Dreadfully Ever After (2 page)

“A dreadful,” she said. “A monstrous parasite intent on sucking the very life from the living.”

Darcy stifled a laugh.

“Is that what this is about?” he almost said. “I’ll grant you Philippa hasn’t begun life as comely as her sisters, but she’s not so unsightly as all that!”

He caught himself just in time.

His wife’s black humors had begun long before the birth of her youngest niece (homely baby though she was). So it wasn’t just this particular child that perturbed her.

“Are you saying you don’t like
children?
” he asked.

“No! Yet I do find myself feeling unaccountably—”

Elizabeth grimaced as if she’d just discovered something unbearably sour in her mouth. Then she spit it out.

“—
relieved
that we haven’t had any of our own.”

Somehow Darcy managed to keep walking, though his mind had gone numb. No blow from a nunchuck or bo staff had ever struck him so dumb.

“You are appalled that a woman should have such thoughts,” Elizabeth said. “Aghast. Disgusted. I can tell.”

“No. I’m merely surprised.”

Elizabeth stared at him dubiously, and he couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t sure if he believed it, either.

He was still focused inward, trying to divine his own feelings, when a small figure stepped out of the forest just ahead. Darcy was so distracted he didn’t even think when he recognized who it was before them. For here was Andrew, youngest son of his steward. Darcy stopped and leaned forward, hands on his knees, as he always did when greeting the lad.

“And what brings you so far from the house, young master Brayles?”

Young master Brayles answered with a growl, and too late Darcy noticed the odd tilt to the boy’s head and the gray pallor of his skin and the smell of death and feculence that drifted with him onto the road. By the time all that had registered, the dreadful had hurled itself at him and was sinking its little teeth deep,
deep
into Darcy’s neck.

There was no timepiece on earth fine enough in its workings to measure how long Elizabeth stood by motionless, in shock, as a zombie chomped into her husband. One tick of a clock would have been an eternity by comparison. Yet Elizabeth judged herself unimaginably,
unforgivably
slow to act.

She grabbed the little dreadful by its lacy collar and jerked it away. The ghoul-child stumbled back still chewing furiously on a stringy chunk of flesh torn from Darcy’s neck. It showed no emotion as the rest of its supper stumbled off a few steps, hands clasped uselessly over a gushing wound. It merely swallowed and stepped forward again, ready for another bite.

Elizabeth swiveled and aimed a kick at its head that could have split a boulder. But Andrew Brayles had been young—just six years old. He’d been nimble in life, and he was new to death. No sleepy-slow half-hibernating dreadful was this. His reflexes were fast, his muscles strong.

“
YOUNG
MASTER
BRAYLES
ANSWERED
WITH
A
GROWL
.”

The zombie dodged under the kick and headed directly for Darcy.

“Elizabeth ... I ...,” Darcy gasped, and fell to his knees with his fingers still pressed to his throat. His white cravat and shirt-front were dyed red. His face was ashy gray.

The unmentionable reached him and bent in toward Darcy’s neck, irresistibly drawn to the enticing sight of so much flowing blood. Before it could taste any again, however, its feet were pulled out from under it, and the zombie found itself swinging through the air. It screeched and flailed, but to no avail.

Elizabeth had hold of the creature by the ankles and was spinning away from her husband like a Scots highlander about to hurl a hammer. She didn’t let go until after the dreadful’s head had whirled into—and was completely splattered upon—a particularly sturdy tree on the opposite side of the road.

Elizabeth sent the rest of Andrew Brayles’s lifeless body twirling into the forest. Then she turned back to Darcy, experiencing a sensation that had been unknown to her for many a year: fear.

She’d faced legions of reanimated cadavers without flinching. She hadn’t batted an eye while dueling her Shaolin masters on tightropes stretched over poison-tipped punji sticks. She’d killed a dreadful with a pebble, a pair of ninjas with their own toes, and a bear with nothing but a long hard stare, all without sinking so low as to break a sweat.

