“Oh, come,” 12-Q was saying. “Fine lady like you doesn’t want to resist the metropolitan police. As for when—right now. Why do you suppose I was sent to fetch you? Justice waits for no man. Or woman. Particularly not when justice is administered by Magistrate Fang. He doesn’t like staying after his time.”
“But I have an appointment to take tea.” Kate set one foot in the carriage, and her footman backed away from her slightly. Her voice was significantly steadier than her nerves. “Are you intimating that instead, I must undertake a tedious journey to—to—”
“The police court at Queen Square, ma’am.” He fingered his collar. “It’s what the Q stands for.”
“So I must travel to Queen Square, hear a set of trumped-up charges and stand trial? But I shall be quite late. I pride myself on my punctuality.”
Officer 12-Q shrugged and reached for her arm. “If you plead guilty first, there’s no need to stand for trial. Trial’s only if you wish to establish your innocence.” His hand closed around her elbow—firm, but not harsh.
Kate glared at him. “Thank you. That is most helpful.”
“Of course,” he continued, “six months in gaol will likely delay your arrival, as well.”
“Six months!” Kate was no longer even able to pretend at equanimity. “You must be joking. What on earth are they charging me with?”
A ghost of a smile played across 12-Q’s face. “Fang tends toward lenience with women, he does. Six months is if he’s feeling kind—and given the lord who brought the charge, he’s unlike to do so.”
Of course it was Harcroft. She had guessed it from the first. But what would he claim she had done? It could have been anything from theft to murder. At the least, she had the luxury of knowing that whatever it was he claimed she did, she was innocent. Now all she had to do was prove it.
She turned to the footman, who gave her a pained shake of the head, one she translated as I like my wages very well, but not enough to leap upon an officer of the police force. Please do not expect it. She sighed.
“You need to fetch my husband,” she said. “He’s off at Chancery. Tell him I’ve been brought to Queen Square. And that I need him. Now.”
The officer yawned at this interplay and shrugged as the footman turned and dashed away. “Will you come now, or must I bind you and carry you down the street?”
Kate raised her chin and went.
NED CHARGED INTO THE STUFFY ROOM where the police court was held.
He’d convinced himself, on the mad dash over to Queen Square, that the footman’s garbled tale held little relation to the truth. If Kate had been required to make her way into the somber, grubby office lodged in Westminster, surely it was because she had been set upon by some cutpurse. She was there to testify, and nothing more—
But no. As he entered, a sergeant of the police stretched his arm out and grabbed Ned’s wrist. He gave a little twist as he did so—some police trick—and Ned stumbled, one knee stiking the ground, his arm wrenching.
The officer was one of only a few occupants—a red-faced drunkard lay snoring across one bench, a woman and her children, all clad in matching shades of brown, took up another. A handful of officers, all in uniform blue, waited. If Ned had wanted, he might have picked out individual scents: five different bouquets of unwashed-ness. He didn’t want, and so he held his breath and looked forward.
Kate stood at the front of the room, beautiful, her hair slightly disheveled. She held her head high. He couldn’t see her face; instead, she was looking at the magistrate. The man sat—if you could call that disreputable slouch “sitting”—in a rumpled coat and trousers, his sole nod to respectability being a white powdered wig that lay somewhat askew on his head.
Directly across from her, standing just before the bench, was the Earl of Harcroft.
Harcroft had engineered this, then. Ned had known he had some other plan. He just hadn’t expected to find his wife charged with some crime before a magistrate.
Kate tossed her head, and something about that ungraceful movement drew Ned’s eyes to her hands. Her wrists were bound.
“What have you to say to the charges?” the magistrate asked. By his tone of voice, he was bored with the proceedings already.
“I can have little to say, Your Worship, seeing as how I haven’t heard them.” Kate’s voice was strong—as always, she betrayed no weakness.
“Haven’t heard them?” The magistrate looked puzzled. “But how can that be?”
“You haven’t read them to me, Your Worship.”
