Dreadfully Ever After (30 page)

Darcy stalked out and grabbed the first ninja he saw.

“Where is Lady Catherine?” he demanded in Japanese.

“I do not know.”

Darcy had a hold of the man by the tunic, and he twisted his fists into the rough black fabric and lifted with all his might. To his surprise and satisfaction, he had more of it than he thought.

The bottoms of the ninja’s tabi boots lifted off the floor. Just an inch or so, but enough to make the right impression.

“You fear incurring your mistress’s wrath?”

Darcy brought his face so close that the two men were practically rubbing noses. The ninja’s life-light wasn’t just something Darcy could see now. He could almost taste it.

He tried to ignore the fact that his mouth had begun watering.

“Fool,” he spat, giving the ninja a shake. “Tell me what I want to know or Her Ladyship will never have the chance to punish you, for I will have already snapped your spine in two.” Darcy cocked his head to the side and leaned down toward the ninja’s neck. “Or perhaps I should simply bite you.”

“The Highest One is hunting in the wood near Badgers Mount!” the man cried. “Please, tell her it was Yoshio who told you! He calls you ‘He-Demon’ and says we should kill the both of you.”

His wide eyes darted toward the training hall. Toward Anne.

With a grunt of disgust, Darcy threw the ninja aside and stomped off toward the road.

His strength may have been returning, but the walk was still long and wearying. Badgers Mount was three miles beyond the borders of Rosings—taking his aunt far enough away, Darcy realized, to give him lots of time alone with his cousin. So it had been all week. Even with an ailing nephew to look after, Lady Catherine had been out hunting every day. Because the real game had been afoot at home.

Normally, Darcy would have taken a horse to go look for her, but he didn’t trust himself with so much animal, so much glowing life, so close. Even the sheep grazing in the fields seemed to him like an endless buffet stretched out before a starving man, and it took a painful act of will not to stray from the path when he saw an untended chicken coop.

Was this what he had to look forward to? Licking his lips as he thought of chomping into livestock? Pulling the wings from butterflies and befriending corpses, like Anne?
With
Anne, in fact ... and without Elizabeth? If so, his supposed salvation had been his damnation. He would have been better off dying back at Pemberley.

And then, just as he reached the most secluded, heavily wooded stretch of road yet, Darcy heard it: the high, breathy voice of a child singing softly. Something about it captivated him, entranced him, and he left the road and followed the sound into the forest.

The voice grew louder as he made his way through the thicket, and it wasn’t long before Darcy saw its source. A girl, perhaps seven years of age, her golden hair in pig-tails, was singing to herself as she skipped around a flower-shrouded glade. She clutched a bouquet in one hand, and every so often she would stop and pluck another handful of dandelions or poppy blossoms, her song never faltering.

I’m lonesome since I crossed the hill
And o’er the moor and valley
Such heavy thoughts my heart do fill
Since parting from my Sally
.
I seek no more the fine and gay
For each doth but remind me
How swiftly passed the hours away
With the girl I left behind me
.

Darcy stopped in the shadows, half-hidden behind a gnarly old oak, and simply watched for a while. It was the purest picture of innocence he’d ever seen. And, oh, the light of this child! It was blinding, yet he couldn’t look away. He found that he longed to be closer to it. To bask in its warmth. To
take
its warmth and make it his own.

Slowly, stumblingly, almost as if sleepwalking, he stepped out from behind the tree and started toward the meadow.

The girl stopped singing and skipping and stared into the forest. She wasn’t looking at Darcy, though; her back was to him. Whatever had silenced her was on the opposite side of the clearing.

Darcy followed her gaze and felt, for a moment, as if someone had left a stray mirror propped up among the trees and brush. A tall dark-haired man was lurching toward the glade, eyes fixed on the little girl.

When his doppelgänger stepped into the sunlight, Darcy could see the green tint to his skin and the bloat that was starting to swell his belly and, most notable of all, the chopping knife through his neck, the handle sticking from one side, the blade’s tip from the other.

The zombie gurgled and loped toward the girl.

She turned and ran ... for all of three seconds. Then, inexplicably, she stopped beneath the jutting branches of a huge yew tree. A dozen more strides and the unmentionable would be on her, yet she didn’t so much as twitch, let alone scream and flee.

