Zombie Abbey
Page 1
Praise for Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s
ZOMBIE ABBEY
“I loved every hilarious moment of this delightfully unique mash-up of Downton Abbey meets The Walking Dead.”
—Alyson Noël, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Highbrow British aristocracy meets The Walking Dead in this tongue-in-cheek tale, a historical and modern mash-up.”
—Wendy Higgins, New York Times bestselling author of Sweet Evil
“More scandalous fun than Downton Abbey, Zombie Abbey is a glorious and zany romp with the undead.”
—Tasha Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The Counterfeit Heiress
“Funny and captivating, romantic and horrifying, Baratz-Logsted’s fast-paced story will leave readers clamoring for more exciting adventures from their new favorite foursome.”
—Karen Dionne, author of The Marsh King’s Daughter
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Acknowledgments
About the Author
More from Entangled Risen
The November Girl
Black Bird of the Gallows
Assassin of Truths
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.
Entangled Publishing, LLC
2614 South Timberline Road
Suite 105, PMB 159
Fort Collins, CO 80525
Entangled Teen is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.
Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.
Edited by Stacy Abrams
Cover design by Fiona Jayde
Interior design by Toni Kerr
ISBN: 978-1-63375-911-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63375-912-1
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition April 2018
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Stacy Abrams: Without you, there is no Zombie Abbey (plus, you’re a lot of fun!)
Prologue
Since the Anglo-Saxon settlement in the fifth and sixth centuries, in the many hundreds of years of its existence, many attacks had been made upon England. Those assaults had come from without, in the form of many wars, and from within, like the Black Plague. No matter how large or severe the threat, however, people still said that the sun would never set upon the British Empire.
But the people who said that had never seen anything like this.
Chapter
One
Lady Katherine Clarke, Kate to those who were fond of her, just seventeen years old and the eldest of three daughters born to Lord Martin Clarke, the Earl of Porthampton, sat in the drawing room at Porthampton Abbey, listening to her father speak.
If he talks to me about the entail just one more time, she vowed to herself coolly, I swear I shall blow my brains out.
Kate knew all about the entail, since she had been hearing talk of it for most of her life, and she’d read her fair share of Austen. Chiefly, it meant that only male heirs could inherit her father’s estate. Since there were none of those, it further meant that if she wanted to continue living the life she had grown accustomed to—and she did—and not see what was rightfully hers fall into outside hands, she would have to marry wealthy. And then, if luck were on her side, provide a male heir, posthaste.
In addition to being the eldest daughter, Kate was also the tallest and quite lean. The word “soigné” had been coined to describe creatures just such as her. She was fair-haired with keen eyes that reflected her high intelligence. In short, she was nothing like her father, who was on the stumpy side and balding, and who was fond of saying, “It troubles me not that none of my children resemble me, so long as each, a little bit, resembles her mother.”
As the two sat side by side on one of the twin velvet sofas aligned perpendicular to the enormous fireplace, Kate regarded the books lining the room from marble floor to gilt-edged high ceiling. She had read many of the volumes herself and as she looked at them, she thought, not for the first time, that it was entirely possible her father had read none of them at all.
“Tonight at dinner,” her father began, “there will be two men I should like for you to pay particular attention to. They are—”
But before Kate could learn who the two latest in the long line of what she privately thought of as “The Man Parade” were to be, her father was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. Ernest Wright, the butler, bearing the tea tray.
Mr. Wright had been with the household for as long as Kate could remember, and she knew he had been there even far longer than that. If she could be said to be fond of anyone outside of Father, it would be Mr. Wright, which wouldn’t be saying much, since she really wasn’t all that fond of anybody.
“Thank you, Mr. Wright,” she said, her words and actions dismissing him as she reached for the teapot. “I shall pour.”
“Very good, Lady Kate,” he replied.
And yet the butler did not move from his position of attention, eyes straight ahead.
Father looked at the butler, then at his daughter, who widened her eyes to express her own lack of knowledge as she shrugged. Every time one thought one knew what to expect from the household staff—strict obedience, silence except when spoken to—they threw some spanner into the works.
“Was there something further, Wright?” Father prompted.
“Thank you, my lord.” The servant all but sighed his relief at being asked. “There was a small matter that I did think I should bring to Your Lordship’s attention.”
“Yes?” Father was forced to prompt a second time when no more informati
on was forthcoming.
