Dreadfully Ever After (24 page)

“How could I stop them?” Bunny sniveled. “They already had Brummell!”

Sir Angus turned toward Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet, his anger giving way to something like horror. “And you went afterrr them?”

Mr. Bennet nodded brusquely. “Those two, at least, have been given an incentive not to bother you again. I cannot speak for their employer, however.”

“I see.”

Sir Angus’s gaze shifted so that he was no longer staring at Mr. Bennet or Elizabeth but instead seemed to be entranced by some mote floating in the air between them. He was assuming, no doubt, that the “incentive” offered to the thugs was a bribe as opposed to a generous offer to let them escape with their lives.

“I am in yourrr debt, then,” he murmured.

From the softening of Mr. Bennet’s expression and the little twinkle of self-satisfaction in his eyes that only his daughters would recognize, Elizabeth knew her father was about to say something appeasing, soothing, conciliatory. They had Sir Angus where they wanted him. They could start another round of calls and outings and strained flirtations aimed at inching their way toward what they sought.

Elizabeth was no longer satisfied with inching. Not with the prize in sight at last.

“Unlike some,” she said coldly, “we have no desire to acquire debtors. It is friends we hoped to find here in London—and friends, despite the embarrassment that has dogged our every encounter with you, that we thought perhaps we’d found. Yet to return just now, only to hear you impugning my sister’s honor? It is more than we can bear.” She turned to her father. “Let us go before we are further insulted.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Mr. Bennet said with a slow uncertainty that wasn’t just for show. Elizabeth’s gambit wasn’t entirely to his liking. “Come, Avis. We should—”

“
Wait
,” Sir Angus said. “Perrrmit me to explain, Mrs. Bromhead. When I came home a few minutes ago, I walked in on Miss Shevington ...”

The man swallowed hard. He had a lot of pride to get down.

“... consoling my son. Finding her herrre without chaperone, engaged in such tenderrr intimacy, I misread the situation in a way that shames me. I let my temperrr get the betterrr of me and I spoke rashly, and for that I apologize with all my hearrrt.”

“Apology accepted,” Bunny said.

Everyone ignored him.

“You’re rrright that I have insulted you,” his father went on. “Again. So I must beg you to allow me the chance to make amends. I would offerrr you the highest honor it is in my powerrr to bestow.”

Elizabeth’s whole body went numb.

What could this privilege be? A tour of Bethlem Royal Hospital? A peek at Sir Angus’s secret laboratory?

Or could it be a cure for the strange plague, made available only to the most select of a very select few?

“Mrs. Bromhead, Mr. Shevington, Miss Shevington,” Sir Angus said gravely, and Elizabeth’s heart began pounding so loudly she feared she wouldn’t hear what the man said next. “Would you like to see ourrr king recrowned?”

After discovering the letter from Elizabeth in his aunt’s study, Darcy took to his bed for two days. He didn’t just take to it, in fact. He may as well have become it.

He did none of the things one usually feels obligated to do when “taking to bed”: sleeping for long stretches, moaning, writhing in sweat-soaked linens, crying out at fever-born phantasms, slurping spoonfuls of broth offered by anxious loved ones, vomiting said broth back onto ones who are, as a result, even more anxious and slightly less loving.

No. All Darcy did was lie upon his bed so still and silent that he could have been the stone effigy of himself atop his own tomb.

He did not sleep. When his aunt had food sent up to him—not broth but dollops of calf’s brain, bloody chunks of Kochi’s unagi, lumpy pastes it was impossible to identify except as “flesh” freshly minced—he did not eat. Even when Lady Catherine herself came up with his daily dose of serum, he only grudgingly consented to part his lips and swallow the astringent crimson liquid that kept him alive (more or less).

What need had he for more life? His appetite for pain was sated.

“I don’t know that I should tolerate this disagreeable humor of yours,” Lady Catherine said on the second day of his self-imposed internment. “Wallowing in self pity—it is beneath you. What do you have to moon about, anyway? With each passing day, up till now, you have gained more strength. There is every reason to believe you will make a full recovery.”

“You see more reasons than I, then,” Darcy muttered. “There is much I fear I shall never recover.”

