Dreadfully Ever After
Page 6
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?”
CHAPTER 9
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.
“Mrs. Bromhead?”
Elizabeth turned toward the voice but couldn’t believe she was seeing its source. The tone had been deep, the Rs rolled regally, the accent as English as the Union Jack and buttered scones. Yet walking up to her carriage was a slightly built young Asian man dressed in the tidy but unassuming black and white of a gentleman’s valet.
“Yes?”
The man stopped, offered her a shallow bow, and then swept an arm toward the gateway into the city.
“If you would be so good as to step down and come with me,” he said—and yes, it was with that voice.
“But my carriage—”
“Will not be needed.”
“My servants—”
“Will not be needed.”
“My things—”
“Will not—”
Elizabeth silenced the man with an upraised hand.
When she stepped out of the brougham, she took only one thing with her: her parasol.
“It will not be needed, I know,” she said. “Yet I hope I shall be permitted this one little nonessential.”
“Of course, Ma’am.”
“Thank you.”
And with that, Elizabeth said her goodbyes to her astonished servants and followed the little stranger through the gate into the biggest, grandest (and dirtiest, wickedest) city on the face of the earth.
CHAPTER 10
Of course, Georgiana Darcy was relieved to see how much her brother was improving. If only he’d stop talking in his sleep about lungs and livers and kidneys and brains … and then licking his lips.
Whenever he awoke and found his sister sitting at his bedside, he would look abashed, and if she asked what he’d been dreaming of he deflected her questions with those of his own. About the bitter, crimson liquid their aunt poured down his throat twice a day. About Jane Bingham’s supposed descent into dire illness. And, most of all, about Elizabeth and her decision to stay behind in Derbyshire.
Georgiana did her best to bat these queries aside with still more, but there are only so many times one can say, “Fancy another round of Crypts and Coffins?” or “I brought my Sun Tzu with me—shall I read another chapter?” Still, despite the awkwardness, she rarely left her brother’s side. And she knew that, if she did, he would not be alone long, for their cousin Anne was ever ready to continue the vigil. Which made Georgiana uneasy. There was something about the way Anne watched over Fitzwilliam that reminded her of a vulture perched near a battlefield, waiting patiently for the moment when the fighting ended and the wounded stopped moving.
Anne had never been a favorite of either Georgiana or Fitzwilliam, though she’d been capable of a rousing game of Spank the Dreadful once upon a time and seemed destined for the same training in the deadly arts as they had received. Yet she’d changed drastically about age fourteen or fifteen, withdrawing into shadowy corners and dark moods and the black dresses of a Spanish contessa, sometimes even donning a veil. It was as though all vitality had been siphoned out of her, and Fitzwilliam once said he knew who the succubus was. While some—his Elizabeth, for instance—had the kind of strength that not only nourished but was nourished by the strength of others, Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s strength fed on weakness.
Still, Anne seemed to have regained a measure of her old vigor, though she remained a quiet, lurky creature given to inexplicable smirks and cryptic comments.
“Ahhhh, fresh meat,” she’d said when a servant entered Fitzwilliam’s room bearing a bloody slab of undercooked beef that Lady Catherine had sent up. “Just what we’ve needed around here for so long.”
Another time, Georgiana checked on her brother in the middle of the night only to find her cousin hovering over his bed, so motionless she could have been a dressmaker’s mannequin.
“Back again?” she said as Georgiana stepped up to the bedside. She reached out and pressed a clammy hand to Georgiana’s cheek, and it was hard to tell if Anne was gazing at her tenderly or trying, in her langorous way, to slap her. “What need has Fitzwilliam of anyone else when such a sister as you is with him?”
Then she’d turned and swept soundlessly out of the room.
The next day, Anne looked up from her breakfast—the same small dollop of red roe and salmon sashimi she took every morning—and said, apropos nothing, “How many unmentionables do you think you’ve killed?”
“Oh, not so many. Only two hundred and seventy-three.” Georgiana thought a moment and then added: “And a half.”
“Only?” Anne glanced at her mother, who was glowering at her from the head of the table. “Of course. Not so many when compared to some. Still, you’ve been in battle after battle, Georgiana, and your reflexes must be finely honed, indeed. So honed, in fact, it makes me wonder if you can entirely control them.”
“I don’t think I understand you.”
“Anne,” Lady Catherine said.
