Dreadfully Ever After

by Steve Hockensmith

  There was just one problem: The guards weren’t obliging. Even as Sir Angus railed on about the charlatans in their midst, the nearest soldiers just peeped at each other sheepishly around their pikes.

  “If these people are imposters,” one of them said to Sir Angus, “who the flippin’ heck are you?”

  “I am Sirrr Angus MacFarquharrr, personal physician to His Majesty the king.”

  “Poppycock!” Mr. Bennet roared. “You’re nothing of the kind, you rascal!” He stretched out an arm and pointed at Sir Angus just as Sir Angus had pointed at him and his daughters a moment before. “He’s the imposter! Seize him!”

  “But—,” Bunny began.

  Mr. Bennet swung his arm toward Sir Angus’s son. “And his accomplices!”

  “A-a-accomplices?” the young man stuttered. He looked down at the squirming rabbit he was clutching in his arms.

  But it wasn’t Brummell Mr. Bennet was accusing.

  He jabbed his finger at Lord and Lady Cholmondeley next.

  “They’re the frauds here, not us!”

  Lord Cholmondeley puffed up his chest—which took much doing, it being a slight and concave little thing—and demonstrated why his speeches had become such favorites of both the Whigs and the more waggish Tories in the House of Lords.

  “Thith ith outrageouth! Thethe people theem to be here under falthe pretentheth, tholdier, and I demand that you theithe them thith inthant!”

  The nearest guard served as spokesman for all.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Arrrrrest them!” Sir Angus translated.

  The guards shared more miserable glances.

  “I’m sorry,” one of them said. “I don’t think we can arrest anybody without orders.”

  “We’re from the 36th Foot Infantry,” another added. He sneered down at his puffy-sleeved gold-trimmed tunic. “We ain’t used to all this beefeater rot.”

  “ ‘Today, you are a fence,’ the color sergeant told us,” yet another soldier threw in. “ ‘So much as bat an eye as the toffs trot by, and you’ll be digging latrines,’ pardon mon Français, ‘until it’s George the ruddy Fortieth mincing into Westminster.’ ”

  Elizabeth despaired of ever being attacked.

  Sir Angus and Bunny also seemed to give up hope that the guards would actually guard anything other than the perfect straightness of the lines in which they stood. Each MacFarquhar turned to the woman he’d been escorting toward the abbey not long before.

  “Who are you?” Bunny asked Kitty, looking hurt.

  “How darrre you?” Sir Angus asked Elizabeth, looking like he wanted to hurt her.

  Before either sister could reply, there was a blast of not-so-distant trumpets and the rumble of approaching drums, and the mob sent up a deafening cheer.

  The king’s procession had almost completed its short march from Westminster Hall to Westminster Abbey. The guards wouldn’t be able to play fence much longer: Any second, George III and the Prince Regent and two hundred assorted nabobs and attendants would start down the very path the Bennets and the MacFarquhars and Lord and Lady Cholmondeley were clogging.

  A burly bald man in the crowd reached out to tap one of the soldiers on the shoulder.

  “ ’Ere. Why don’t you just drag off the lot of ’em?” he suggested helpfully. “The whole barmy bunch. That way, you’ll know you got the right ’uns even if you got the wrong ’uns, too.”

  “ ‘The whole barmy bunch’?” Lady Cholmondeley fumed.

  “Thuch intholenthe!”

  “Ain’t a bad idea, Thommo,” the soldier said to one of his comrades. “I’d rather have the color sergeant mad at me than the flippin’ king.”

  Finally, Elizabeth thought.

  She went into a fighting stance.

  Not that there would be any escape for her and Kitty and their father. There were at least thirty soldiers standing at attention between them and the street, and even if they should reach the end of the gauntlet, what then? One direction would be blocked by the procession. The other would be lined with yet more soldiers.

  Resistance would be futile—but perhaps it would also be satisfying. If Elizabeth had to accept defeat, she would do so on her terms, not Lady Catherine’s or anyone else’s.

  And then Lord Cholmondeley spoke again.

  “I thay, that’th not my driver.”

