Dreadfully Ever After (7 page)

They were close enough to hear the rasps emanating from inside and see the rheumy, reddened eyes that peered out through the slit.

Kitty had stood her ground before scores of putrid ghouls still chewing on their last victims. Yet
now
she wanted to flee.

Her father stopped directly in front of the box.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

The voice that answered was whispery and sibilant, just as the serpent must have sounded when it tempted Eve.

“If you say so,” it said. “I awake each morning dreaming that the dreadfuls had finished making a meal of me all those years ago instead of stopping at my arms, legs, ears, and nose. All that remains of me is a lumpy blob for which there is no use but this: sitting on street corners reminding children to say their prayers at night so that God, in His infinite mercy, might spare them the fate he didn’t spare me. Yet you, Sir, pause to wish me a ‘good afternoon’? Well, I shall try my best.”

There was a thumping from inside the box, and the clink of metal on metal.

“I have jumped for joy, Sir,” the man in the box said. “Please give generously.”

Mr. Bennet removed a coin from his pocket and slipped it through the slot.

“A sovereign, Sir? Indeed, the afternoon
has
improved. Ell, Arr—wag your tails for the gentleman and his lovely daughter.”

The dogs did as they were told.

“Come along now, Papa,” Kitty said, taking her father by the arm. “We don’t want to miss a single shooting demonstration, do we? They might run out of unmentionables before we get there.”

Mr. Bennet carried on with her up the street, but his pace was slow, his expression troubled.

“What is it, Papa?”

“I don’t know. I have the nagging feeling there’s something I should be remembering, but I can’t think what.”

“I know! You were about to tell me that we’re off to Four Central to shop for bonnets!”

“Most assuredly not. It had something to do with ...” Mr. Bennet glanced over his shoulder and then shook his head and shrugged. “At any rate, I was just about to tell you where we
are
going. I have good news and bad news, my child. Which would you like to hear first?”

“Oh, always the good news, Papa! Always!”

“Of course. Well, then ... there is no crossbow convention.”

“What? Then why are we here?”

“That, I’m afraid, is the bad news.”

Mr. Bennet stopped again. To their right was a winding street so narrow it could barely pass as a tunnel, let alone an alley. Unlike the broad, busy avenue the Bennets had been walking along, this one was dark and deserted, with rubbish heaped against the buildings like snowdrifts and but one shop sign poking out into the shadows about forty feet off.

W.W.
MASSINGBERD
BUTCHER
,
POULTERER
,
PURVEYOR
OF
WILD
GAME
CAN’T
AFFORD
A PHYSICIAN?
INFECTED
LIMBS
REMOVED
AT
HALF
THE
PRICE

Mr. Bennet looked at the sign and sighed.

“We came all this way to meet a butcher?” Kitty asked.

“That remains to be seen,” her father said. “Here is our state of affairs: Either your brother-in-law Mr. Darcy is in some grave danger and we have been enlisted to help save him or
we
are in grave danger and will, quite soon, be fighting for our lives.”

“You don’t know which?”

“No.” Mr. Bennet raised his cane and pointed it at the sign. “But I do know where we’ll find out.”

“All right, then,” Kitty said, and without a second’s hesitation she tugged her father toward the butcher’s shop. “Why didn’t you tell me about Mr. Darcy sooner?”

“Because discretion was called for, and with some, the only way to ensure it is through complete ignorance.”

“I resent that, Father.”

“As well you should.”

The old Kitty—the one who was but an extension of Lydia, a pale shadow cast by the stronger spirit—would have done more complaining. And the new Kitty did indeed put on a prodigious pout. Yet she did so silently. Unlike her younger sister, she didn’t enjoy the sound of her own voice so much that she couldn’t deprive herself of its mellifluousness, if need be. And something told her need was.

At Shaolin Temple on Mount Song, she’d been taught to listen with such intensity that the falling of grains in an hourglass resounded like the cascade of a waterfall. She was used to the silences of the glens and meadows: It was easy to pick out the shuffle of a dreadful’s gait when all that might obscure it was the singing of starlings and the rustling of windblown leaves. But this was London, and echoing up and down the narrow lane were the sounds of clattering hooves and rumbling wagons and bellowing street peddlers.

Mixed in with the din was something softer that came and went too quickly to be pinpointed, leaving in its wake nothing more than a tingle across the back of the neck. Kitty was straining to catch it again when a high whiny sound, like the drone of small wheels rolling over cobblestones, bounced up the street from behind them. Both she and her father looked back, but nothing was there.

When they turned toward the butcher’s shop again, they found four men before them, dressed all in black from head to toe. Kitty heard another noise behind her—a shushing thud, this time—and she didn’t need to look around to know more ninjas had dropped from the rooftops to cut off their escape.

“Well,” her father said. “It seems we have the answer we sought. I’m sorry, my child.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Papa. But if we live out the day, you shall owe me a new cashmere shawl at the very least.”

One of the ninjas stepped closer. Like his comrades, he hadn’t drawn his weapon, though his right hand rested on the hilt of a katana.

“You will give us your weapons,” he said.

Kitty gave him her sweetest smile instead.

“With pleasure.” She whipped up her right arm, and a dagger popped out of her sleeve and into her hand. She jerked her left arm sideways across her body, and two throwing stars were instantly in her fingers. “Which ones would you like first ... and where?”

Elizabeth wasn’t traveling alone. There was the coachman, of course, as well as the musket men who sat atop the Darcys’ brougham, popping off the occasional shot at unmentionables lurking near the road. Yet that was hardly company, and Elizabeth, on her own in the passenger compartment, had never felt so alone.

