Written in My Own Heart's Blood

“Sweaw,” she said, folding her arms.

“Sw—oh. Bloody hell. All right, then—I swear on my honor.”

Jane made a small, dreary noise that was still a laugh. That stung.

“Do you think I haven’t got any?” he demanded, turning on her.

“How would I know?” she countered, sticking out her chin. It wobbled, but she stuck it out. “What does honor look like?”

“For your sake, you’d better hope it looks a lot like me,” he told her, but then turned to Fanny. “What do you want me to swear on?”

“Your mudder’s head,” she said promptly.

“My mother’s dead.”

“Your favver, den.”

He drew a long, deep breath. Which one?

“I swear on my father’s head,” he said evenly.

And so they told him.

“I KNEW HE’D come back,” Jane said. She was sitting on the log, hands clasped between her thighs and eyes on her feet. “They always do. The bad ones.” She spoke with a sort of dull resignation, but her lips tightened at the memory. “They can’t stand to think you’ve got away without . . . without. I thought it would be me, though.”

Fanny was sitting beside her sister, as close as she could get, and now she put her arms around Jane and hugged her, her face in Jane’s calico shoulder.

“I’m sowwy,” she whispered.

“I know, lovie,” Jane said, and patted Fanny’s leg. A fierce look came into her face, though. “It’s not your fault, and don’t ever—ever—think so.”

William’s throat felt thick with disgust at the thought. That beautiful, flower-faced little girl, taken by—

“Her maidenhead’s worth ten pound,” Jane reminded him. “Mrs. Abbott was saving her, waiting for a rich man with a taste for new-hatched chicks. Captain Harkness offered her twenty.” She looked directly at William for the first time. “I wasn’t having that,” she said simply. “So I asked Mrs. Abbott to send us up together; I said I could help keep Fanny from making a fuss. I knew what he was like, see,” she said, and pressed her lips involuntarily together for an instant. “He wasn’t the sort to plow you like a bull and have it done. He’d play with you, making you undress a bit at a time and—and do things—while he told you all about what he meant to do.”

And so it had been easy to come behind him while he was watching Fanny, with the knife she’d taken from the kitchen hidden in the folds of her petticoats.

“I meant to stab him in the back,” she said, looking down again. “I saw a man stabbed that way once. But he saw on Fanny’s face what I—it wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t help it showing,” she added quickly. “But he turned round quick and there wasn’t any choice.”

She’d plunged the knife into Harkness’s throat and wrenched it free, intending to stab again. But that hadn’t been necessary. “There was blood everywhere.” She’d gone pale in the telling, her hands wrapped in her apron.

“I frew up,” Fanny added matter-of-factly. “It was a mess.”

“I expect it was,” William said dryly. He was trying not to envision the scene—the candlelight, the spraying blood, the panicked girls—with remarkably little success. “How did you get away?”

Jane shrugged. “It was my room, and he’d bolted the door. And nobody was surprised when Fanny started screaming,” she added, with a trace of bitterness.

There was a basin and pitcher of water, the usual rags for mess; they’d washed themselves hastily, changed clothes, and climbed out the window.

“We found a ride on a farmer’s wagon, and . . . you know the rest.” She closed her eyes for a moment, as though reliving “the rest,” and then opened them and looked up at him, her gaze dark as shadowed water.

“Now what?” she asked.

WILLIAM HAD BEEN asking himself that question for the last several moments of Jane’s story. Having met Harkness himself, he had considerable sympathy for Jane’s action, but—

“You planned it,” he said, giving her a sharp look. Her head was bent, her unbound hair hiding her face. “You took the knife, you had clothes to change into, you knew how to get down from the window and get away.”

“Tho?” said Fanny, in a remarkably cold voice for a girl of her age.

“So why kill him?” he asked, transferring his attention to Fanny, but keeping a wary eye on Jane. “You were going to leave anyway. Why not just escape before he came?”

Jane raised her head and turned it, looking him directly in the eye.

“I wanted to kill him,” she said, in a perfectly reasonable voice that chilled him despite the warmth of the day.

“I . . . see.”

He saw more than the vision of Jane, with her delicate white wrists, plunging a knife into Captain Harkness’s thick red throat while her little sister screamed. He saw Rachel’s face, pale among the leaves, six feet away. From her expression, it was apparent that she had heard everything.

He cleared his throat.

“Is, um, Mr. Murray all right?” he asked politely. Jane and Fanny whirled, wide-eyed.

“He fainted,” Rachel replied. She was eyeing the younger girls in much the same way that they were looking at her, with a gaze of fascinated horror. “His shoulder is badly inflamed. I came to see if thee had any brandy.”

He fumbled in his pocket and withdrew a small silver flask with the Grey family arms engraved upon it.