"Madam," Darnell said, stepping forward with the handkerchief still raised as though he had forgotten he held it. "Madam, I must protest. This is no place for—"
"I know exactly what sort of place it is, Mr. Darnell," said Lady Sophia Ardleigh. She did not slow down. "I've been told about it at every dinner I have sat through for ten years. Men come here at dawn to put holes in one another over things women have supposedly done. I've always wanted to see it. It is smaller than I imagined, and wetter."
She walked straight into the space between the two marks and stopped there, squarely in the line of fire, and turned to face them both. She was out of breath. Her colour was high and her eyes looked very dark. Edmund saw that she was trembling and that she was trying to hide it, and that she was doing it about as well as anyone could.
"Lady Sophia," he said. His voice came out strange. "I beg you. Go back to your carriage."
"I came in a hackney, it has gone off to water its horse, and I am not going anywhere until you have heard me." She looked past him at Stannard, and something changed in her face. It hardened, and also, oddly, softened. "Captain Stannard. Does he know?"
Stannard did not answer. He stood perfectly still with the pistol at his side. It was the stillness of a man who has been asked a question he dreaded, by the one person he had hoped would never ask it.
Sophia waited. When nothing came, she turned back to Edmund, raised her arm, and pointed past the hedge, past the elms, at the black chariot standing on the verge with its blinds down and its four horses steaming.
"Mr. Garrow," she said. "Do you see that carriage?"
"I see it."
"He wants you gone before noon."
The meadow went very quiet. Edmund could hear water dripping from the elms, a horse blowing out through its nose, and Darnell's thick, wet breathing.
"Who does?" Edmund said.