Mr. Darcy's Great Escape (26 page)

“What did I just say? Or do you even understand me?” Handy said. “This is just a business matter, and yeh're in hostile territory, so you might as well take a walk. That is, if you don't speak in clicks and whistles.”

“
Kore de sugita
.” (I've had enough of this) he said, knowing that they would not have understood a word. “Leave them alone.”

“Or what, Chinaman?”

It was faster than any possible reaction as the man pulled the long sword from his scabbard and swung it at Handy, who was only able to scream and tear himself back, clutching his severed limb as his hand and forearm dropped lifelessly to the ground. The Chinaman seemed unaffected by this but did not replace his sword, grabbing Jack and slamming his hand on the table with his own slender, tattooed arm. “Now.” He held it so Jack could not escape as his partner thrashed about behind them and the few other patrons hid behind the bar. “I take finger. Count to three.
Ichi
—”

“Please, sir, I beg of you—”

“
Ni
.”

“All right! All right! Just—leave me in peace! I'll go!”

“Is shame,” said the Oriental, and with only a hold on Jack's hand, hurled him across the room to join his severed partner. “Go.”

They did. Following them were the rest of the patrons. The Chinaman turned to the two women, horrified at the bloodshed that they had just seen, and very aware that if Jack and Handy had been at his mercy, so would they. He put his sword on the table. “Madokusu-san?”

“I am Mrs. Maddox,” Caroline's voice was trembling as she unconsciously linked arms with Elizabeth.

He bowed, and pointed to Elizabeth, “Darushi-san?”

“I am Mrs. Elizabeth Darcy.” She rose and curtseyed to him. “Are you looking for us?”

“Madokusu-san and Nadi-sama send me. You go to England?”

“Yes. We were trying to arrange it—”

“He arrives. Ship.” He looked out the window. “Soon.”

“We'd best leave, anyway,” Caroline said. “After all the carnage you've caused, Chinaman.”

“Mugin,” he said. “No Chinaman.
Nippon.
”

“I'm afraid we do not fully comprehend you,” said Elizabeth, “but our husbands are upstairs, if you would follow.”

“Hai.” He put his blade back in the scabbard and bowed to them.

As they climbed the stairs, they could hear the clonking of his wooden shoes following behind as Caroline whispered, “Why are we listening to him?”

“Because I'd rather listen to him than lose my arm!” Elizabeth replied and opened the door to their room.

Darcy was in the armchair. He rose with his cane at the entrance of his wife. “Elizabeth. Mrs. Maddox—” and then he caught sight of the very angry and dangerous-looking person following them. “Sir?”

“This is—I have no idea,” Elizabeth shrugged, “but he just saved our lives, if in a very gruesome way.”

Darcy did not seem to have the energy to ask for the details. “Sir,” he said, with a very small and stiff bow, “I am indebted to you.”

“Please, don't strain yourself,” his brother pleaded beside him. “Sir, we are grateful.”

The man shrugged it off. “Go to England.” He pointed to the doctor, still unconscious on his cot. “Madokusu-san?”

“Dr. Maddox,” Elizabeth said. “He's very sick. We'll have to arrange—”

But the man slid past her, without any hesitation, picked up Dr. Maddox and slung him over his shoulders. “We go.
Junbi dekiteru?
” (Are you ready?)

“If I might inquire—”

“Darcy,” Elizabeth said, grabbing his arm. “I think this man was sent by—Brian Maddox. I don't think we have the option of not listening to him.”

For it seems they didn't, unless Caroline wanted to raise her pistol at the man carrying her husband over his shoulders with surprising ease for someone on clog stilts. Elizabeth gathered what little belongings they had and put her husband's arm over her shoulder, helping him follow the Oriental down the steps and out the door as Grégoire carried the box containing the reliquary.

It was a small town, and he seemed to know his way to the docks. Aside from their feet against the cobbled stone, they made very little noise. The water was in sight when they heard it.

“
Halte
!” It was an occupational guardsman, coming up with a lantern and a pistol.

“
Nani
?” said the Oriental.

Several others joined the guard, with bayonets.

“French,” Darcy said. “We have to go, Chinaman.”

