Trial by Desire (Carhart #2)

“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.”