The horror of what he was about to see finally snapped Darcy from his trance, and he cursed himself for having brought no weapon from the house. He frantically scanned the underbrush for a rock to throw or a fallen branch to use as a bludgeon, but there was nothing near at hand and no time to keep looking.

He had just enough strength to lift a ninja off the ground. He had to hope that was enough to stop a hunger-crazed zombie.

Before Darcy could take a step toward the girl, however, she shot straight up into the air, as if the Almighty Himself had finally taken mercy on one of the strange plague’s victims-to-be and plucked her from harm’s way. Her ascent to heaven ended a bit prematurely though—just beneath a particularly sturdy branch some twenty feet off the ground. Even the unmentionable looked surprised. But that didn’t stop it from positioning itself beneath the dangling girl and jumping toward her, making hopeless swipes with its stiff arms.

The little girl began twirling in a slow circle, and Darcy finally noticed the thin rope from which she was suspended. It was secured around her chest, the line obscured by the high waistline of her dress. The rope was knotted in the back and, when slack, would have been hard to distinguish from the off-white muslin against which it hung. Darcy could see now how the other end ran down a series of ring bolts hammered into the tree and disappeared into a thick tangle of juniper bushes just beyond the trunk.

“Looks like this one’s alone, m’lady,” the girl said. She sounded remarkably bored for someone gazing down at a leaping dreadful intent on grabbing (and eating) her feet. She amused herself by trying to drop flower petals into the creature’s upturned mouth. “No need to worry about scaring off the rest of the herd.”

“I will be the judge of that,” the juniper bushes seemed to say. They sounded exactly like Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

The zombie stopped its futile clawing at the air and turned toward the new voice.

“Now look what you’ve made me do,” the juniper bushes said, and the unmentionable’s head promptly exploded, spraying bloody pulp in every direction. The rest of the body topped over backward as straight and stiff as a felled tree.

“Oh, dear,” the little girl sighed, inspecting the gore dripping from the hem of her dress. “Those stains will never come out.”

Lady Catherine emerged from the bushes carrying her still-smoking elephant gun.

“You are becoming a most impudent girl. And if there’s one thing I don’t tolerate long, I assure you, it’s impudent girls. If you want your sixpence—and you
don’t
want a thorough English beating—you will hold your tongue next time we have a dreadful so ...”

In one smooth swirl of motion, the lady tossed aside her rifle, drew twin flintlocks from the bandolier criss-crossing her stalking gown, and spun around toward the thick oak Darcy had been hiding behind. She kept her pistols pointed at it a full minute before the little girl spoke again.

“Are we hunting trees now, m’lady?”

“I thought I heard something,” Lady Catherine said, holstering her pistols. “You will now only receive a groat for the day, Miss Flynn. And when I bring you down, I shall have to clap you once upon the left ear.”

“Yes, m’lady,” little Miss Flynn grumbled.

Lady Catherine peered into the forest again for a long, silent moment before lowering her zombie bait back to earth. She had indeed heard something, of course. Some
one
who’d slipped away, bound again for Rosings.

Darcy had changed his mind about talking to his aunt. There was nothing more to say. His reaction to Miss Flynn had shown him as much.

Elizabeth was right. He was tainted, befouled, beyond redemption. He could never again be what he once was. And he wouldn’t allow himself to become like Anne.

There was a special case in his aunt’s trophy room. It held two swords. One, Lady Catherine always said, she would use to disembowel herself if she were ever bitten by one of the sorry stricken. The other was for her second—whatever comrade or ninja was on hand at the time—who would use it to lop off her head, in accordance with tradition.

Darcy would have no second. He was and would be utterly alone. That wouldn’t matter, though. He was strong enough again, both in body and in will.

He could commit hara-kiri all by himself.

Elizabeth had just been exposed as the fraud she was before what seemed like half of England, and a part of her didn’t mind. In fact, that part of her—it felt like a very large part, actually, perhaps as much as ninety-nine percent—wasn’t simply ready for the yeomen of the guard outside Westminster Abbey to throw themselves on her. It was anxious for it. Anxious to
fight
.

