Dreadfully Ever After

by Steve Hockensmith

  When they reached Hyde Park, she found it just as she’d remembered, if a trifle more crowded in advance of the recoronation. The grounds were beautiful: lushly wooded and verdant, despite the long shadows of the towering walls all around. No one was there to admire the greenery, though; they were there to be admired themselves. Gentlemen bounced upon the broad backs of black-maned thoroughbreds that cost more than Mr. Bennet earned in a year, while carriages of every size and design whizzed up and down the park’s paths, completing the same circuits over and over, going nowhere in the finest style.

  “Oooo, is that the Prince Regent?” Kitty cried as their barouche passed a particularly resplendent chaise and four. “No? But that simply must be the Duke of York over there! No? Well, how about that gentleman? Surely he’s someone important. No? Really? Why, just look how grand is his … is that a landau or a calash? I can never tell the difference. Oh, now that must be the Prince Regent. He looks so wonderfully fat and flushed … and so grumpy! I suppose I would, too, if I had to give up a throne.”

  “That is not the Prince Regent,” Elizabeth said.

  “Then how about that gentleman over—?”

  Mr. Bennet put a hand on Kitty’s knee. “You’re getting too worked up, my dear. Remember, the point is to appear indifferent. If we are impressed by important people, how important can we be ourselves?”

  “But the Shevingtons are supposed to be new to London. I can’t imagine they’d be so blasé about … ooo, tell me that’s the Prince Regent! Please, do!”

  “If you wish,” Mr. Bennet sighed. “It is the Prince Regent.”

  “It is not,” Elizabeth said before her sister could wave to His Royal Highness (who was indeed looking fat and flushed and grumpy that day). “And, at any rate, it’s not the royal family we’re looking for.”

  “Oh, that’s why he’s here.” Kitty said, fluttering a hand at the front of the carriage, where Nezu sat beside the driver. Both were dressed in the powdered wigs and silver-satin liveries of coachmen to the upper crust. “If Bunny MacFarquhar turns up, he can tell us.”

  “He’ll be here,” Nezu said. “His five o’clock appearance at Hyde Park is the only time he can be counted on to be punctual. And if the king decides to grace us with a visit from St. James’s, it is a certainty that Sir Angus will be at his side.”

  “Ooooo! We might see the king?” Kitty squealed. “I didn’t think they’d let him out in public for fear he’d start barking and chasing phaetons. I know we’re all supposed to be so very glad he’s not a loony anymore—as if it were the whole country that had gone mad, not just him—but I can’t help wondering … Good heavens, who’s that magnificent creature?”

  She was looking at a large white carriage with but one passenger: a beautiful if (to Elizabeth’s eyes) overrouged young woman luxuriating upon seats of plush red velvet. An honor guard of would-be beaux surrounded her on horseback, all of them jockeying for the best position from which to lean in and exchange pleasantries (and perhaps steal a peek down a décolletage so immodest, her charms might as well have been laid out on a serving platter).

  “I don’t recognize her,” Elizabeth said, though she certainly knew the type.

  “She’s ever so popular with the gentlemen! I’m surprised, though, that she should be out unchaperoned.”

  Elizabeth and her father exchanged a chagrined look. Kitty had killed men on four continents, yet she remained an unworldly Hertfordshire girl at heart. Much of what she knew of society came from the novels and periodicals she loved so dearly, and the picture they painted was, to be charitable, incomplete. Elizabeth was in no mood to sketch in what was missing: that, in some circles, it was more acceptable for a woman to be a harlot than a warrior. So she simply changed the subject.

  “Is Bunny MacFarquhar among the lady’s admirers?” she asked Nezu.

  “On most days, yes. I see nothing of him or his friends, however.”

  The ninja (and that’s what the man’s unflappable calm, watchful bearing, and smooth agile movements had convinced Elizabeth he was) glanced off to the left, his attention captured by a swirl of movement in a nearby copse.

  “Interesting,” he said. “That’s not supposed to happen here.”

  Then the screams started.

  “Dreadful!”

  “Unmentionable!”

