The colonel shook his head at me. “Lord, Darcy are you a man or are you a snail?”
“A snail?” I said.
“You have said already that it is your fault he was free to go after this woman, and you refuse to do anything with him. Why is that?”
I walked out of the room.
Richard came with me. He shut the door on her, and we stood in the hallway together and spoke in low voices.
“We do not know where he has gone,” I said.
“If he came here, we may indeed have some idea. He was bleeding when he left, and there is that bawdyhouse in Givston. You remember it. We went there all together, and the girls there were fond of him. He would have gone there and gotten them to tend his wounds. He might still be there, in fact. Some of those strumpets seemed incredibly tenderhearted towards him. You know how he can be.”
I made a face. It was the last place I wished to go. We had gone before, of course, but I certainly was not going to avail myself of bawds like that. Strange women in strange beds? It didn’t sound… clean. So, it had been a very long night for me, sitting up alone in the sitting room whilst everyone else was busy.
“I think, in fact, you should be the one to do it,” said Richard. “It would be good for you, Darcy, to do it.”
“To kill him,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
I grimaced, but then I nodded. “Yes, all right.”
He gave me a look and then he laughed. “I thought I should have to work harder to convince you.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. Miss Bennet’s trembling lower lip had done that.
CHAPTER NINE
As it happened, Miss Bennet had gone after Mr. Wickham with a poker because he had attempted to expose her to other men in the taproom. She should not have been in there in any case, for it was no place for a proper lady like her.
Richard told me she had been quite fierce, or so the innkeeper had said, and the innkeeper had indicated that he would not have stood for such behavior from Mr. Wickham anyway, but I had to admit that I had my doubts about that.
The innkeeper was there to make his coin, and he would be silent as long as he was getting paid, that was what I thought. There was the fact, I supposed, that the innkeeper had turned him out after Miss Bennet had brought a poker down on his head.
At any rate, I had to admit it sounded like Mr. Wickham. He was not the least bit respectful of women, and it was one of the many reasons I would not stand for my own sister being united with him.
We rode with all haste towards the bawdyhouse that Richard had spoken of, but we came across a carriage along side the road several miles before we could get there.
It had been abandoned, the horses taken, the driver and anyone else gone.
Richard rode on, but I stopped to look inside.
It was Wickham.
He was sprawled out on the back seat of the carriage. There was quite a lot of blood. He was already dead.
I called Richard back and we climbed in and checked for a pulse to make sure.
We peered down at him.
“I suppose the driver of the carriage wanted nothing to do with this,” I said.
“Yes, when he realized Wickham was dead, he must have bolted,” said Richard. “He would not have wished to be associated with a man who had been asked to leave the inn for terrorizing a woman. He would have wished to be clear of it all.”
“I suppose Miss Bennet swung the poker rather hard,” I said.
“Yes, good for her,” said Richard.