Yet every time her sister had gone into labor, Elizabeth had found herself reacquainted with dread. At such times, Death wasn’t something she could defeat with a well-executed Striking Viper or thrust of her katana. If it chose to take Jane, she’d be helpless—just as she would be if her husband’s wound was half as bad as it looked.

By the time she reached his side, it looked even worse. Darcy was on his hands and knees, the blood that splashed onto the sloping road already starting to trickle in little rivulets down the hill. The only cause for hope (ridiculous as it was to have hope at such a moment) was that the blood was dark and came in a steady stream. It didn’t squirt out in heartbeat spurts, nor was it the vivid crimson that issues from a torn artery. Darcy might yet be saved. Perhaps. For a time.

Elizabeth knelt beside him and helped him straighten—better to keep the wound elevated, above his heart. Then she lifted her skirts and tore a long strip of muslin from her petticoat.

“Keep applying pressure,” she said, pushing the wadded cloth into his fingers and lifting his hands back to the side of his neck. “Don’t let up, no matter what.”

“Elizabeth ... you must ...”

She silenced him with a gentle kiss—for all she knew, their last.

“Tell me later,” she said. Then she was hoisting him onto her back and beginning the sprint up out of the valley.

It wasn’t so different than one of Master Liu’s old disciplines during her training at Shaolin. Only now she wasn’t dodging arrows, and it was her husband’s weight upon her shoulders rather than a sack of bricks tied to her back.

She wasn’t as strong or as fast as she’d been in those days. Yet she knew she was strong and fast enough. She
had
to know it.

Doubt
, Master Liu always said,
is death
.

Ten minutes later, she had the great jade door of Pemberley House in sight. It flew open as she staggered across the lawn toward it, and the housekeeper, Mrs. Reynolds, bustled out as quickly as her bound feet could carry her.

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” she cried, waving her hands over her head. “Whatever has happened to Mr. Darcy?”

“An accident,” Lizzy panted.

“Oh! Thank heavens!”

“Send for Dr. Oxenbrigg at once.”

“Oh! Yes! Of course! Oh!”

And with another “Oh!” for every scuffling step she took, Mrs. Reynolds scooted off. To anyone unfamiliar with the strange plague, the relief on the woman’s face would have been unfathomable. Her master was riding piggy-back on her mistress, head lolling, eyes rolling, blood everywhere. At least he hadn’t been bitten, though. At least he wasn’t damned. Or so Elizabeth had led her to believe.

More servants came swarming out of the house, and three grim-faced footmen gently lifted Darcy off Elizabeth’s back. She was shocked when she saw him again. As she’d run, she’d taken comfort in the steady thump of his heart against her back, but now she could see it had merely been emptying her husband of life. His skin had gone a pale beyond white, as if milk flowed through his veins. Certainly, there couldn’t be much blood there anymore.

By the time they laid him on his low, palletlike tatami bed upstairs, Darcy was no longer moving, except to breathe. He’d closed his eyes as well, for which Elizabeth was grateful. They’d gone glassy, empty, and looking into them made Elizabeth feel dizzy, as if she were on the edge of some precipice staring down into a dark abyss.

A young chambermaid knelt next to her and reached for the clump of muslin she was pressing to Darcy’s neck.

“I’ll hold it!” Elizabeth snapped.

The girl jerked back. “I’m sorry, Ma’am. I thought you might like to rest.”

“No. Just bring me the angelica root and fresh dressings, and I will attend to my husband myself. The rest of you may leave.”

The servants were shuffling out glumly when Georgiana Darcy came bursting in.

“They say my brother is—no!” She rushed to the bed and threw herself to her knees beside Darcy. “Just look at him! Lizzy, how did this happen?”

“An accident,” Elizabeth said, lowering her voice as she glanced meaningfully at the open door. “You must remember your training.”

