Dreadfully Ever After (20 page)

“Yes.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “That is the course of inaction, and we can’t afford to take it another day.”

“There is no need for undue haste, Mrs. Darcy. Her Ladyship assures me that your husband has grown no worse, and if we force the issue—”

“These assurances would mean more if they had come to
me
,” Elizabeth interrupted. “From Miss Darcy. And even if they had, hearing that my husband ‘has grown no worse’ is hardly an inducement to do nothing.”

“Biding one’s time is not doing nothing. And, at any rate, the wrong kind of something could jeopardize all our plans. I hardly need remind you that there are rules in polite society by which one must abide.”

“Indeed. You do not have to tell me that which I know so well. All the same, my mind is made up. I am through waiting for a chance at a cure that might not even exist. We will pay a call on the MacFarquhars.”

“That would be extremely forward.”

Elizabeth shrugged. “The Shevingtons are like that, I suppose. Good thing they’re rich enough to ignore the rules when they choose. Now, why don’t you go make sure breakfast is ready while I tell my father and sister to prepare themselves for a morning call.”

Nezu stared at Elizabeth for a long, silent moment. She had the feeling he was playing out a conversation in his head—one that began, “I’m sorry, Your Ladyship, but ...,” and ended with his mistress’s knee going where no knee ever went with good intentions. Though he eventually bowed and said, “Very good,” the expression on his face seemed in no way in agreement with his words.

Within the hour, Elizabeth was setting off with Kitty and Mr. Bennet. Since the MacFarquhars lived just six blocks away—and because Elizabeth wished (rather perversely, she knew) to deny Nezu an excuse to tag along as a coachman—it was decided that the party would walk. As they sauntered off, Nezu watched from the portico, a strangely forlorn look upon his face. Elizabeth almost expected him to howl like a hound watching its master ride away. To her surprise, Kitty glanced back and smiled in a way that seemed both comforting and cruel.

“There’s just something about people who take themselves
so
seriously,” Kitty said when she noticed Elizabeth watching her. “I can’t help but tease them a little.”

“Our young friend Nezu certainly isn’t what anyone would call frivolous,” Mr. Bennet said.

“Oh, no! He makes Mr. Darcy seem as giddy as Lydia!” Kitty giggled with a very Lydia-like giddiness, and then took her sister’s arm and gave her an apologetic pat. “Not that I’m saying your Mr. Darcy lacks for humor. It’s just ...” She grinned and looked back again at Nezu. “Oh, he’s like a male Mary!”

“Mary’s like a male Mary,” Mr. Bennet said.

“Papa! You’re simply horrid!” Kitty shot back, but she was laughing as she said it.

“It’s nothing to make light of,” Elizabeth said, not laughing at all. “Whatever it is Mary’s doing, at least she’s—”

A man ran around the next corner screaming. “That never bodes well,” Mr. Bennet said.

There were more shrieks, followed by more fleeing men and women.

The Bennets kept walking toward the corner.

“I do wish someone would scream a
word
,” Mr. Bennet said.

“You know what that kind of scream means,” Elizabeth replied.

A phaeton came careening around the corner, the galloping horses wide-eyed with panic.

“Dreadfulllllllllllll! Dreadfullllllllllll!” the coachman bellowed.

“That’s more like it,” Mr. Bennet said. “I just prefer when people are clear about these things.”

Even forewarned, however, the Bennets couldn’t have predicted what they found when they rounded the corner:
four
dreadfuls hunched over a still-twitching body.

The zombies all seemed relatively fresh. The skin was still taut, not bloated or shriveled, and it had the jaundiced pallor of illness rather than the green or gray of decay. They all shared the same fiery red heads of hair as well, and their clothes were similarly tattered and smeared with muck. Two were adults, a male and a female, and two were children, a boy and a girl.

This had been a family.

At present, they were enjoying a meal together: a well-dressed middle-aged man whose ample belly the children were in the process of emptying into their mouths. Father, meanwhile, was gnawing on an ankle while Mother doggedly bashed the dead man’s skull against the cobblestones in an attempt to crack it open like a walnut and avail herself of the sweet meat within.

“How did
they
get here?” Kitty asked as the last screaming ladies and gentlemen sped past them. The street was now deserted except for the unmentionables and their main course.