It didn’t have to be. There’d been a moment, as she was sending word of her trip to Fernworthy, that she’d been tempted to tell Jane of her troubles. Elizabeth knew what her sister would do: drag herself from bed and insist on accompanying her.

Which was why, when she finished her note to Jane, it made no mention of Darcy’s condition or the incredible, disgraceful course of action Lady Catherine had proposed for saving him. Jane was too weak to be much help, and, what’s more, Elizabeth could not have accepted her aid had it been offered. Her sister had found a contentment that Elizabeth feared she could never share. She would do nothing to imperil that happiness. She would shoulder her burden alone.

The dreadfuls posed a serious problem only once during the journey to London, when they stormed an inn at which Elizabeth had stopped for the night. They were few in number, and most were still stiff and sluggish from their winter’s sleep. Elizabeth stood back while the villagers beat them to mush with the cheap clublike “Zed rods” that had of late become popular with the yeomanry.

At least when I am a widow
, she thought,
I will be free again to do more than watch
.

She was so mortified to find herself thinking such a thing that she immediately retired to her room and administered the first of the seven cuts of shame. But she stopped there. Best to pace herself. She knew that, in the coming days, there would be much, much more to shame her.

As the coach sped south the next morning, a gray blob on the horizon loomed ever larger. The lower half was “Britain’s Barrier”—the Great Wall of London. The upper half was the vast cloud of smoke that hung over the city thanks to the factories and crematoria continuously belching ash into the dreary sky.

The brougham came to a stop while still far away from it all. A line of coaches and wagons more than a mile long stretched from the Northern Guard Tower, and it took hours just to be near enough to spot the red-coated soldiers stationed at the gate. The queue was full of merchants and peddlers and performers, all drawn to town by the upcoming recoronation of George
III
. The king, finally cured of his “nervous exhaustion” (otherwise known as “insanity” when it afflicts those of lower rank), was about to reclaim his throne. The Regency was ending, and London was set to host such celebrations as hadn’t been seen in a generation. Which meant, of course, that there was money to be made, and on a grand scale. It irritated Elizabeth to be stuck there among the fortune hunters, but she knew her timing might have been even worse: It wouldn’t be long before the tourists started pouring in.

At long last, the brougham reached the gate, and the captain of the guard appeared alongside. He was a man of just the type Lydia and Kitty found so irresistible: young and brightly uniformed, with bland good looks unmarred by either scars or excessive character.

“Name, place of residence, and reason for entry?” he said.

“I am Mrs. Mathias Bromhead of Manchester, and I have come for the king’s recoronation.”

Elizabeth knew by heart all the questions that should follow. Did she have among her baggage any cadavers or body parts? Had she come into contact with an unmentionable within the past fortnight? Were there upon her person any festering bites or scratches? Et cetera. Then the officer would wave the brougham through with a lazy flap of the hand.

“A
LINE
OF
COACHES
AND
WAGONS
A
MILE
LONG
STRETCHED
OUT
FROM
THE
NORTHERN
GUARD
TOWER
.”

Not today.

“To the side, if you please.” The soldier pointed to a candy-striped sentry box off to the right. “Over there.”

“What’s this about, Mrs.—?” the coachman began.

“Just do as he says, Gregory,” Elizabeth broke in. “I’m sure it’s all quite routine.”

“That’s right, Madam,” the officer said. He looked as if he were suppressing a smile.
“Quite.”

Once the coachman had finished maneuvering the brougham off the road, there was nothing to do but wait again. The captain of the guard had disappeared.

Elizabeth passed the time watching the other soldiers go about their work—poking through the contents of farmers’ carts and drays with churlish lassitude while sending the most resplendent carriages ahead with hardly a glance. They moved with the indolence born of infinite boredom, like the dreadfuls themselves when they sense nothing around to grab and tear and eat, and Elizabeth had to wonder if even an unmentionable in their midst would rouse them from their torpor.

She wasn’t expecting an answer, but she got one nevertheless.

A commotion rose up in the queue, and when Elizabeth turned she saw two soldiers dragging a man from one of the big mud-splattered stage coaches waiting to roll into the city.

“Thith ith a horrible mithtake,” the man was saying. “Therth nothing wrong with me but a wee cold. Gwarr!”

He was about Elizabeth’s age—no more than twenty-five years old—and he might have been handsome not long before. Now, however, he was sallow and twitchy, with rings under his eyes and dark hair matted down in sweaty clumps.

The soldiers were hustling him toward a section of the wall that was pocked with small holes.

“That thquirrel ith ... gwarr! ... eathily ekthplained. I am a takthidermitht, you thee. I wath going to mount the little fellow ... gwarr! ... I thwear.”

One of the soldiers snorted. “How’d them tooth marks get on it, then?”

The man’s back was against the wall now, and the soldiers released him and moved off a dozen paces, reaching for the muskets strapped to their backs.

“Oh, all right. Yeth. An unmentionable did give me the thlightetht little nip on the ankle the other day, and ever thinthe I’ve come over all peckith for ... well. But I hear there are ... gwarr! ... cureth to be had in the capital. Phythicianth who can—”

“All lies, Sir,” the other soldier said. “There’s only one cure for the plague.”

He brought up his Brown Bess and took aim. His comrade did the same.

“Oh,” the man said. “Can I at leatht have my thquirrel back firtht?”

Both musket balls caught him in the forehead, and the back of his skull exploded onto the wall, along with the majority of his brains.

A moment later, the soldiers were beheading the body and stuffing it into a burlap sack. Four more such sacks, already full, were stacked up against the wall nearby.

The sorry stricken would find no pity here. And neither would Darcy, Elizabeth knew, if anyone learned of his plight before she found the cure—the one the soldier was so sure didn’t exist.