  He was gazing, brow furrowed, back at the street. His carriage had returned, apparently, for Elizabeth saw a sleek black barouche adorned with silver molding and an especially ostentatious crest.

  Nezu was in the driver’s seat. Even more surprising, not to mention baffling, were his companions.

  Sitting beside him were two small, mangy dogs.

  “Oh, bra-VO!” Kitty said with a grin. “He really is the sneakiest little fellow, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, yes. Quite the slippery devil,” Mr. Bennet said. He turned to Elizabeth. “The better part of valor?”

  Elizabeth nodded. “So it would seem.”

  She and her father had exchanged these words on only a few occasions, the last more than four years before. “A true warrior does not know the word ‘retreat,’ ” Master Liu had told his pupils again and again. So this is what the Bennets said to each other instead when the time came.

  Time to run away.

  Elizabeth had taken but a single step toward the carriage when a meaty hand clamped down on her wrist, dragging her to a halt.

  “Oh, no,” Sir Angus said. “You’rrre not going anywherrre.”

  “Quite the contrary,” Elizabeth replied. “I think I’m finally getting somewhere.”

  She broke his hold, grabbed his wrists, and sent him spinning into the nearest row of soldiers. Half a dozen men went down together in a furiously cursing tangle.

  Mr. Bennet, meanwhile, had begun running down the opposite line, smacking soldier after soldier with the butt of a pike he’d wrestled away. A pair of patriotic onlookers separated themselves from the gasping, cringing crowd to try to catch him, but Kitty leapt between them and threw her legs out straight to the sides in a perfect scissor kick. Both men went flying back into the roiling throng. Kitty landed nimbly and carried on after her father without missing a step.

  After a few more kicks, punches, and pike-butts to the side of the face, the Bennets were clambering into the barouche.

  “Goodness,” Mr. Bennet said. He was already busy holding off soldiers with his pike but managed to jerk his chin to the right. “We seem to have disrupted the king’s little parade.”

  About fifty yards away, where the road curved southwest around the abbey grounds, Elizabeth could see what had to be the beginnings of the king’s procession. It was either that or an attention-starved theater company attempting an impromptu performance of Romeo and Juliet, for everyone in the street was clad in the frilled collars, ballooning breeches, and gaily colored hose of Elizabethan courtiers. If that was the case, however, the show was going very badly, indeed: Half the players were in a mad panic, shoving their way to the front or into the goggling hordes along the road while the other half gaped at them in confusion.

  “I used to fear that the Bennets would end up infamous, but I had no idea we would manage it so spectacularly,” Mr. Bennet said. “After today, they shall burn us in effigy once a year along with Guy Fawkes.”

  “Let us focus our attentions on the here and now,” Elizabeth said as she kicked back a soldier trying to climb over the barouche’s mudguard. “There is still the little matter of getting away.”

  She drew her ankle dagger—the only weapon she’d brought—and hurled it into the hand of another guard reaching for the horses’ bridles.

  “Gaaaahhhh!”

  “Sorry!”

  “Well, obviously we can’t get through the procession,” Kitty said. She turned toward the other end of the street, which was rapidly filling with soldiers and civilians rushing out to see what was causing all the trouble. “And how would we ever clear a path through that?”

  “I shal
l show you,” Nezu said. He’d been keeping the horses steady with a gentle but firm tug on the reins, letting the scruffy mutts, with snarls and snapping jaws, drive off soldiers who came too near. Through it all, he’d remained utterly still, utterly silent.

  Now, however, he sucked in a deep breath and tilted his head back and opened his mouth wide.

  “Dreadfuls!” someone yelled.

  “What a coincidence,” Nezu said. “That’s just what I was about to say.”

  Then there were more shouts, all coming from the direction of the procession.

  “Unmentionables!”

  “Bogies!”

  “Runnnnnnnnnnn!”

  The soldiers tried to heed this last call by turning and hurrying toward the king’s cavalcade. The crowd, on the other hand, surged away from the screams, sweeping most of the soldiers along with them. Within seconds, thousands of shrieking people were fleeing Westminster Abbey.

  Nezu gave the reins a snap, and Lord Cholmondeley’s carriage joined the stampede.