Mr. Wright took in a deep breath before letting out with: “Someone has died, sir.”
“Oh no!” Father cried. “Oh, I do hope it wasn’t one of the members of the staff.”
“I agree,” Kate said. “Good help is so hard to find.”
“It was not one of the staff,” Mr. Wright assured them.
“Thank God for that,” Kate breathed.
“It was one of the villagers,” Mr. Wright said. “More specifically, a crofter—one of the tenant farmers on your land.”
“I’m sure it is all very sad,” Father said, “for someone. But surely people die every day, so I do not understand why you are telling me this.”
“It is the way he died, my lord.”
“The way…?”
“It would appear he was mauled and most of his heart ripped out so that very little of it remained by the time the body was discovered.”
“His heart?”
“But the most peculiar part is that—”
“More peculiar than that?”
“—after the discovery of the body, after many had seen it and declared it dead in the yard, and after the widow said to leave it be until her nephew could be got home to help with the burial, and after the widow herself went back inside the house—”
“That is an extraordinary number of after thats, Wright.”
“Indeed it is, my lord. And after all that, once everyone was inside and the widow was alone, she heard a sound from the doorway.”
“I suspect it was someone coming to pay his or her respects,” Father said.
“Hardly, my lord. It was the dead man.”
“The one with no heart?”
Mr. Wright nodded.
“What did the widow do?” Father asked.
“She ran and got a shotgun, and then she shot him in the head until he was dead, my lord.”
“But he was already dead,” Kate pointed out.
Father considered for a moment. “Won’t the widow hang for this?”
Both servant and daughter looked at him, perplexed.
“For what?” Kate asked.
“Why, for killing her husband,” Father said. “I am fairly certain that in England, killing one’s husband is still a hanging offense.”
“Did you not hear what Mr. Wright said earlier, Father? The man was already dead!”
“Everyone does appear to agree on that part, Lady Kate,” Mr. Wright said. “Everyone says the man was most definitely already dead.”
“You see, Father?” Kate said, satisfied. “The widow will not hang. You cannot hang for shooting at someone already dead.”
“Precisely,” Mr. Wright agreed. “Everyone agrees that when the dead man was first found, while his heart was mostly missing, he most definitely did not have any bullet holes in him, although he does have them now.”
Father looked thoroughly confused. “But if the man was dead, then how did he appear at the door?”
Mr. Wright and Lady Kate shared a look.
“Of course he didn’t appear at the door, Father.”
“But Wright said—”
“I know what he said, since I was sitting right here, but surely he meant that the widow only thought her dead husband had appeared in the doorway. The poor woman was no doubt so overcome with grief and terror that she only hallucinated her husband there.”
“Most of the villagers agree with you, Lady Kate.”
“I should think so. But wait. Only most?”
“I’m afraid there are others who believe that the widow was not hallucinating at all, Lady Kate. These others are now terrified at the notion of a dead man walking.”
“But that is absurd!”
“I agree with you, Lady Kate, but you know how the villagers can be.”
“I do indeed, Mr. Wright. They are, to a man, a superstitious bunch.”
“Not only am I confused now,” Father said with some annoyance, “but I also still do not know: Who died?”
“I’m sorry, my lord. I should have named the dead man earlier. It was Ezra Harvey.”
Father considered briefly and then shook his head.
“Longtime tenant farmer?” Mr. Wright added helpfully. “Always quick with a joke?” He thought about this last, a rueful look overtaking his features. “Well, he was.”
More consideration, more head shaking.
“Uncle to William Harvey?” Wright tried one last time. “William Harvey, who himself is known to the household as Will?”
“Will Harvey… Will Harvey…” Father tapped his lip. “Now, why does that name sound so familiar?”
“Because he is our stable boy?”
Kate gasped a smile as her elegant hand flew to her breastbone, sitting up even straighter if such a thing were possible. “The handsome one,” she said, eyes flashing.
Kate couldn’t have rightly said why she didn’t admit immediately to recognizing Will Harvey’s name as soon as Wright uttered it, because of course she did. Kate went to the stables nearly every day of her life, and every time she went there, Will Harvey was there, too. If, to Father, someone like Will Harvey was just a nameless person carrying out a necessary function on the estate, to Kate he was the person who took best care of that which she loved best outside of Father: the horses in general and, in particular, Wyndgate.