  “One of them! One of them!”

  A single, contorted figure was staggering stiffly out of the thicket. Not so long ago, it had been a man, if not a gentleman. Its coat and trousers were frayed, stained, rumpled—the clothes of a pauper. And one who hadn’t died peacefully in his sleep, either, to judge by the grimace that twisted its gray face.

  It raised its arms and roared.

  Women shrieked. Men shrieked. Horses reared. Coaches scattered in every direction.

  Elizabeth and Kitty sprang to their feet.

  Their father grabbed each by the hand and pulled them back down.

  “Think,” he said. “What would the Shevingtons do?”

  Nezu looked over his shoulder and spoke in his usual cool monotone. “They certainly wouldn’t leap from their carriage and kill an unmentionable with their bare hands.”

  “What would you have us do?” Kitty asked. “Scream?”

  “Yes,” Nezu said. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I would, actually!”

  “Swoon, then,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “I’ve never swooned in my life!”

  “Neither has your mother, but you’ve seen her feign it often enough to know how it’s done. Swoon.”

  “Oh, all right.” Kitty put a hand to her forehead and fell back into Mr. Bennet’s arms. “Is anyone even looking?”

  “No,” Elizabeth told her. “They’re too busy running away.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  Kitty sat up again and took a look around. The cream of English society had fled, without exception.

  Kitty folded her arms over her chest and frowned. “They ought to be ashamed of themselves.”

  Nezu nodded at the dreadful, which had gone loping off after the retreating bluebloods. “As should he—and he is every bit as likely to admit it.”

  Elizabeth noticed Kitty throwing the man an amused, admiring glance. It wasn’t often one ran across a ninja given to wit. When they spoke English—which wasn’t often—they usually limited themselves to things like, “My mistress sends her regards!” as they tried to poke sai spikes through your eyes.

  “Well,” Kitty said, looking away again, “I shall make him sorry if he keeps that up.”

  The zombie had lost interest in the other carriages and was now clumping toward the only one that wasn’t speeding away: theirs.

  Nezu reached under the driver’s seat and produced a stubby carbine.

  “I think it would be better, Miss, if you were to swoon again,” he said. “Just in case anyone has collected themselves enough to look back.”

  “Oh, we’re being watched, all right,” Mr. Bennet said.

  Then Elizabeth spied it, too: something long and tan and serpentine slithering through the grass directly behind the unmentionable.

  “You tell us Sir Angus’s son is a fool.” Elizabeth pointed at the rope tied to the dreadful’s leg. “Is he that kind of fool?”

  Nezu nodded. “Very much so,” he said.

  The zombie was now no more than fifty feet away.

  “I have an idea,” Mr. Bennet said. “Nezu, if you would do me the favor of missing and alarming the horses, please.”

  “As you wish,” Nezu said after only the slightest pause, and he murmured something to the driver in Japanese.

  Mr. Bennet turned to Elizabeth and put a hand over hers. “Know by this, my dear, how fond I have grown of your husband … for if it were Wickham who’d been bitten, I would sit here laughing.”

  “I don’t under—,” Kitty began.

  Nezu brought up the carbine and shot a bullet into the ground near the dreadful’s feet. The horses
whinnied and danced in their harnesses, and the carriage jerked forward.

  Mr. Bennet took the opportunity to tumble out.

  “Father!” Kitty cried, beginning to leap to her feet again. It was Elizabeth who held her back.

  “Scream,” Elizabeth said.

  This time Kitty didn’t hesitate to accommodate.

  The carriage was rolling away from their father while the unmentionable was closing in.

  “Ahh!” Mr. Bennet cried. “God have mercy on a helpless old man!”

  He went hobbling off waving his arms over his head, and the zombie was soon no more than five steps behind him.

  “Oh, my lumbago! I can barely move, I am so stiff!” Mr. Bennet threw a wide-eyed look back at the ghoul that was dribbling black drool practically on his heels. “Do you not understand? There is no tender meat for you here! Shoo! Shoo! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

  Mr. Bennet tripped over nothing and went sprawling face-first into the grass. He flipped himself over and screamed just as the dreadful lunged in for the kill—and was jerked backward by a tug on the rope wrapped around its right ankle. It roared in rage and went for Mr. Bennet again, but still the rope held it back. The zombie ended up making futile swipes at its intended dinner as it loomed over him on one leg.

