Dreadfully Ever After

by Steve Hockensmith

  Up ahead, Bunny was escorting Kitty back a few steps and putting Brummell in her arms before turning and striking a stiff pose: chin high, chest out, arms raised, fists clenched. Bunny, it seemed, was a practitioner of Britkata, a bastardization of the deadly arts that emphasized English dignity above all else. He’d struck the Affronted Noble stance. His comrades did the same, while the men facing them all assumed the Haughty Vicar.

  “They’re going to fight?” Elizabeth asked. “But why?”

  Sir Angus quickened his pace. “My son and his friends arrre dandies.”

  “And the others?”

  “Fops, of course.”

  Elizabeth recalled again why she’d given up on London.

  “You therrre!” Sir Angus barked. “Don’t you darrre!”

  It was too late. The fight had begun.

  Bunny threw the first punch—if merely straightening one’s arm and poking at empty air could be called a punch. To Elizabeth’s eyes, it looked more like he was practicing the offering of flowers to potential paramours. His friends waded in with jabs that were equally weak, and even when they connected—which was infrequently—they seemed to have no effect at all. The worst injury any of their foes sustained was a slightly loosened wig.

  The fops, meanwhile, were far more accurate with their face slaps and back-handed smacks, and the battle quickly turned into a rout, with one dandy after another staggering back with monogrammed hankie pressed to bloodied nose. Bunny was the last dandy standing when an unlikely ally charged in to save him.

  Actually, Brummell didn’t so much charge in as fly. Despite Kitty’s cry of “No! Come back!” it wasn’t the rabbit’s choice to go to Bunny’s aid. Kitty had flung him into the fray and then dashed after him, squealing, “Brummell, stop! Someone will step on you!”

  She grabbed at the rabbit and “accidentally” head-butted a fop in the gut.

  She spun after a darting Brummell and “accidentally” sent another fop sprawling with her hip.

  She chased Brummell in a circle, “accidentally” crushing fop toes, elbowing fop faces, and (Elizabeth could but pray she alone noticed) kicking a heel backward into one unfortunate’s most foppy parts.

  Only when all the fops were stretched out on the ground, whimpering or (in some cases) weeping, did a seemingly oblivious Kitty snatch Brummell up and admonish him with a finger-wagging, “Bad rabbit!”

  “Oh, I beg to differ, Miss Shevington!” Bunny cried giddily. “Good rabbit! Great rabbit! And you’re rather magnificent yourself!”

  He was leaning in to kiss either Kitty or Brummell when a hand on his starched collar jerked him back.

  “We’rrre leaving,” Sir Angus said.

  He gave his son a shove toward the pleasure garden’s central path—and the crowd that had gathered there to gawk and whisper and giggle. As Bunny went slinking off through the throng, Sir Angus turned to Elizabeth, looking more anguished now than enraged.

  “Mrs. Bromhead, I … I …”

  His gaze flicked over to Kitty, and all emotion drained from his face. When he continued, his tone was cold and controlled.

  “I’ll have the carriage brought rrround. If you would be so good as to collect your fatherrr and meet us out front.”

  Then he, too, stalked off into the onlookers. The crowd had the good sense to part for him.

  Kitty stepped up beside Elizabeth, Brummell still cradled in her arms.

  “And I used to think we caused a lot of scenes,” she said. “We’re nothing compared to the MacFarquhars.”

  “Oh? You don’t think you made a spectacle of yourself just now?”

  “I was ending a spectacle, not starting one. And it wasn’t me. It was—”

  “Don’t blame the rabbit,” Elizabeth said.

  Bunny’s friends were milling about dazedly, heads back, crimson-stained handkerchiefs still jammed to their faces. The fops, meanwhile, were starting to get back to their feet.

  “Let’s go,” Elizabeth said. “If there’s to be another Britkata demonstration, I want us to be as far away as possible.”

  “Good idea. I don’t think I’d be able to keep from laughing a second time.”

  As Elizabeth and Kitty moved through the spectators, one among them—a short, slender man who slipped out from behind a particularly broad-beamed lady—started walking with them.

  “Your lack of discipline might have ruined everything,” he said to Kitty.

  It was Nezu.

  “And you are so overstocked with discipline that you can criticize?” Elizabeth snapped back at him. “When you risk everything by speaking to us where the MacFarquhars might see you?”