But it was more than that. When she’d been just three years old, she’d been taken to the stables for her first riding lesson. No sooner had the horse master got her seated than from the corner of a stall, a small voice was heard to cry with joy, “Horsey!” When questioned by the horse master, the little boy explained that he’d been playing on his aunt and uncle’s farm but somehow, in his running and roaming, had wound up here.
“Horsey!” he’d cried again.
“Yes, well,” the horse master had said, seeing Will Harvey’s evident love and accompanying lack of fear as he walked among the great beasts, “you can stay for this one day, but then off you go back home. You can come back again when you’re six—no, make that seven—and help out as a junior stable boy.”
And so, for that one day in her life, Kate had had a friend—not her younger sister Grace, still a toddler at two, and so, useless to her; not her youngest sister, Lizzy, still a baby and so, more useless yet, but a real friend. Someone who loved horses as much as she had immediately loved them.
The event no doubt would have faded from memory, as most things experienced by three-year-olds do, were it not for the fact that for day upon day afterward, despite what the horse master had said, she’d looked for Will’s return. And when he didn’t, he became a fixture in her mind, like an imaginary friend who might yet be made real. That day represented her earliest memory in life. There was nothing before it, not even memories of her parents, only after. Just one day, when she’d had a friend. But no matter how much she’d looked for him after that, he didn’t come back for four years.
Then, seemingly out of the blue, he showed up and announced to the horse master, “I am seven today, and I am here for my job as junior stable boy.”
Kate, already an accomplished rider for her age, slid off her horse to greet him, but with only one foot on the ground and one still in the stirrup, she had been approached by the horse master, who had whispered harshly in her ear, “That boy is not for you, Lady Kate. He is one of the help, and your father would be most displeased to see you treating him as anything more.”
Oh! The bitter cruelty of being asked to give up the one friend she’d ever made!
But if there was one thing Kate loved more than the horses, it was Father. And so the line had been drawn. Will Harvey was a stable boy and Kate was a lady of the house, however young a lady she might be. Over the ten years since, they’d exchanged the occasional inadvertent smile because, both loving horses as they did, how could they not? But she would never cross that line again.
Still, while she might not immediately admit recognizing his name, as soon as Wright identified him to Father as the stable
boy, the playful—and in some ways, more honest—side of her nature couldn’t help but utter that line about him being “the handsome one,” and so…
“Katherine!” Her father was outraged. “He’s a stable boy!”
The stable boy, now grown almost to manhood, had longish brown hair with a light wave to it and kissed by the sun, brown eyes that leaned toward green framed by sinfully long lashes, and a naturally muscular body made further so by labor. To see him ride was to envy the horse.
“Well,” she said, unconcerned, “that doesn’t stop his being handsome.”
Father threw up his hands at this. “Is there anything else, Wright? And why did you bring me this news in the first place?”
Now it was the butler’s turn to appear perplexed. “Why, because, as head of the household, head of Porthampton Abbey, and head of the entire village, you are not only the financial leader of everyone beneath you, but the spiritual one as well. In that capacity, I thought it only correct that you be informed about any major concerns—and I do stress major—the villagers have.”
“Yes, yes, you have informed me and now I know.” Father waved a dismissive hand. “The superstitious villagers fear a dead man walking.” He rolled his eyes. “You may go now, Wright.”
“Very good, my lord.”
After the butler had bowed himself out, Father turned once more to the ongoing matter of his eldest daughter.
“Where were we again?” Not waiting for an answer, he continued. “Ah yes! Now, about that dinner tonight…”
Chapter
Two
Fanny Rogers had already had an incredibly full day, thank you very much.
She’d arisen at four thirty—a.m., that is, for while some Upstairs might nap until late afternoon if there was a big night ahead, Downstairs was never afforded such luxuries. Upon waking, she’d lit the lamp in her dark, cramped attic quarters, the tiniest in the house, before donning corset, dress, and apron, and then putting her hair up.
Formerly, her first task of the day was to light the fires in the family’s bedrooms. The problem was that she was never quite quiet enough at this. Since two of the chief qualities required of a servant were silence and invisibility, and Fanny was not much good at either, this job was taken away from her and given to one of the housemaids, who didn’t appreciate the extra work. Fanny, for her part, didn’t mind in the slightest having one less thing to do, since she had so many tasks already.