“You talk twaddle, Fitzwilliam. You are a warrior! Face this battle like one, and you will lose nothing you do not choose to.”

The old woman’s tone was harsh. Yet even as she snapped at her nephew, she laid a gentle hand on his shoulder. It was, Darcy knew, as warm and nurturing as Lady Catherine de Bourgh ever was.

How easy it would be to turn her tenderness into disgust.

Anne had helped him erase every trace of his entry into the study, so his aunt had no way of knowing he’d penetrated her sanctum. If he told her he’d seen the letter, he’d also be admitting that he’d violated her trust.

And how would Lady Catherine feel if she knew he hadn’t been eating because the plates being placed before him held nothing he now recognized as food? The kitchen might as well send up bowls of sand. It was the light alone he hungered for. The light of living things—such as glowed even in the bony old fingers that rested on his shoulder, so tantalizingly close to his mouth.

Darcy looked up into his aunt’s dark, piercing eyes and forced himself to smile.

“You are right, as always. Soon, I’m sure, I will be well enough to take up my sword again, and together we shall finally rid this land of its last dreadful. If this cure of yours works, no Englishman or Englishwoman need ever again feel the shadow of the plague fall upon them.”

Lady Catherine returned his smile, though it was so tight and dry, it was a wonder she could pry her lips apart to speak.

“There. That is what I like to hear. Keep thinking of England, Fitzwilliam, and before long you will be strong enough to save it.”

Darcy managed—just barely—to keep smiling until his aunt left the room.

How could he be expected to save England when he hardly had the will to save himself?

Not a minute after Lady Catherine stepped out, Anne slipped in. She always managed to avoid her mother’s visits. At first, Darcy had assumed it was because she didn’t like seeing him take the serum; it would be a reminder of the foul pollution of his blood. Yet she’d proved so tolerant of his condition (unlike some others he could think of—and was, obsessively), he eventually concluded it was something far simpler: She didn’t like Lady Catherine.

“Do you wish to keep brooding alone, or may I brood with you?” she said.

“I am managing it quite well on my own. I need no help.”

Despite his words, Darcy found himself wearing the slightest sliver of a smile—a real one, this time. Anne returned it as she stepped closer, stopping at her usual spot. Darcy had started to think of it as her post: two steps from his side, halfway along the length of the bed. She could stand there tirelessly for hours. There was something of the gargoyle about her perfect vigilant stillness, and at first it had unnerved him. Now, he found it comforting.

“I believe I could teach you a thing or two about brooding,” she said. “I have had much practice at it. In fact, I consider myself quite the master.”

Darcy need not ask what reason his cousin had for brooding. To some degree, he was the reason. And now his heart—the one he’d given to another four years before—was as pained as hers must have been back then.

He could not have blamed Anne had she come to gloat, but she wasn’t there to wound him further. She seemed ready to wait—for a thousand years, if need be—for him to heal.

“Perhaps I should take you on as an apprentice,” she continued, “though I would hate to see you become as expert at self-torment as I. It is a skill I have been endeavoring to unlearn, and with some success, I’m pleased to say.”

“What is the secret to your success?”

“Acceptance.”

Darcy snorted and turned away. “I am not ready for that. I do not know that I shall ever be.”

“I thought the same thing, once. Do you know why I took to wearing black so many years ago?”

Darcy turned toward his cousin again. He found her away from her post at last: She’d taken a step closer that he hadn’t even heard.

She didn’t wait for him to say, “No.”

“I was in mourning ... for myself. I thought my life—what I had of one—was over. What a little fool I was! Though with excellent taste in gowns, I must say.” She looked down and ran a pale hand over the silky smoothness of her bodice. “I don’t mourn anymore, but I do so love black taffeta.”

“I am glad you no longer grieve. But it is different with me, Anne. My life as I knew it
is
over, unless perhaps ...”

Darcy couldn’t say it. The words—the hope—hurt too much.

“If I am to accept anything,” he said instead, “it is that I am tainted. Impure. Untouchable.”

“No!” Anne spat back with a ferocity Darcy found shocking. “You are special, rare, extraordinary—and all
for
being impure! What good is purity? We English once fancied our blood so fine that it would be a crime to blend it with anyone else’s. Yet did that spare us the strange plague? No. For all we know, it brought it upon us. And even now, when that curse could be turned into a blessing, many such as my mother lack the ability to see it, for that would require an acceptance—an
embrace
—of the very ‘impurity’ they so hate.”