“No China!
Nippon, gaijin
!” He slid the doctor's body off his shoulders and onto the ground. “I take care.” He drew his very long sword.

“Darcy, don't let him,” Elizabeth whispered. “He'll kill them!”

“
Nanika atta
?” (What's up?) came a voice from behind them. A lone figure standing in front of the entrance to the docks, wearing a lampshade for a helmet, from what it seemed in the light. “Mugin?
Daijoubu
?” (Are you okay?)

“
Saikou da
!” (Couldn't be better!)

“Remember what I said,” the lampshaded figure said in the King's English. “No killing, Mugin.”

“
Hai, hai, Madokusu-sama
,” said Mugin as he approached the three very confused soldiers. Actually, what he did was not so much approach as it was to duck off to the side, catch the tip of the raised bayonet between the grooves of his wooden shoes, and stamp his foot down, punching the man in the jaw as he went down. The leader fired a shot with his pistol, but Mugin was already gone from that spot, leaping over him and clocking him from behind with the butt of his sword. The third man might have reached him had the lampshade-hatted man not used that time to join him, drawing his sword and swiping it across the bayonet, slitting it in half. Between that and a hit in the head from a flying shoe, all three men had been sufficiently incapacitated in a few brief seconds.

“We should go,” said the man, turning to his English spectators, “immediately. Nady has the ship waiting. But first, tell me—is my brother alive?”

“Barely,” Darcy said. “And if it were not for your wild Oriental there and my own infirmity, I would sock you for it, Mr. Maddox.”

“That I can't help,” said Brian Maddox, lifting his hat, which seemed to be made of some kind of straw, so they could see his face. “What I can do is get you all to England—now. Mugin?”

“
Hai
?”

“We're leaving.” He re-sheathed his sword—he had two of them—and attempted to pick up his fallen brother, but the doctor was much taller than him and therefore much heavier, and it was Mugin who took him fully.

There were screams and alarms in the distance. After all, they had caused a ruckus in this little town. They barely made it onto the ship where Fitzwilliam was waiting. “What—” but he got no response as they ran past, with Brian using his small blade to cut the ropes as they went. Shots were fired as the mainland disappeared behind them. The doctor was wrapped in a blanket by a woman in a silk robe and eased onto the deck floor. Mugin, completely relaxed by the whole series of events, merely kicked off his sandals and laid down against the side of the bow.

“Some—introductions are in order,” said Brian Maddox, removing the hat and revealing an oddly shaved head, long in the back and tied up over the front. “Mr. Darcy, Mrs. Darcy, Mrs. Maddox, Colonel Fitzwilliam—this is my wife, Princess Nadezhda Maddox.”

Upon closer inspection, in the light afforded to them by the full moon and the various lamps on the bow, they could see that despite her clothing, the woman beside him was dark, but certainly not Oriental. She was undeniably European, and curtseyed to them. “Pleased to meet you all.” Her accent was heavy but certainly excusable. She whispered something in another language, presumably Romanian, to her husband, and he laughed.

“No, I assure you, she's not,” he said and, without explanation, turned to Darcy. “You must sit down. You look horrible.”

“Yes,” he said. “Amazing what months in captivity by an Austrian count does to you.”

Brian didn't flinch as he ordered the hired crew to settle Mr. Darcy down on something soft and attend to the ladies as well. It was only then that he fully turned his attentions to his brother, whom he could not wake. “Danny?”

“Laudanum,” Caroline said, kneeling on the other side of her husband, “for his hand. And the fever.”

“His hand?” With all of the bandages, it was obvious.

“If only we'd known, we wouldn't have—”

“I know,” Brian said. “I know. I wrote every day I was still on the Continent, I swear. I sent couriers and couriers to say we were safe, but none of them reached you because of this… bloody embargo!” He fumbled in anger and tore at his hair, pulling down the carefully tied topknot. “Danny, I'm so sorry.”

“How did you find us?” Darcy asked.

“Mrs. Bingley filled me in on the particulars upon our arrival from Japan.”

“Japan?”

“Yes. We took the rather long way home to avoid my father-in-law. I think I'll be happy never to be on a ship again in my life.”