The younger woman nodded solemnly, and Elizabeth was grateful for the moment she took to compose herself. As Georgiana straightened her spine and wiped any hint of emotion from her face, Elizabeth did the same. Both had been trained to be warriors. They’d been taught to suppress their feelings, to squelch anything like fright or dismay. Yet Elizabeth felt that, so far that day, she’d utterly failed.

“Your brother has been bitten,” she whispered, “by one of the sorry stricken.”

Georgiana looked down again at Darcy, and in particular at the blood-soaked wad of cloth pressed to his neck. Despite her best efforts, her eyes widened.

“Then he is doomed,” she murmured.

“Not necessarily.”

“But the wound is—”

The chambermaid came hustling back in with a jar of flaky brown Kampo herbs and a roll of bandages. She set them on the floor (the room’s spartan Japanese style accommodating nothing as decadent as a bedside table) before curtsying and scurrying out again, closing the door behind her.

“What happened to Andrew Brayles?” Elizabeth asked before Georgiana could finish the thought she’d started.

“He went missing a few days ago, just after you left for Fernworthy. Mrs. Leech was the last to see him. He was playing down by Dragon Bridge.” Her gaze flicked to the bed again. “Not little Andrew.”

Elizabeth nodded. “He must have fallen somewhere in the woods and broken his neck.”

“Then this is my fault! I should not have rested until the boy was found and properly dealt with!”

“We can indulge in self-recriminations later. For now, there is work to be done. I set Andrew’s soul free, but the body remains. You must find it and destroy it at once ... without letting anyone know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t understand. You want it kept secret that—?”

“
Quickly
, Georgiana! It is your brother’s only hope!”

The young lady sprang to her feet. “Where will I find the carcass?”

Elizabeth told her and Georgiana bowed, pivoted crisply, and went striding away.

Through it all, Darcy stirred not once, nor did he open his eyes or move over the course of the next hour. Not when Mrs. Reynolds or one of the other servants popped a head in to tearfully inquire about his condition. Not even when Elizabeth smoothed back his dark hair and kissed him on his clammy forehead.

When Georgiana returned, she was accompanied by Dr. Oxenbrigg, whom she’d encountered on the road as she headed back to the house. The doctor was a withered, bald, eye-patch-wearing, sixtyish man who was no stranger to the dangers of the dreadful plague: Legend had it he’d plucked out his own eye after it was scratched by an infected patient. Whether or not that was true, one eye was all he needed to recognize a zombie bite when he saw one.

“An accident?” he said after slowly lowering himself next to Darcy and pulling back the bandages around his neck.

He shot Elizabeth a scowl.

“There are many kinds of accidents,” she replied. “Is there anything to be done about this one?”

Dr. Oxenbrigg grunted and leaned in again over his patient.

Darcy remained motionless save for shallow, irregular breaths.

“No. It’s hopeless,” the doctor announced. “What am I supposed to do? Amputate his neck? There’s no way I could dig out enough flesh to ensure the plague won’t take root.” He nodded at the black leather valise he’d left at the foot of the bed. “I’ve brought my hacksaw, if you want a professional to handle the coup de grâce. I know how you people feel about your fancy swords, though.”

A little whimper broke through Georgiana’s stone-faced facade.

“You’ll have to excuse me. I’m sure I must seem horribly callous,” Dr. Oxenbrigg said. “The heart hardens when you’ve sawn through as many necks as I have.” He looked back down at the bed and shook his head. “I am sorry, though, Miss Darcy. Your brother was a good man.”

“
Is
a good man,” Elizabeth said. “Tell me, Doctor. Have you ever known the Darcys to shirk their responsibilities?”

“No. No one could say anything of the sort.”

“Then if I were to ask you to keep this unfortunate matter to yourself, could you, trusting that we would do what needs to be done when the time comes?”

The old man gave her a long, monocular squint before answering.

“You know what the Dreadful Act says.”

“Of course. You’re bound by law to see that my husband’s head is removed and his body incinerated. I am asking you, as a favor to the family, to let us handle all that in private. In our own way, in our own time.”