  Nezu bowed slightly and then slowed his pace until he was behind the ladies, following them at a distance—as, it seemed, he’d been doing all afternoon.

  Kitty threw him a look over her shoulder that started out as a pouty glare before transforming into something more confused, and perhaps even amused.

  “Well put, Lizzy. Who is he to pass judgment on us?”

  Elizabeth said nothing, though she knew the answer.

  Who was he to pass judgment?

  The one who was right.

  CHAPTER 19

  Mary let all of half a minute pass after her father and sisters rode off in the MacFarquhars’ landau. Then she joined them on the streets of London.

  Not the same streets, though. Not for long. She had her own destination in mind.

  She wasn’t just leaving the house. She was walking away from the role she’d been assigned both as a woman and a Bennet. Second fiddle. Nursemaid. Lady in waiting who was never supposed to do anything but wait.

  Well, she wasn’t waiting any longer. She’d come all the way from Hertfordshire to help, and help she would.

  The nearest shop was a small bookseller’s around the corner, and Mary marched in and asked the way to Bethlem Royal Hospital.

  “That’s two questions you’re really asking, Miss,” the man behind the counter said. He was a roly-poly fellow with spectacles sliding so far down the bridge of his nose they seemed in imminent danger of falling into his mouth. “Could I tell you the way? Why, it’s but a twenty minute walk from here down to the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, where they moved old Bedlam after the Siege of ’97. So that’s a yes for you, young miss. Yes, indeed. But will I tell you? Can I, in good conscience? Noooooooo. No, indeed.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, Miss, Bethlem Royal Hospital is in Section Twelve Central, and if I were to send you there I would be as guilty of murder as whichever footpads or unmentionables got hold of you first.”

  The shopkeeper leaned over the counter and popped his eyes wide on the word “murder,” saying it as one would “Boo!” to a small child.

  “And what if I were to tell you,” Mary replied coolly, “that the footpads and unmentionables have more to fear from me than I do from them?”

  The man scratched the lowermost of his several chins. “Then I do believe I would laugh, Miss, very much like this.” He cleared his throat. “Ho ho ho!”

  Mary had never snapped a living man’s neck, but this was a day for new experiences, and she was momentarily tempted to give it a try.

  “Will your scruples allow you to sell me a guidebook to London?” she said instead.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. What a lady does with a guidebook is no business of mine, once it has been paid for.”

  “Then I will take one.”

  “I recommend this.” The shopkeeper reached under the counter and produced a slender volume. “London: Being a Complete Guide to the British Capital; Containing, a Full and Accurate Account of its Buildings, Commerce, Curiosities—”

  “I will take it.”

  “—Exhibitions, Amusements, Religious and Charitable Foundations, Literary Establishments, Learned and Scientific Institutions: Including a Sketch of the—”

  “I will take it.”

  “—Surrounding Country, with Full Directions to Strangers on Their First Arrival
.”

  “I said I will take it.”

  “By John Wallis.”

  “Yes, yes. I will take it.”

  “I have not yet quoted you a price.”

  Mary found herself gritting her teeth in a way she hadn’t done since her sister Lydia left home.

  “How much is it?”

  “One shilling and sixpence.”

  “I will take it.”

  “There’s no need to be snippy, Miss,” the shopkeeper said, but at last he held out a pudgy hand, palm up.

  Mary reached into her reticule, careful to avoid the pistol inside lest she be tempted to make use of it.

  Once book and coins had changed hands, Mary said, “Do you also have in stock Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman?”

  The shopkeeper nodded, half-smiling, as if her question answered one of his own.

  “Indeed, I do. Two shillings. But wouldn’t the young lady prefer a nice frothy novel, instead?”

  Mary put the coins on the counter.

  “I’m not buying the book for myself,” she said. “Be so good as to give it to the next young lady who comes in looking for a nice frothy novel.”

  Mary walked out of the shop so absorbed in her guidebook that she didn’t even notice the scruffy dog sitting patiently beside the door. Nor did she notice that it hopped up and darted around the corner the moment she passed, as if it had been waiting for her to emerge.

  She was too busy plotting her course. While her father and sisters practically circumnavigated the globe to get to Bethlem Hospital, she would go there in as straight a line as possible.

  Her first major zig came at the north gate to Section Twelve Central: The soldiers there refused to let her pass.