  “What—what is the meaning of this?” Mr. Bennet sobbed.

  Raucous laughter could be heard from the grove from which the unmentionable had first emerged. A moment later, it was followed by half a dozen young men. Two were dressed in drab, dirty clothes not much better than those the zombie wore; they were the ones holding the rope. The rest were of the type never to have held so much as a length of yarn lest it scrape the pampered flesh on their soft palms. Their coats were long and black, their hats tall and glossy, their cravats extravagantly fluffed, their trousers so tight as to invite detailed study of the male anatomy. The uniform of the dandy.

  Elizabeth didn’t need to ask which one was Bunny MacFarquhar. It was safe to assume he’d be the strikingly handsome young man leading the huge, leashed rabbit. He was also guffawing the loudest of the bunch.

  “It was a practical joke?” Kitty asked her sister.

  “Yes. Though you do it a kindness to call it practical.”

  “Or a joke,” Nezu added. The man was turning out to be rather loquacious after all.

  “If Lydia were here,” Kitty said, “she’d laugh and laugh.” Elizabeth was pleased to see that Kitty herself wasn’t even smiling.

  “What an awful thing to do! You nearly scared us all to death!” Kitty called to the young gentlemen approaching their barouche. “It was horrid! Horrid!”

  They stopped to stare at her, frozen in that undecided moment when they might shrink into po-faced shame or explode with more laughter.

  Then Kitty’s expression—her whole face—changed so completely that, for a moment, Elizabeth could have sworn she was looking at Lydia.

  “You must tell me which one of you naughty monkeys thought it up!” Kitty said. “La!”

  CHAPTER 14

  Darcy didn’t know if he’d been in his bed a week or a month, for he could no longer distinguish any division between day and night. The heavy curtains remained drawn, and the light that shone at their edges might have come from the moon or the sun, Darcy couldn’t tell. It never seemed to him anything but dull gray. The only thing more unremitting than the room’s gloom was the presence of his cousin Anne, who hovered constantly by his bedside, giving him all the more reason to keep his eyes closed.

  Sometimes he slept, and dreamed. More often he lay awake, and worried. And more often still, he drifted in some nameless place between slumber and wakefulness. If there truly were such a place as Limbo, he knew what it was like—and he came to hate it.

  So at last the day (or night?) arrived when, woozy or not, nauseous or not, he had to escape. And not with a pull on the bell rope. His cousin was giving him the rare gift of her absence, and he didn’t wish to summon her or her mother or the cowering servants, with their downcast eyes and mottled bruises. This was something he had to do himself. With a monumental exertion of will, he swung his feet off the bed and stood.

  Then he fainted.

  Sometime later, he picked himself up off the floor and stood again. When he was satisfied that he could manage without fainting, he started shuffling toward the dresser.

  Then he fainted.

  When he regained consciousness, he started the process over. He stood, shuffled, fainted, stood, shuffled, found his clothes, fainted, stood, put on his trousers, fainted, put on his shirt, didn’t faint, put on his waistcoat, didn’t faint, put on his stockings, didn’t faint, picked up his coat, fainted, stood, picked up his coat, fainted, stood, and finally decided he could live without the coat. After much (but faintless) effort, he had on his shoes and cravat and was at last ready to leave the little tomb in which he’d been interred for so long.

  He moved slowly, cautiously, out the door and into the hall. There he found windows with no curtains drawn, yet the world outside still seemed dreary and dim. The sky lacked the absolute blackness of night, though nighttime it was, Darcy decided. There were no groundskeepers to be seen, no one walking or riding along the road just beyond the hedgerows, and he could hear no movement save for the distant ticking of a clock.