The magistrate cast Kate a baleful look, as if it were somehow her fault that his court had to pause for such futile things as the reading of charges. In an elaborate gesture, the man swooped a pair of spectacles off the bench and balanced them on his nose. He held a piece of paper in front of him at arm’s length. “There,” he said. “Abduction.”
He ripped the glasses off and peered at Kate again. “Now what have you to say to the charges?”
“Abduction of whom, Your Worship?”
A longer pause, and the magistrate’s lips thinned. “I am accustomed,” he said in a commanding voice, “to people knowing with whom they have absconded.” He glared at Kate.
She shrugged her shoulders helplessly.
Slowly, he picked up his spectacles, and once again set them on the bridge of his nose. He read the paper more carefully. “Ah, yes. I recall now. Abduction of this fine lord’s wife.” Off came the glasses again. But instead of glaring at Kate, he glanced at Harcroft.
“How odd,” he said. “Abduction of a wife? By another woman? I have only ever seen the case brought against other men.” He glanced back at Kate.
“But there is nothing in the law preventing its application to a woman, is there?” Harcroft spoke for the first time, his voice soothing. “You heard the evidence for the warrant, Your Worship. Must I repeat it all now, or can we dispense with the formalities?”
“He claimed to have evidence that I forcibly abducted his wife?” Kate said. “He’s lying.”
“Abduction by persuasion, at a minimum.” Harcroft didn’t look at Kate as he spoke. “A wife, of course, has no power to consent to leave her husband without his permission.”
Ned looked down at the hand still restraining him, and then slowly, gingerly, he pulled his sleeve from the sergeant’s grasp. He’d never given it much thought, but what Harcroft said was likely true. And if that was the case…Harcroft might in fact have hit on a crime Kate had actually committed.
“Wait!” Ned called from the back. “I’m her husband!”
The magistrate took Ned in. He gave him one long, pitying look, and then shook his head in dismissal. He turned back to Kate. “Well? Did you do it?”
“How can you even charge her?” Ned demanded. “She’s my wife. Whatever she’s done—whatever you think she’s done—should I not be charged with responsibility for it, as her husband?”
The judge fixed Ned with a pointed stare.
“That is, I should be charged with responsibility, Your Worship,” Ned appended belatedly.
“Mr. Carhart, I presume,” the magistrate said. “This is not the proper way to present an argument to the bench.” He looked around the room. “Having heard the evidence in this case, I hereby find that—”
“Your Worship,” Ned said, “which of these individuals—” he spread his arm to encompass the courtroom stuffed with sorry specimens of humanity “—is sitting on the jury?”
“Jury?” The magistrate frowned. “Jury? There isn’t time this afternoon for a trial by jury.” He glared at Kate. “You didn’t say you wanted a jury. In fact, you can’t have one. Not unless the amount involved is over forty shillings.”
“The Countess of Harcroft is likely worth more,” Ned said. “Your Worship.”
Harcroft glanced at him through slitted eyes, but did not contradict.
The magistrate sighed and set his glasses back on his nose, looking at Ned in the back of the room. “You appear to be a gentlem
an.”
“I am a gentleman. I’m the heir presumptive to the Marquess of Blakely.”
A crease formed in the magistrate’s brow, and he peered once at Harcroft. “But you said—that is, I thought Mrs. Carhart—”
“My wife is Lady Kathleen Carhart. The prosecutor did disclose that she is the Duke of Ware’s daughter, did he not? This is not a suit that you can dispose of in such a summary fashion.”
As Ned spoke, the magistrate looked to Harcroft again, his lips thinning. Ned could imagine how this particular case had evolved. Harcroft had indeed tried to take the upper hand. No doubt he’d impressed the judge with his title. Perhaps he’d even attempted to purchase the outcome with a few well-placed bank notes. But even the most corrupt magistrate would balk at sending a duke’s daughter to gaol for money.
Under Ned’s scrutiny, this particular magistrate straightened his wig and shuffled the papers on his bench. “Perhaps a fine,” he said to Harcroft. “You’ll be satisfied with a fine—a few shillings?”
