“Sir?”
“Have my horse saddled this instant! Tell my sister I have a small matter to attend to at Sir Hugh’s request. I-I must see to a-a breached fence or something. I do not know, but make some suitable excuse, will you? There is no cause for her to suffer any alarm.”
“Yes, sir.” He looked at me from the bottom of the stairs still in an attitude of expectation typical of when he was waiting for me to change my mind.
“Well?” I demanded.
“If there is any sort of trouble, sir, perhaps a coach with a footman or two might be of use?”
I harrumphed because he was right. This was not a moment for a romantic gesture. “The readier ones if you please, and roust out Sam if you can find him.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
I did not have a set plan other than to make Miss Bennet aware of the danger, put her backhouse man on notice to arm himself with his wood axe, and if I could overcome the lady’s inevitable objections to interference of any kind, I would leave a man behind as a further deterrent to a most unlikely intrusion.
When we arrived at Mrs. Jennings’s house, the street was dark and silent, and a freezing mist had begun to settle on the rooftops and trees. It was nearly eleven o’clock, and I entertained a moment of doubt. There is nothing more upsetting than to be rousted out of bed by a frantic knock at the door. But I had come this far out of duty, out of an urgent need to forewarn the lady, and setting my misgivings aside, I left my retainers with the coach and went to the door.
That I did not have a plan was likely for the best since nothing could have prepared me for what then took place.
Miss Bennet tore open the door—her eyes wide and haunted—pulled me into the darkened hall, and whispered that the very men I had come to warn her about were in Mrs. Jennings’s kitchen!
“Where’s me trollop, eh?” one of the villains called out impatiently. “Bring us a tipple, girlie. Ya can sit on me lap and kiss me while ya do.”
That bit of insolence was sufficient cause for murder, and without once thinking of the men I brought for rough work, I proceeded into the hall alone to beat the four of them with a passionate, vengeful glee that might have startled me if I had not relished the breaking of heads to such a degree.
These were men who had learned to fight in the alleyways, and as such, they were vulnerable to skills in the art of self-defense I had learned as a young man. Those skills, the element of surprise, the narrowness of the passage that did not allow them to surround me, and a few dastardly tricks my cousin Richard had learned in Spain, were sufficient to give me the advantage against such odds.
I suppose it was fortunate that one of the beasts managed to land a serious kick to my ribs before I ground him into the floorboards; otherwise, I might have continued to punish them long past what was reasonable or required. In any case, none remained standing, and I went quickly to the front door, executed a piercing horse whistle to summon my people, and ushered them toward the hall.
My coachman’s brother Sam, who had been a career bruiser in the taverns of Manchester, took one look at the heap of bodies and, in a tone ripe with disappointment, said, “Aye, sir, ye might ha’ called fer us.”
“I should have,” I conceded, tenderly palpating my ribcage.
“Ye’ll need a wrap, I reckon,” he said, and then, looking critically at me from the perspective of a professional, he remarked, “The question is whether ye broke yer hands.”
“I kept my gloves on.”
“Then ye’d best let me take ’em off a’fore the knuckles swell, and we have to cut ’em.”
We had by then moved outside and stood in the circle of pale light from the carriage lantern. Throughout this conference, the fourroughs, to use Sir Hugh’s designation, were tied up and piled onto the floor of my coach.
One, emitting a constant groan, cried out, “Me arm! He broke me arm!”
“Yer lucky to stillhaveyer arm,” Sam replied dispassionately as he worked off my gloves. “Best dash ’em in a bucket of cold water, sir,” he said, before mumbling something about “demmed delicate swells.”
“What now, Mr. Darcy?” my coachman, Keller, asked. The groom stood at the heads of the team and the footmen had already stepped up onto the back of the coach in readiness.
That was an excellent question to which I had not yet formulated an answer. The one thing I knew for certain was that I did not want the miscreants anywhere near Lambton.
“I believe they should be returned to Sheffield and entrusted to the care of the press gang with my compliments. Send James and a few of your boys in the market cart, will you? There is no need for them to be too comfortable.”
“Tonight, sir?”
“I see no reason to offer them our hospitality. It will be slow and cold, but tell the men it will be worth their misery. When you have set that in motion, come back for me.”
I was still surging with what Richard calls thedark, red blood of war, when I saw my coach disappearing into the night toward Pemberley. In the half-minute of dead silence that followed, the reality of what had taken place began to penetrate my residual rage, and I wheeled around and went in grim search of Elizabeth Bennet.
In truth, the belated realization of what might have been terrified me, and I confronted her in that perverse mood of outrage levied against the person of our greatest concern for having been in danger in the first place.