“They certainly don’t look like residents of Section One North, do they?” Mr. Bennet said.

Elizabeth eyed the wall and watch towers that loomed over the houses half a mile away.

“However they got past the checkpoints,” she said, “it will be quite some time before any soldiers arrive to attend to them.”

Mr. Bennet shook his head. “The Shevingtons don’t fight dreadfuls, Lizzy. We shouldn’t involve ourselves.”

“Oh, Papa?” Kitty said. “I think we’re about to get involved.”

Papa Zombie apparently found ankles less than satisfying, and, rather than move on to the juicier flesh of the calf or thigh, it stood and started lurching toward the Bennets.

“We should run,” Mr. Bennet said.

“I will not run,” Elizabeth replied.

The dreadful was no more than forty paces away now, and it was gaining speed with each step.

“Really, Elizabeth,” Kitty said. “We
should
run.”

“I will not run.”

Papa Zombie opened its mouth and roared, and Mama Zombie, as if still playing the dutiful wife, dropped the gentleman’s head and staggered off after its mate.

“You should run,” Nezu said.

Elizabeth hadn’t even noticed the man slip up beside them. By the time she did, he was already off again, charging Papa Zombie. He started at a sprint and then flipped himself end over end—ninjas and their incessant hand springs!—until he was soaring into the air toward the unmentionable. At the apex of his flight, he pulled a katana from a back-scabbard hidden beneath his cutaway coat, and as he fell back to earth the blade bit into the dreadful’s head. It stopped slicing downward only when it had reached the creature’s collarbone, and the skull and neck split open like the blooming of some viscous red blossom. The zombie ran a few more staggering steps before pitching forward and tumbling, cleaved head over heels, along the cobblestones. It finally flopped to a stop at the Bennets’ feet.

Nezu, meanwhile, never slowed. His momentum carried him forward into another roll, and then he was sprinting and springing, springing and sprinting toward the other unmentionables. Mama Zombie he cut in half in his haste to reach the youngsters, who (in a display of the instinctive self-preservation that sometimes presented itself even in those with no more self to preserve) were retreating up the street. Once their heads were in the gutter, he could stroll back to the matriarch of the family at his leisure, and this he did with a casual calm and absolutely no sign that his acrobatics had winded him in the slightest. The zombress—or the top half of her, anyway—slithered toward him, hissing and clawing at his feet, but he was able to finish her off with an upward-arcing slice of the sword, not unlike a Scotsman swinging his “golf” club.

Watching him, Elizabeth had to respect the man’s formidable skills even as she resented that her own remained untapped.

“Well, I don’t know about you,” Kitty said, “but I’m impressed.”

She looked it, too. In fact, she was gazing at Nezu with such smiling delight, Elizabeth almost warned her not to applaud.

“Ooo,” Kitty cooed, “he is a marvel with Fukushuu.”

“Fukushuu?” her father asked.

Kitty nodded at Nezu and the sword he was resheathing as he walked toward them. “His katana. He told me it belonged to his father.”

Mr. Bennet looked around Kitty at Elizabeth.

She nodded. She knew what it meant. The word, anyway. Living with Fitzwilliam Darcy, how could she not have picked up a little Japanese?

Fukushuu
meant “revenge.”

“Next time,” Nezu said as he swept passed them,
“run.”

Behind him, long red fingers stretched out from puddles of blood, creeping their way toward the grates in the gutter and, below, the new sewers that ran under all of London.

At first, Mary didn’t mind the stares. In fact, she rather relished them. So she was a lady walking through a respectable neighborhood beside two mangy dogs and a black box. What of it? She could choose her own company. If she should decide to go for a stroll with a flock of geese while pushing an orangutan in a purple perambulator, who had the right to stand in judgment?

She had released herself from the shackles of propriety. She was free!

Still, the gentlemen’s frowns, the ladies’ scowls, the children pointing and laughing—she wasn’t entirely immune to it. There was freedom, and then there was making a spectacle of oneself.

So Mary tamped down her misgivings and kept up her nerve the best way she knew how.