“And your—I don't know his name, the servant.”

“Mugin. He isn't a servant. He's just sort of… traveling with us,” Brian said, sitting down beside his brother and resting his arms in the sleeves of his silk robe. He added, “And he can understand you, even if he pretends otherwise.”

From his position, Mugin huffed, but said nothing.

Brian's Story, Part 2

1810

Embarrassingly for Brian's self-esteem, it was Nadezhda who was the chief reason they survived the first few weeks. She was a far better huntsman than he was, having been raised with it as a means of sport in her native homeland. She was also a better cook, so she was largely responsible for the food, and he only the fire, which she often chastised him for being too high or too low to bring the meat to a proper temperature. He had spent more years on the run, and in this he bested her, knowing how to hide (which they did from every passing authority figure, no matter from what country), how to make shelter, and how to treat burns from the frost on a particularly chilly evening. He was surprised that they made it to St. Petersburg without having to eat their horses, and still managing to stay off the well-traveled roads. There, he was mainly lost. He had been there once on an errand, and his Russian was poor, while hers was fluent.

“I don't know which one of us is being rescued,” he said to her with a smile as they enjoyed what they considered the luxury of one-room lodging with a pipe stove. The bed wasn't very large, but neither of them minded. In fact, it helped pass the time.

Paper was expensive, but they had her dowry, and he slowly began to quietly convert small amounts over to Russian coinage, with multiple trips to multiple banks. He spent his spare time, while she shopped for food, writing to his brother, carefully not revealing their location but relaying the events of the past few months. He sent every letter with a prayer as it dropped into the iron box.

“If we stay here much longer, we'll have to winter here,” he said.

Nadezhda curled up against him. “The sea is frozen by now. We can't sail to England.”

“Maybe we could skate.”

Nadezhda giggled.

He'd been frightened—she had never been more than a few miles from home, and here she was, fending largely for herself in a foreign country with a foreign husband. She never complained. “I am alone with you for the first time. No spies.”

“That we know of.”

She laughed again and kissed him.

***

Any degree of tranquility they enjoyed was shattered, but with enough time for them to make it out of St. Petersburg before it became too cold to do so. For this, Brian was grateful, but in the days to come, he would look back on their weeks in that tiny apartment with great affection, as if it had been their true honeymoon, drab as the surroundings were.

She came home that afternoon and said, “Someone called me by my name.”

Brian sighed. They had to go, no matter how innocent it might have been. They could not go east, and they could not wait for the thaw of the sea to take them to safe harbor. They had to go west, into the terrible steppes of the Rus. They went south as well, where it was slightly warmer, but not enough. They went from village to village. Nadezhda's horse died, so they sold the meat and rode together on his. They both had a bad cough, and many times were tempted to stop and seek shelter in some village for the winter.

“We cannot go farther,” he announced. They stopped at the next set of wooden buildings ahead on the road, now disappearing into the snow. With half of Count Vladimir's treasury in Russian rubles, strapped to a sack beneath his clothing, he took his wife's hand, and they walked into town. He tried his Russian, but their accents were too heavy. The men were wearing beaver fur hats and long black coats, and as far as he could tell, they were speaking some unknown dialect when they talked amongst each other. They all had beards; that was hardly unusual, but the way they talked—they did not speak directly to Nadezhda; however, they understood what she said and talked amongst themselves for some time.

“Here,” he said in Russian, holding up some coins. They would probably not take paper money here. “Please. Help.”

“We can't stay,” Nadezhda whispered to him in Romanian.

“Surely if we give them enough—”

“We can't stay. It's dangerous.”

“You are sure?”

“Brian, they're Jews.”

He blinked. “So? I've met Jews before.”

“You have?”

“People are people, Nady,” he said, “people with warm houses. They could have horns for all I care.” He smiled as one of them looked at him. “Hello.”

The men were still talking when another one came out of one of the houses with a long beard, carrying his hat as he was clearly unprepared to be walking about outside, and began yelling at them. It was vaguely Russian, vaguely not. “Yiddish,” Brian said at last.

“What?”