  Darcy followed the sound through the murk shrouding the house. The clock stood, he knew, just outside the room he wished to visit. There was no getting away from Rosings—not with the strange plague still in him. But if he couldn’t escape the place, he could at least leave the time and all its troubling questions. He would seek refuge in the past.

  Lady Catherine always liked to remind him that he’d taken his first steps in her trophy room, wobbling from his mother to his father under the literally glassy-eyed gaze of hundreds of mounted dreadful heads. Her ladyship could tell you where and when and how she’d acquired each and every one, and as a lad he’d spent countless hours at her feet while she regaled him with tales of her victories in battle. Only one trophy would she never talk about, though it was mounted alone over the room’s huge fireplace. It was the head of the first dreadful she ever killed—and of her first husband as well.

  Darcy couldn’t look at it without wondering whether another head might soon join it, should the cure fail. So instead he concentrated on the weapons along the walls. Yet even as he took down a favorite old katana (and found he could barely keep the blade aloft), his thoughts betrayed him again. He wanted to remember happier days—taking his first clumsy lunges with this very sword, waving it over his head as he and his sister played Stricken and Slayers, panicking when he accidentally halved one of the stuffed zombies that loomed in the room’s four corners.

  All he could think of now, though, was how much he’d like to share those memories with his wife and show her the sword that helped set him on the path to her. And that brought back all the questions, and all the pain; he replaced the katana on its rack and thought himself a fool for seeking solace in a place such as this.

  When he turned to go, he nearly walked into the small black-clad figure that had planted itself directly behind him.

  “Anne! I didn’t hear you come in!”

  His cousin’s thin lips curled upward ever so slightly. “Going unnoticed is one of my specialties.”

  “What are you doing out of bed?”

  “I could give the same answer as you.” Anne looked past Darcy at the swords and maces behind him before lifting her gaze to the heads poking from the wall all the way to the vaulted ceiling high above. “I have been visiting old friends.”

  On the young woman’s pale face was a curious mixture of fondness and revulsion. She wiped it away with a smile as she looked again into Darcy’s eyes.

  “WHEN HE TURNED TO GO, HE NEARLY WALKED INTO A SMALL BLACK-CLAD FIGURE.”

  “It is good to see you up and about. I have been looking forward to the time when we might again walk the grounds together, as we did so long ago.”

  She offered him her r
ight hand.

  Darcy didn’t take it.

  “In the middle of the night?” he said.

  “There is as much to admire in the nighttime as in the daytime.”

  “I still feel quite weak.”

  “You may lean on me, if need be.”

  “I would be afraid to crush you, you are so delicate a thing.”

  “I am stronger than I look.”

  She was still holding out her hand to Darcy, and he found himself taking it even as he said, “I will need a coat.”

  “No, you won’t,” Anne told him, and she moved in close to his side as she guided him from the room.

  Once outside, they strolled up the gravel path to the rose garden. Anne was right: Darcy barely noticed the chill of night, and the lack of light didn’t bother him either. The world was still bathed in the same dull gray glow he’d noticed from the windows, only now he could see small pinpricks of glistening brilliance spread throughout it. Not overhead in the sky—these weren’t stars he saw. The twinkling was in the bushes and the grass and the trees and sometimes swirling in the air.

  Darcy rubbed his eyes with his free hand, and the tiny white sparks disappeared.

  “Are you all right?” Anne asked.

  “Yes. It’s just … the tonic your mother gives me is helping, I’m certain, yet I still feel … not quite myself.”

  “Surely, that will pass with time, though I wonder if you’ll ever feel exactly as you used to. Going through such an ordeal could not help but change how you see yourself and those around you.”

  “Perhaps,” Darcy said in a tone that did not invite further discussion. There was a truth to his cousin’s words he could recognize even as he tried to evade it.

  Anne let only a few steps pass by in silence.

  “I’m glad you’re here, Fitzwilliam. I’m sure that sounds strange, but I mean it. That you should end up at Rosings in your time of trouble almost seems like providence. Now we have a chance to get to know each other again. We haven’t really talked, just you and I, in years, and we’ve both changed so much since then. I think you’ll find that we have more in common now than we ever did as children.”