  “Do you think there really are dreadfuls back there?” Kitty said.

  Already it was impossible to tell what was happening where the panic had begun. People running, shoving, falling onto one another—that’s all Elizabeth could make out. If any of those doing the running and shoving and falling were dead (or about to be), she couldn’t say.

  “From what we’ve seen lately, it wouldn’t surprise me,” Mr. Bennet mused. “Though I do wonder how they could penetrate so deeply into the center sections.”

  “What of the king and the Prince Regent and the rest?” Kitty asked. “Should we go back for them?”

  “You see how it is.” Mr. Bennet pointed at a soldier being swept past them backward by the current of the scurrying mob. “I doubt we could get back even if we wanted to. Not in time to be of any help.”

  “But—,” Kitty began.

  “Before you decide, consider this,” Nezu said. “I know where Mary Bennet is.”

  “Where?” all three Bennets said in chorus.

  “She is being held prisoner in Bethlem Royal Hospital.”

  “The spy you had following her finally returned?” Kitty asked.

  “Not entirely.”

  “ ‘Not entirely’?” Mr. Bennet grimaced. “Someone sent you his head?”

  “He’s talking about the dogs,” Elizabeth said. “I thought they looked familiar.”

  Mr. Bennet blinked at the mongrels perched next to Nezu.

  “They told you where Mary is?”

  “They’re extremely well trained,” Nezu said. “A few biscuits and a map, and all was made clear. Miss Bennet and her escort have been in Bethlem since yesterday afternoon. Ell and Arr here would have reported to me sooner, but the journey from Twelve Central to One North was not an easy one without their master.”

  “Really?” Mr. Bennet gazed at the dogs in wonder. “I’m surprised they didn’t just hire themselves a cab.”

  Ell and Arr were sitting up especially straight now, looking rather pleased with themselves.

  “So,” Kitty said, “what do we do?”

  “What we should have done a long time ago,” Elizabeth told her. “What I should have been doing all along.”

  A group of young men started climbing into the carriage, apparently intent on commandeering it for themselves. Elizabeth paused just long enough to crush their fingers and flatten their noses and generally do whatever necessary to send the invaders flying. When she was done, she dusted off her hands and smoothed out her gown and finished her thought.

  “We act like warriors.”

  CHAPTER 35 (AN ASIDE)

  Mr. Anthony Isaac Crickett of 23 Crabtree Row, Bethnal Green, Two East, London, did not lead an especially noteworthy life. A miserable childhood in a Whitechapel workhouse was followed by an adulthood stoking furnaces at the Hackney Crematorium & Glue Factory that was (fortunately) slightly less miserable but (unfortunately) rather brief.

  Not that Mr. Crickett died an especially noteworthy death. When cholera swept through Two East (as it already had through Twelve and Thirteen Central and half the Souths), he succumbed to it, at the age of twenty-five, no sooner than most of his rookery neighbors, yet no later than most as well.

  Under normal circumstances, that would have been the end of Mr. Crickett and whatever chance he ever had at leaving some kind of legacy. Not so in the Age of the Dreadfuls! Mr. Crickett had no family to see to his beheading after he hacked out his last breath in his tiny garret apartment. (Even if he had, that would have been no guarantee his corpse would have been properly attended to, for the cholera was mowing down entire families at once with one sweep of the scythe.) So the strange plague gave Mr. Crickett one last go at making his mark, and he seized the opportunity with both hands—and promptly tore it limb from limb. Anthony Isaac Crickett would finally be, for the first time in his quarter-century tenure on earth, something rather special.

  No, he wasn’t the first dreadful to discover that London’s new sewers were as comfy-cozy as any mausoleum or cave or well or pit. He simply slithered in through an accommodating storm drain and made himself at home, as did scores of his fellow unmentionables. Nor was he the first to find, once a few pesky metal grates were broken through, that the sewer system made a most excellent thoroughfare, running, as it did, under all the walls and gates and watch towers of the stratified city above. It wasn’t even he who first noticed that the Glow was flowing in great rivers through the streets to pool in a vast new ocean of light—of life—not far from where the sewers emptied: that venerable old cesspool known as the Thames.