“Mary Wollstonecraft tells us,” she said, “and I quote: ‘Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.’ How true! It is one of the reasons I have never much missed such attentions. If one is pursued by suitors, let’s say, is that really a thing to be envied? For what is the purpose of pursuit but capture, imprisonment, destruction even? Better, I think, to be left alone to one’s
own
pursuits—those that elevate spirit, mind, and body—rather than wallow in sentiment.”

Here, Mary remembered to pause (something she’d been mostly forgetting that morning) to allow Mr. Quayle the opportunity to either demonstrate his intelligence by agreeing or expose his ignorance by dissenting. She heard nothing from the little crate rolling along beside her, and after a moment she began to wonder if Mr. Quayle had been listening at all—or was even awake. Ell and Arr certainly seemed to know the way, turning crisply at all the right corners without any apparent pulling on the reins that disappeared into the slot of Mr. Quayle’s box. For all Mary knew, the man inside was slumped against a pillow, snoring contentedly until a yap from his dogs alerted him that they’d reached their destination.

So she decided to try a test. She would ask the question her mother always claimed either put men to sleep or sent them fleeing.

“Have
you
ever read Mrs. Wollstonecraft?”

“I mean”—she quickly threw in before Mr. Quayle could answer (or not)—”
did
you ever read her? Before your ... change in circumstances?”

“Oh, I still manage to keep up my reading,” Mr. Quayle replied, sounding as chirpy and cheerful as one could when speaking (it seemed from the rasp of it) through a throatful of scars and sand. “I’ve trained Arr and Ell to shave my face, load a flintlock, and prepare and cook an entirely satisfactory shepherd’s pie. Turning the pages of a book was nothing. Yet I have, alas, never sampled Mrs. Wollstonecraft. I recently read her daughter’s novel, though.”

“Oh,” Mary said. “
That
. Yes, I read it as well. Mrs. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to Mrs. Shelley, you know. I wanted to see what her sacrifice had begat.”

“I take it from your tone that you did not find Mrs. Shelley’s work worthy of her heritage.”

“Most novels are worthless, Mr. Quayle.
Frankenstein
has the added defect of being perverse. I can only take solace from the fact that Mrs. Shelley’s little grotesquerie will soon be forgotten, allowing her mother’s legacy to live on, unsullied and immortal.”

Mary almost stopped there, pronouncement complete, but she was overcome by the sudden urge to add four more words she had, up to then, rarely spoken.

“What do
you
think?”

“I’m afraid I must differ. The story aroused my sympathies in the deepest way imaginable. Though, thanks perhaps to my unique ‘circumstances,’ those sympathies often lay with the monster, not its creator. As to the book’s perversity, yes, I will grant it was intended to shock, in some ways. But, given the things you and I have seen—”

Mr. Quayle’s voice trailed off, and for a moment he fell silent.

“I found it quite diverting,” he finally finished.

“Ahh, but a book should do more than divert!” Mary declared. “It should do the opposite, in fact. It should focus one’s consideration on that which is real and important. It should strive for uplift. Inspiration.”

“I try to take those things from
life
, Miss Bennet. It has not been easy, I grant you ... though of late I find I’ve had a bit more success than in years past. And here we are.”

They’d arrived at the gateway from Eleven to Twelve Central. When they tried to walk through, however, the soldiers there—the same ones who’d let Mary pass without any questions about her intentions (or sanity) a mere twenty-four hours before—looked tense and sweaty. The captain of the guard came over to ask if she and Mr. Quayle really, truly, absolutely, without question, no matter the consequences, being duly forewarned and absolving him of all responsibility,
had
to keep going.

Mary said yes.

“All right, then,” the man mumbled with a twitchy nod. “But I’d stay close to the soldiers, if I were you.”

“Soldiers?” Mary asked. The officer had already turned his back and stalked off, however, as if suddenly anxious to wash his hands.

On the other side of the gate, they found a crowd of clamoring, shabbily dressed people pressed around a squad of soldiers stretched along the roadway. Mr. Quayle had to set Ell and Arr to growling and barking to clear a path through the throng.

“You’ve got to let me out!” a man was roaring at the soldiers as Mary moved past. He lifted up a wailing baby swaddled in a canvas sack. “For my wee one’s sake! She needs a doctor!”

“I don’t know who you got that from, Coogan,” replied a soldier wearing a sergeant’s chevrons, “but you may as well take it back and get a refund, because you’re not getting through this gate.”