“The Countess of Harcroft,” the earl said, with a cutting look at Ned, “is worth a great deal more than a few shillings. That woman has my wife. I want her back. No, Your Worship—I must insist on pressing charges. Trial will proceed.”
The magistrate pressed his hand to his forehead for a few seconds before he spoke. “This court,” he muttered, “has decided to reject the first argument put forward by Mr. Carhart. The accused in this case must remain Mrs.—that is, Lady Kathleen Carhart.”
His Worship, Ned thought grimly, was hiding his guilt behind an excess of formality.
“On what grounds, Your Worship?”
“By the evidence I have heard, the events in question occurred when you were absent from the country. We no longer live in times so benighted that we imagine a husband is responsible for everything a wife does. You are free of indictment.”
“I don’t want to be free,” Ned protested. “In fact, I want you to let her go and charge me instead.”
“Facts, Mr. Carhart, are facts. Wants are wants. The law does not allow me to substitute one for the other, no matter how keen the wanting might be.” The magistrate drew himself up as he spoke. Law hadn’t seemed to matter much to him before he discovered that Kate was the daughter of a duke. “Mr. Carhart also suggested that Lady Kathleen be tried by jury.”
Harcroft smiled at Ned. “I am perfectly happy to put the evidence I’ve obtained before a jury,” he said with an aggressive lift of his chin. “I should love to have one sworn in, right at this instant.”
“Right now?” The magistrate looked vaguely ill. “But it is almost three in the afternoon.”
“What has that to do with anything?” Harcroft demanded.
“This court closes at three.” The magistrate glanced at Harcroft, astounded. “We don’t stay after hours, my lord. Not—not for anything.”
Harcroft stared ahead, his jaw working. “Very well. Toss her in the cells. We’ll finish this in the morning.”
“The cells!” Kate said.
“Lady Kathleen,” Ned said quietly, “will not be seeing the inside of the cells. Surely Your Worship recognizes that a gentleman such as myself can be trusted to return her for trial tomorrow.” He stared the magistrate full in the eyes, letting his threat sink in. If a duke and a marquess were to turn their attention on a puny little police magistrate, the man would be stripped of his seat on the bench before he had a chance to pronounce sentence.
“Ah. Yes.” The magistrate glanced warily from Ned to Harcroft, and licked his lips.
An earl could cost him his seat, as well. Ned would have felt sorry for the magistrate, except that he’d agreed to go along with this travesty in the first place.
“I release the prisoner into her husband’s care for tomorrow’s trial,” the man finally said. “We’ll start at eleven. Sharp.”
NED FELT HOLLOW ON THE carriage ride home. He’d known Harcroft was planning something. He just hadn’t guessed what. He should have known. He should have done something. But now Kate was threatened, and all his fine plans to prove himself tangled up in his mind.
“Are you sure,” Kate asked dryly, seated across from him, “that we can’t just slay this dragon?”
“Ha.” Ned shook his head wistfully. “I think there are a handful of swords somewhere in Gareth’s home. Maybe stored in the attic?”
It was an enchanting thought, that—sneaking into Harcroft’s house in the dark of night, swathed in a black cloak, sword in hand. With nobody to prosecute the case on the morrow, Kate would be sent home.
It would be lovely, up until the moment when Harcroft was discovered dead in his home. At which point the municipal police wouldn’t need to look far to discover a person who had both an interest in his demise, and an inconvenient bloody sword wrapped in a black cloak.
As if Kate knew the path down which his thoughts had drifted, as if she’d trodden silently down the hallway of his imagination, sword in hand, she sighed. “Drat.” The carriage rolled up to the house and she shook her head as the door opened.
She disappeared into the night, and Ned stared after her. She’d meant the crack about dragons as a joke, as a way to defuse the tense, despairing energy that ran between them. But to him, it felt like more. Dragon or no, she was in need of a hero. And lo, here sat Ned, in the carriage still. He fought the urge to rush into the servants’ quarters in search of long kitchen knives. Some knight he made.
