an open carriage. The handkerchief had been removed from her mouth and her wrists were cut free, and from the feel of the shoulder and the arm around her, she knew she was now leaning against Darcy.
“Her hands are red and swollen,” she heard him say.
“She might have been pounding on the door.” A quick, eager voice she did not know answered him from across the carriage.
“Oh my God,” Darcy whispered in a tone of anguish.