There was just one problem: The guards weren’t obliging. Even as Sir Angus railed on about the charlatans in their midst, the nearest soldiers just peeped at each other sheepishly around their pikes.

“If these people are imposters,” one of them said to Sir Angus, “who the flippin’ heck are
you?
”

“I am Sirrr Angus MacFarquharrr, personal physician to His Majesty the king.”

“Poppycock!” Mr. Bennet roared. “You’re nothing of the kind, you rascal!” He stretched out an arm and pointed at Sir Angus just as Sir Angus had pointed at him and his daughters a moment before. “He’s the imposter! Seize him!”

“But—,” Bunny began.

Mr. Bennet swung his arm toward Sir Angus’s son. “And his accomplices!”

“A-a-accomplices?” the young man stuttered. He looked down at the squirming rabbit he was clutching in his arms.

But it wasn’t Brummell Mr. Bennet was accusing.

He jabbed his finger at Lord and Lady Cholmondeley next.

“They’re the frauds here, not us!”

Lord Cholmondeley puffed up his chest—which took much doing, it being a slight and concave little thing—and demonstrated why his speeches had become such favorites of both the Whigs and the more waggish Tories in the House of Lords.

“Thith ith outrageouth! Thethe people theem to be here under falthe pretentheth, tholdier, and I demand that you theithe them thith inthant!”

The nearest guard served as spokesman for all.

“Huh?” he said.

“Arrrrrest them!” Sir Angus translated.

The guards shared more miserable glances.

“I’m sorry,” one of them said. “I don’t think we can arrest anybody without orders.”

“We’re from the 36th Foot Infantry,” another added. He sneered down at his puffy-sleeved gold-trimmed tunic. “We ain’t used to all this beefeater rot.”

“ ’Today, you are a fence,’ the color sergeant told us,” yet another soldier threw in. “ ’So much as bat an eye as the toffs trot by, and you’ll be digging latrines,’ pardon
mon Français
, ‘until it’s George the ruddy Fortieth mincing into Westminster.’ ”

Elizabeth despaired of ever being attacked.

Sir Angus and Bunny also seemed to give up hope that the guards would actually guard anything other than the perfect straightness of the lines in which they stood. Each MacFarquhar turned to the woman he’d been escorting toward the abbey not long before.

“Who are you?” Bunny asked Kitty, looking hurt.

“How darrre you?” Sir Angus asked Elizabeth, looking like he wanted to hurt her.

Before either sister could reply, there was a blast of not-so-distant trumpets and the rumble of approaching drums, and the mob sent up a deafening cheer.

The king’s procession had almost completed its short march from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey. The guards wouldn’t be able to play fence much longer: Any second, George
III
and the Prince Regent and two hundred assorted nabobs and attendants would start down the very path the Bennets and the MacFarquhars and Lord and Lady Cholmondeley were clogging.

A burly bald man in the crowd reached out to tap one of the soldiers on the shoulder.

“ ’Ere. Why don’t you just drag off the lot of ’em?” he suggested helpfully. “The whole barmy bunch. That way, you’ll know you got the right ’uns even if you got the wrong ’uns, too.”

“ ’The whole barmy bunch’?” Lady Cholmondeley fumed.

“Thuch intholenthe!”

“Ain’t a bad idea, Thommo,” the soldier said to one of his comrades. “I’d rather have the color sergeant mad at me than the flippin’ king.”

Finally
, Elizabeth thought.

She went into a fighting stance.

Not that there would be any escape for her and Kitty and their father. There were at least thirty soldiers standing at attention between them and the street, and even if they should reach the end of the gauntlet, what then? One direction would be blocked by the procession. The other would be lined with yet more soldiers.

Resistance would be futile—but perhaps it would also be satisfying. If Elizabeth had to accept defeat, she would do so on her terms, not Lady Catherine’s or anyone else’s.

And then Lord Cholmondeley spoke again.

“I thay, that’th not my driver.”

He was gazing, brow furrowed, back at the street. His carriage had returned, apparently, for Elizabeth saw a sleek black barouche adorned with silver molding and an especially ostentatious crest.

Nezu was in the driver’s seat. Even more surprising, not to mention baffling, were his companions.