“A Yid. A Jew. They speak it in Germany.”

Whatever they were saying, every man hushed when the old man approached them and started sermonizing. Eventually, they all scattered, and a woman emerged from behind him and waved Brian and Nadezhda in. “Thank you,” Nadezhda said in Russian.

The old couple spoke fluent Russian, they soon discovered, and Brian understood more than he spoke, so he was able to follow the conversation fairly well. He offered money, but the man waved it away.

“We need shelter,” Nadezhda said nervously. Aside from his black skullcap, the man did not have horns. “Please.”

“You come from where?”

“St. Petersburg,” Brian said.

Their host said no more about the obvious lie as his wife disappeared, reappearing with a steel tub of soup, which she portioned off for the four of them.

“I am Rabbi Shneur Zalman,” the man said. “My wife, Sterna Zalman.”

“Brian Maddox,” he replied. “My wife, Nadezhda Maddox.”

“You are English?” the rabbi said in perfect German.

Brian and Nadezhda exchanged nervous glances. “I am,” Brian said in German. “My wife is not.”

“She is Polish?”

“No,” he knew he couldn't say she was German—her accent was too Baltic. “To the south.”

The rabbi didn't inquire further, said something in Yiddish to himself, and began his soup. That was their signal. So they dug into their food, drinking down every last hot, salty drop, and washed it down with vodka. Feeling warm again was delightful; Brian only gave a dreamy glance as his wife was removed with the rabbi's wife, leaving him alone with Zalman. “So, you are from here? Where is here?” He fell into a natural Romanian without thinking, only realizing it after it came out of his mouth.

The rabbi answered in Romanian, “I was born in Liozna. It is Lithuania now, I believe, then Vilna, and then St. Petersburg. But we are in Liadi, Baruch Hashem.”

“You are—I don't know—noble here?”

“No,” the rabbi said very modestly. His home did not look like a noble's. It looked temporary. The walls were bare, the furniture comfortable but plain. “The voivod was who invited me to come here, Prince Stanislaw Lubomirski. Now his son rules. He stays away, thank God. The czar, he always makes trouble.” But he waved it off. Brian noticed that beneath his black coat, he had scars on his wrists. “You will stay for the winter, Herr Maddox?”

“Please. We will pay anything.”

“Did you do something bad?”

He was put off by the question, perhaps because of the strength of the vodka and his general exhaustion. “I—yes, we are in trouble. But we didn't do anything wrong. Please, you understand?”

“I was in prison in St. Petersburg, for three months,” said the rabbi, “for giving charity.”

Brian smiled despite himself. “What kind of charity?”

“I gave money to my homeland. The Turks were very upset.” He must have read Brian's look of confusion. “My homeland is the land around Jerusalem, in their empire. It is now Palestine. The goyim, they change all the names.”

“Jerusalem? As in, the Bible Jerusalem?”

“Ja, the Bible Jerusalem,” said the rabbi in German. “Every year I ask God to go. Every year He says no. Someday, I find out why.”

Brian laughed.

***

Brian and Nadezhda quickly learned much about their hosts. Rabbi Zalman—“der Alter Rebbe”—was the leader of the community and had been a big man in Vilna before his arrest. He married into wealth, so he could devote all of his time to study. Their house was plain, but it had a considerable library. This was no Englishman's collection of gothic novels. The texts were gigantic and smelled ancient. Some were still scrolls or hand-bound—all were in languages neither of them could read. “I feel like I'm at home,” Brian said to the rabbi when he first entered.

“You read?”

“Not like my brother. He is a doctor. He reads—all the time. I was going to send him something before I left Austria, but I didn't get the chance.” He sighed. “He probably already has a copy. It's an old German poem or something.”

The rabbi spoke maybe a dozen languages. “A doctor is a great profession.”

“I know. I'm very proud of him.”

Brian had some trouble finding use for himself. Nadezhda could at least cook and did not mind doing such a mundane chore. There were no servants to be had, only dozens of students following the rabbi, who seemed to walk to and from the synagogue. Brian offered to find them food when he noticed they ate little game.

“No hunting,” said the Rebbetzin, the rabbi's wife. “It is cruel to the animals.”

