Authors: Courtney Milan
Trial by Desire (37 page)
He smiled, and his arm came around Kate’s waist, pulling her close. “A confession,” he whispered in her ear. “With you beside me, all dragons are tame.”
“You don’t feel that you need a struggle, that you need something to prove yourself?”
He shrugged. Kate knew there were still moments when he’d resorted to sheer physical exercise to regulate
some of his emotions. There had been a month in the middle of winter when she’d come to understand precisely what he’d meant when he’d described his bouts with darkness. But they had both known that it was a finite thing, that it would leave. And it hadn’t been as bad as Kate had feared.
“I think,” Ned said quietly, “I’ve come to the point where I trust myself enough not to need the proof. I see no need to seek out another challenge.”
“Oh.” Kate suppressed a small, secret smile, and let only a note of timorous wistfulness creep into her voice. The ground was soft under her feet, and she waited until they were out from under the limbs of the trees before continuing. “That’s too bad.”
“Are you trying to rid yourself of me?” He was joking, by that tone. “Send me off to China again? Or India?”
“Oh, no. That would be very inconvenient. You see, I was thinking that in another…oh, seven months, I’ll be presenting you with a very lovely challenge indeed. I was rather hoping you would want this one.”
Ned stopped dead and turned to her. A low smile lit his face. “Ah,” he said, a hint of a quaver in his voice. For a moment, he didn’t say anything more. But their arms were linked, and Kate could feel a tremor run through him. She’d felt the same way once she’d realized she was expecting. Fear. Exultation. And one silent scream, halfway between “I’m not ready!” and “It’s about time.”
Ned looked off into the distance and coughed before turning back to her. “We ought to name her Iphigenia.”
“Isn’t that overly formal?”
“Iphigenia,” he repeated, as if the name were the most
reasonable one in the world. “We could call her ‘Figgy’ for short.”
Kate choked on her laughter, relieved that he wasn’t serious. “She would hate us forever.”
“Yes, well. You’re the one who insisted we needed to add difficulty to our life. How better to accomplish that than to guarantee from the start that our daughter can’t even pronounce her own name?”
“Ned, if you name our daughter Iphigenia, I will…I will…”
“You,” Ned said with an assured sparkle in his eye, “will love me just as much as ever. But maybe you are right. How’s Hatshepsut?”
“Hatshep
what?
”
“Egyptian is all the rage right now. No?”
“Decidedly not.” Kate smiled at him. “Try again.”
“Vertiline? Permelia?”
“Where are you getting these names? Why is it that they all seem to have eighteen syllables?”
“I know the one. Obraya.”
“That is not a name.”
He waggled his eyebrows at her. “Can you be sure?”
“Goose.”
He frowned. “Well, at least that one’s short, but I think she won’t appreciate the connotations. Isn’t that a little pejorative?”
Kate burst into laughter. “Stop. You have to stop.” When she finally was able to breathe again, she shook her head at him. “What’s wrong with your mother’s name? Have you some objection to Lily?”
“I suppose not,” Ned said. “This is why I love you.
Always practical.” He reached out and took her waist and drew her closer.
No. Not always. Not when he held her this close, not when his lips brushed her cheek once, her jaw a second time.
“And what if it’s a boy?” Kate asked.
He leaned over to brush a third kiss on her forehead. “Then, my love, he is really going to hate being called Lily.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Kate’s trial takes place without an indictment being presented to a grand jury. This is mostly because that step in the process would be boring to read about and boring to write about. In 1842, that step would have been necessary. I’ve taken the liberty of bending time a little in this regard; in 1849 legislation was passed that allowed police magistrates to certify that indictments could proceed to trial without being presented to a grand jury.
In early Victorian England, summary trials (that is, trials without a jury) could come before police magistrates under some circumstances (certain petty, nonviolent crimes). In many instances, particularly for the lower classes, magistrates sat as judges of fact over other crimes, too, so long as the parties agreed that no jury was necessary. It’s not always clear that the parties under those circumstances consented to the lack of jury; in some cases, they may not even have known they were entitled to a jury. Kate’s first abortive trial, interrupted by Ned, is one such. Both the speed and the apparent laxity of the courtroom depicted here are in keeping with the few accounts I’ve read of such proceedings.
Harcroft’s statements to the magistrate as to the elements and legality of abduction of a wife by persuasion were drawn (with little alteration) from Blackstone’s
Commentaries on the Laws of England
—presumably the source of our hypothetical Harcroft’s cribbed notes, anyway. Magistrate Fang was borrowed from Charles Dickens’s
Oliver Twist.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6892-4
TRIAL BY DESIRE
Copyright © 2010 by Courtney Milan
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