  In all these matters, Mr. Crickett was merely doing in death as he’d done in life. He mindlessly followed his fellows, going where they went, acting as they acted, eating as (and now whom) they ate.

  Which was how he eventually came to be chasing the Archbishop of Canterbury up and down Abingdon Street with a half-eaten liver hanging from his mouth. Like all the unmentionables that had come streaming out of the sewers a few minutes before, Mr. Crickett was crazed with lustful hunger. Never had the Glow been so intense, so abundant, so free for the taking. All around was a veritable zombie smorgasbord, and all Mr. Crickett wanted to do was eat eat EAT!

  The liver he’d plucked from the mangled corpse of a standard bearer, but the brains had already been dashed and eaten, and there was simply too much fresh meat still running around on two feet for him to think of settling down to savor his meal. So on he raced after the brightest lights—the scattering remnants of George III’s recoronation procession and the multitudes gathered to watch it pass by.

  Mr. Crickett settled on the Archbishop because he was an old man, moving slowly. But when the clergyman looked over his shoulder and saw that a zombie wished to pick him off the buffet tray, he yelped, threw off his heavy ceremonial robes, and immediately doubled his speed. The archbishop proved quite spry after that, weaving around abandoned sedan chairs and scepters and flags and swords of state too heavy with gold scrollwork and jewels to be of real use to anybody. He was wily quarry as well, trying to dissuade Mr. Crickett both by throwing things back at him (his Bible, his high-peaked mitre, his false teeth) and by drawing the dreadful close to possible distractions (this or that writhing body being ripped apart in the street, a flock of altar boys precariously perched in a walnut tree, et cetera.).

  Yet Mr. Crickett never wavered, and at last his resolve was rewarded. When the Archbishop tried to duck inside the abbey, he found himself trapped outside with a small group of survivors. The reason: Those inside—“nobles” every one—had locked the doors.

  “Let me in! It’s me! The Archbishop!”

  “How do we know you’re not a dreadful?” a man asked from the other side of the door.

  “Because I’m talking to you, you cretin!”

  “Sorry. I really don’t think we should take the chance.”

  “I demand sanctuary!”

  “He led one right to us,” said a pretty if rather sharp-featured woman, and sh
e pressed herself close to the short, slight gentleman beside her. “And now others have noticed!”

  Indeed, Mr. Crickett was closing in on the Archbishop, with a clutch of unmentionables right behind him.

  “God have merthy on uth!” the little gentleman called to the gray heavens. “God have merthy on our poor thoulth!”

  And it was here that Mr. Crickett finally separated himself from the vast ranks of the unremarkable and took his first step toward Destiny.

  “Go, Brummell!” cried one of the entrées-to-be as the dreadfuls moved in. “Run, my one true friend!”

  A shard of hot, white radiance seemed to break off from the man and shoot like lightning along the ground. All the unmentionables but one ignored it.

  Mr. Crickett was that one. He was experiencing something rare indeed in zombies (and not always easy to find in people): curiosity. The Archbishop was forgotten—which worked out fine for Mr. Crickett, it turned out, for the clergyman and those around him were set upon by so many dreadfuls, each creature managed but a mouthful or two before more of the undead shoved their way in for a taste.

  Mr. Crickett didn’t get so much as an eyelid or a fingernail, for he’d left the abbey doors behind. The bolt of life-light was zigzagging away, and he was intent on catching it. It didn’t have the soft, pinkish hue of that most cherished delicacy, brains, yet it burned with a brightness he found irresistible.

  As prey, it proved as quick and canny as the Archbishop. It changed direction frequently. Whenever possible, it shot under or through obstacles Mr. Crickett had to go around. It even doubled back on its trail once, shooting between Mr. Crickett’s legs as he fumbled for it clumsily.

  Eventually, though, it began to tire. Its turns weren’t as sharp, its sprints weren’t as fast, but Mr. Crickett remained as fresh as ever. Which wasn’t all that fresh, as far as his body was concerned (he had about him both the color and something of the smell of gorgonzola cheese), but he certainly wasn’t growing fatigued. He could chase the light for the next week without slowing.