“Then how are we eating meat?”

He got a demonstration from the rabbi himself the very next day, when they slaughtered a calf for dinner. The rabbi calmly herded the calf away from the other animals, took a large butcher's knife, and slit its throat. It died almost instantaneously as the blood poured into the snow. “You slit the throat just so,” said the rabbi. “It is very hard not to hurt it.”

“What if you hurt it?”

“Then we chop it up for the wild dogs to eat. We don't eat it.”

“Why would you feed wild dogs? You don't eat them.”

“When the Jews were sneaking out of Egypt in the middle of the night, not a single dog barked to alert the authorities. So we feed the dogs, if we can.”

Brian did not question it. He had never taken Bible passages so literally.

Eventually they found industry for him—and were grateful for it, so “others can learn.” He cut wood, essential for the freezing Russian nights, and he carted around goods. Fortunately these obviously religious people did not have a rule about sleeping in a different room from one's wife, and he could collapse guilt-free beside Nadezhda; he found his own way of keeping warm in the long nights. There was far more darkness than light. He was happy to an extent, because he had his wife and he had shelter. As the winter passed, he began to dream of England—its rolling hills, the small hills he had once considered mighty mountains, even the awful smell of the Town square on a hot day. Surely their trail had gone cold? (Everything else had.) Once they were in his homeland, they would be untouchable, even if the count wanted to pursue. Nadezhda seemed to silently accept never going home again, why couldn't he?

Brian watched the snow melt with an unspoken anticipation. He wanted to go—somewhere—that would bring him home. East? Maybe he could go south, to Mongolia, and then to the Turks?

“You can bribe your way through the Turkish Empire,” said the rabbi, “if you can get there.”

“We can't go back to St. Petersburg,” he said. “What should I do, Rabbi?”

“If you must go east, go east,” said the rabbi. “We wandered forty years in the desert, and we came out all right.”

“The Bible didn't happen yesterday, you know.”

“Every Jew who would ever live stood at Mount Sinai. We are all old souls.” He always said things with complete confidence, at least on spiritual matters. That was why, Brian supposed, the people listened to him like he was the next prophet, even though he made no prophecies. He sat and read, and occasionally wrote on some religious thing he was working on—something about the soul and how to elevate it. It was beyond a vicar's sermon that was for sure. He even wrote in ancient script. Brian watched him write a letter to his friend in Poland in what he explained was Hebrew. “It is to congratulate him on the birth of his son, Nacham Franzblau.”

They could not stay in this place forever, however removed from their reality it seemed to be. At night, Nadezhda and Brian sat in conference.

“We go east?”

“We go east.”

They consummated the deal the best way a husband and wife could.

***

It seemed silly to be going off in the wrong direction. Brian's horse didn't survive the winter, so they purchased a wagon and two mules, which was the best they could do. The Rebbetzin gave them more preserves than they thought they could ever eat, which was a pleasing prospect. The rabbi gave them the only book he owned in a European language—a copy of some French travelogue, so old it had writing in different hands in the margins and inside the cover. Brian took it gratefully.

“So they didn't have horns after all,” he said to his wife as they watched the little town of Liadi disappear behind them. “Or drink our blood.”

“So I was ignorant! Like you're so wise,” she said.

It was not very warm, but it was warm enough to see the roads again, and that was enough. They had come full circle, living outside and traveling until they would both collapse. Brian didn't try to keep track of the date, or ask it of the villagers they passed. All he knew was that it was warmer, so it was spring. There was a port to the east, the villagers said. By the time they got there, it would be thawed and ships would come again. They could go to America; it was so close. America? At least they spoke English there. One could get to England from America—that much, he knew. He wondered how far across it was.

It was late spring, almost summer when Brian and Nadezhda Maddox arrived in Magadan. They shuddered to think about how long they had been on the road. Brian had written letters again; he posted them from the first place he saw suitable enough to possibly guarantee a delivery. In this tiny town, there was at least a kind of civilization, where he could get a shave from a barber and speak to someone in German or French. He saw the ships coming in and began to inquire. There was one bound for this place called Alaska, near America. They booked passage.