Darcy had never seen his cousin speak with such passion (for he’d never seen her speak with any passion at all), and he gaped at her as he groped for a reply.

“Anne, I ... I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not making any sense.”

“I will show you, then. And perhaps you will come to a new understanding of what does and does not make sense.”

Anne held out her hand.

After a moment’s hesitation, Darcy took it.

A few minutes later, they were walking into the large dojo/barracks of Lady Catherine’s ninja army. Assassins were everywhere on the training floor—twirling nunchucks, sparring with swords and spears, scaling ropes, practicing their hand springs, painting pictures of rainbows and sad-eyed puppies (their tiny, meticulous brushstrokes honing the precision required to flick a needle into an opponent’s eye or drop a poisoned pellet into a goblet while hanging upside-down from rafters).

Silence fell over the room as Anne led Darcy inside, and without a word the ninjas set down what they were doing and began filing out.

“Be sure to lock all the doors this time!” Anne called after them. “You remember how displeased Lady Catherine was when Rinsaku and Susumu forgot. I’d hate to see any more heads on pikes. Thank you!”

One by one, the doors of the great hall slammed shut, and Darcy could hear the scraping and clicking of bolts being thrown on the other side.

The ninjas were locking them in.

It wasn’t the first time for Darcy. He’d trained there many a time in his youth, so he knew what usually came next. He couldn’t believe his cousin had ever tried it herself, however, or that she would presume to doom them both to bloody, agonizing death by attempting it now.

“What is the meaning of this? Why have you brought us here?”

“Fitzwilliam,” Anne chided him with a smile, “for a man who was content to spend the last two days staring at the ceiling, you are so impatient. I said I would show you, and show you I shall. Now, wait here, if you would.”

She walked to one of the weapons lockers against the wall, opened it, and pulled out a drawer.

“Ohhh, poor dear,” she said, reaching down for something Darcy couldn’t see. “Just a little light left ... but enough.”

When she turned toward Darcy again, she was holding a tiny case about the size of a snuff box. As she carried it to the center of the training floor, she cooed down into it and said, “There, there. Almost over now.”

Then she stopped and knelt down and tipped the little box until something short and thin—like the tip of a small stick—tumbled out onto the floorboards. It seemed to be black, though it was hard for Darcy to tell, for it glowed with the soft white radiance of a living thing.

“What is that?”

Anne was hovering over the whatever-it-was with a wistful look on her face.

“A butterfly,” she said.

“A butterfly? But I saw no wings.”

“Oh, I removed them. All that flapping around. It wouldn’t do today.”

She stood and started walking back toward Darcy.

For the first time he noticed how dark she seemed, for all her paleness. The luminescence he’d begun seeing in people and animals—it was nowhere in her.

She stopped beside him and wrapped an arm around his.

“Minoru!” she called out.
“Zombi o dashite yare!”

Release the zombies!

Across the great hall, a section of wall started to slide aside. Beyond it was utter blackness.

“Anne, have you lost your mind?”

On the floor nearby was a pair of abandoned sai daggers, and Darcy started to turn toward them. He wasn’t sure how much of a fight he could muster, but he would at least take a few dreadfuls to hell with him. A part of him was even relieved to have the opportunity. Perhaps this was the death he should have had in the first place, instead of dragging things out for weeks ... and losing that which most made life worth living.

Darcy got no closer to the daggers. His cousin held him tightly to her side with a strength he never would have suspected she had.

“Remember the forest,” she said. “The unmentionables from the cave.”

“I hardly think they’ll take us for trees this time. Thoughtless though the dreadfuls might be, they’ll see us for what we are sooner or later. We must fight or—”

“Here they come,” Anne said.

The first zombies shuffled out of the darkness of their holding pen.

A woman, green and bloated; an old man, desiccated and gray; a boy; a girl; something with only a blob for a face, a mass of mangled flesh from which stared one wide, lidless eye. And then there were more and more, all wearing plain white shifts with multicolored circles on the front and back.