Damn it.
As names went, “Harcroft” didn’t even have a particularly villainous ring to it. It sounded respectable. Stodgy, even. And the threat—imprisonment—wasn’t even the sort of thing that could be slain. Not by typically heroic means. The heroes in the stories had it easy. A week ago Ned had been trying to figure out how to win Louisa’s freedom. Now he was fighting for his wife’s. His entire quest had started off-kilter, and it had only skewed with the passage of time.
Ned pushed himself out of the carriage. “You know,” he said, catching up to her at the door, “If I killed Gareth, we could forestall this whole affair, too. I’d be the Marquess of Blakely. And you, as my wife, could only be charged in the House of Lords.”
“Well. There’s a thought. And so convenient, since the swords are stored in his attics.” Her lips quirked up.
And the sight of that tentative smile—the first he’d seen since she’d been taken to Queen Square—was exactly what Ned needed. Enough with the analogies. Enough with the panic. Kate didn’t need the sort of hero that slew her enemies. That was the easy kind of heroism—the stab-and-vanquish sort. Any idiot with a sword or a kitchen knife could engage in the appropriate hacking motions. No. At this moment Kate needed a real hero. The kind that would put a smile on her face today, and bring her victory tomorrow.
Ned could be that sort of hero.
She walked into the parlor and sat on the silk-cushioned sofa, her silhouette illuminated by the firelight. She turned to look into it, presenting him with her back.
Her back seemed as good a place as any to start. The thin, tense line of her stance made a miserable curve.
He set his hands on her shoulders. The silk of her gown seemed cool to his touch as he slid his hands down; he could feel the ridges of whalebone beneath, stiff lines against his hand. She was wearing a small corset, one that fit neatly under her breasts, clasping her ribs. The chances of his being able to remove it seemed as dim as the lighting in the room.
But above that garment, he could still massage away the hard knots of worry that had collected in her shoulders. He took them on, one by one, letting his fingers speak the reassurance that his voice could not. And once her shoulders had loosened, he noticed how tight her lower back seemed, just at the edges of her corset.
There was only one way to defeat Harcroft on the morrow. Oh, it was possible that Harcroft’s information wasn’t sound, that the testimony he’d collected—and the gravity of his charge—would leave the jury unconvinced. But Ned wasn’t willing to accept a mere possibility of her r
elease. After all, she was charged with a crime, and however good her intentions, she had committed it. He’d gambled enough in his youth; Ned was not going to merely toss the metaphorical dice again and pray for the best.
He pressed his palms into the heated curves of her waist and made gentle circles there, over and over, until those muscles, too, had relaxed.
By contrast, he was all on edge. Kate could tell the entire truth of her story—that Louisa had come willingly, that she’d been beaten by her husband—but so long as Louisa was absent, it was Kate’s word against Harcroft’s.
She had relaxed a little more under his touch, but she was still stiff. Her hands were still clenched at her sides, her fingernails biting into the palms of her hand.
There was the possibility of countering Harcroft’s claims with charges of their own. Assault on Kate, assault on Louisa herself. But every charge Ned could imagine would require Kate to explain the circumstances that had brought them about. She would have to admit her guilt. No, there had to be another way out of this. Something that would leave Kate unquestionably free.
He took her hands. They were still cold and trembled slightly. He flattened her delicate fingers between his, and then pressed his thumb along her palm. Trust me. Trust me. He coaxed the tension from every finger, squeezing them in his grip, working his way up the muscles of her forearm.
She had leaned back as he rubbed her arms, her body molding against his. Holding her as closely as he was, he couldn’t help but brush his arms against her chest. And as he did, he couldn’t help but notice that her nipples had grown hard and tense. And so he massaged them, too.
He made little circles with his fingers about her breasts, radiating from the center on out. She let out a sound, halfway between a sigh and a sob, as he did so. And when that did not relieve the tension in those tight buds—when she turned around and straddled him, her petticoats covering his legs, her thighs clasping his, her body sweet against his—well. Only a cad would have left her in such a state.