“It’s just that you’ve been spending so much time with your brother,” Anne went on. “Even as he improves, there will certainly be moments when he will behave erratically, alarmingly, perhaps even like a—”
“Anne!” Lady Catherine gave the table a thump with her fist that sent every plate and cup jumping. “This is neither the time nor the place!”
If the downward-looking kimono-wearing servants shuffling around the room showed any sign of noticing the exchange, Georgiana didn’t see it. As far as she knew, none of them spoke English, for Her Ladyship populated her household staff entirely with imported Japanese peasants.
“I bring it up only out of concern for Fitzwilliam,” Anne said coolly. “You warriors are always so eager to kill, I should think it would become something of a habit. An impulse barely held in check. And I would hate for something tragic to happen if your little potion didn’t work quickly enough.”
“Not the time,” Lady Catherine grated out. “Not the place.”
“Fine.”
Anne returned her attention to her meal, albeit with a strangely serene smile upon her face. She plucked up a single roe with her chopstick and glanced over at Georgiana before sliding it between her thin lips.
The proper time and place for the conversation to continue, Georgiana couldn’t help but think, was whenever she wouldn’t be around to hear it. And, indeed, Lady Catherine did all she could to arrange many such times, pressing her young niece to spar with her ninjas and sample the exotic weapons in her vast armory and make use of the small flock of dreadfuls she kept on hand for target practice. Yet always Georgiana resisted and, aside from those moments when she slept or bathed or ate, she stayed at her brother’s side. She would not leave it willingly unless Elizabeth herself asked her to.
And then she did.
One of Lady Catherine’s waiting geishas brought the letter to her in Fitzwilliam’s bed chamber. Fortunately, her brother had plunged into a deep slumber after taking his morning medicine, so he couldn’t inquire about the mud-speckled envelope that had just come, it seemed, all the way from the Yorkshire Dales. Georgiana didn’t open it until she was alone in her own room.
My dear Georgiana,
I have not the time to tell you everything that has happened since your departure from Pemberley. Suffice it to say this: Our situation is more desperate than ever. The physician who holds the key to curing the strange plague has, I have just learned, left London for Aberdeen! He has there, I am told, a laboratory like a fortress, and only within its high stone walls will we find what we seek.
I have already begun the long journey north. Our only hope, I am convinced, is to strike immediately, taking the cure either by stealth or by force. In either case, my paltry peasant skills are unequal to the task at hand. I need assassins versed in the noble Shinobi ways of death. I need you, Georgiana, along with as many of your aunt’s ninjas as she might spare! Let us rendezvous at the
Seasick Sheltie Inn in Aberdeen, and together we shall snatch your brother back from the very gates of Hell!
Yours etc.,
Elizabeth
Georgiana didn’t linger over the letter. She read it through just once and then dashed downstairs to find Lady Catherine. Her Ladyship was giving her kitchen staff their midmorning beating, but paused to hear Georgiana through. She immediately agreed to send a small force of ninjas to accompany her to Scotland.
“I wish I could go along myself,” Lady Catherine said. “But I must remain here to continue administering the serum to Fitzwilliam. Only I, of all of us here, have some inkling as to its properties and proper use.”
“I understand entirely. And how grateful I am to have you for an aunt in this hour of need!”
Georgiana turned and started to hurry off, but Lady Catherine called her back.
“Where are you going?”
“Why, to pack my things. And I shall want to say goodbye to my brother, of course.”
“And where is it you will tell him you are going?”
“Well, I … I hadn’t thought about that.”
“That is obvious.”
Her Ladyship approached, not stopping until she was too close—her chest mere inches from her niece’s, her eyes glaring down over a sharp nose that would, with but the slightest nod, poke the younger woman in the forehead.
“Georgiana, do you know why I asked your sister-in-law not to tell Fitzwilliam that she is in search of a cure?” She didn’t pause for a reply. “It is for the same reason I will ask you not to speak to him now: We must preserve his peace of mind. His very soul is in flux. All that is good in him is weakened, dying, while unspeakable urges grow ever stronger. We mustn’t upset or agitate him, lest we tip him all the more quickly into the dark pit that looms before him. He rests now, and that is good. Would you disturb that rest to tell him that his sister and wife are risking their lives to save his? No. Just go, and I will find the best words to explain your absence.”