  “I had daughters myself, once,” said the captain of the guard, a grizzled man with only one of nearly everything—hands, ears, eyes, nostrils, legs—that God granted in pairs at birth. “No other father shall be deprived of his on my watch.”

  With a simple zag, however, Mary was back on course: After circling around to the east gate from Section Eleven Central, she was able to carry on toward Bethlem Hospital. In fact, this time the guards let her pass with nary a question, waving her through almost as if they’d been expecting her. (If Mary hadn’t been consulting her guidebook again, she might have noticed the dogs watching her from behind the sentry booth and the squat black box they flanked.)

  “The accompanying map we provide only out of obligation to comprehensiveness,” Mary read from the brief chapter on Section Twelve Central. “If you value your life, you will make no attempt to use it. Study instead the maps of One North and Eleven Central, so that you will know well the roads leading away from what you see depicted here.”

  It struck Mary as melodramatic, all this humbug about the hellishness of Twelve Central. She’d just walked along the edge of One North and Eleven Central entirely unmolested, and how much difference could a few feet of limestone make?

  She looked up from her book and found her answer.

  A lot.

  Passing through the gate hadn’t just brought her to a different part of London. It seemed to have transported her to a different time—somewhere in the Dark Ages, perhaps.

  She had to assume that the street before her was paved with cobblestones, as were the ones she’d just left behind, for it was so covered with mud and garbage and the vilest filth of human making that she couldn’t see the street at all. The creatures along this wretched avenue were dressed in shabby fourth-hand clothing or mere rags or, to Mary’s dismay, nothing at all: She spotted several naked children, empty bellies protruding before them like little drums, staring at her with glassy, sunken eyes from alleys and doorways. Here and there bodies lay in the gutters before the ramshackle buildings, some with the heads removed or crudely crushed, others ready to reawaken to darkness at any moment. Two slow-moving men were collecting them, tossing the corpses onto the back of a dray already heaped high with more of the same. Something squirmed and moaned at the bottom of the pile, but whether it was someone in their last moments of life or their first of undeath would soon make no difference, for Mary could see where the cart’s cargo was headed: the chimneys of a crematorium that spewed black over the nearest rooftops.

  It was then that Mary knew the secret of the city’s walls. They were as much for locking this horror in as keeping the dreadfuls out. And not only was she supposed to stay on the right side of the stones, she wasn’t even meant to know how very, very wrong the wrong side really was.

  A true lady would turn and flee.

  Mary straightened her spine and started up the street.

  As she weaved around the largest mounds of muck, the men loading the dray paused to gape at her, the stiff carcass of a woman stretched between them, its severed head resting on its stomach.

  “You’ve picked a poor time to come sightseeing,” one of them said. “Unless you want a dose of cholera to go with the bad memories.”

  Mary could think of no reply, and so made none. She did, however, give the bodies lining the streets a wider berth.

  Even with her map, navigating Twelve Central proved difficult, for the street signs (where any existed) were so blackened with soot they were unreadable, and what passersby Mary encountered answered her queries with snorts or shakes of the head or, most frequently, some variation on “Bedlam, eh? That’s certainly where you belong when you chose to wander around here.” Eventually, however, a sandy-haired, apple-cheeked boy in tattered clothes offered to lead her to Bethlem Hospital for two farthings.

  “That seems quite reasonable,” Mary said, and she fished out the coins and handed them over. “You will receive four more if we’re there within a quarter hour.”

  “A whole penny?” the boy exclaimed. “God blind me, let’s go!”

  Mary followed him up the street, around the first corner, and then into a narrow darkened alley—both ends of which were quickly blocked off by grime-smeared men wielding Zed rods and knives.

  “ ’Allo ’allo, fancy lady,” said the burliest, dirtiest of them. “Are you a reformer, then? Come to improve our miserable lot? Well, me friends and I can make some suggestions as to how you might start.”

  Mary sighed. Kitty had gone on and on about the way Lady Catherine’s ninjas had ambushed her and Papa in an alley a few days before, and now she’d walked right into the same sort of trap. Certain details would have to be omitted when she told her sister about all this. And she was certain—for it didn’t occur to her that there might be reason to think otherwise—that she would be telling her sister about all this at the end of the day. That the end of her life might be at hand never crossed her mind.

  “You have sacrificed your gratuity, young man,” she said to her guide.

  The boy just grinned as two of the men moved past him, closing in on Mary.

  “Oh, he’ll get ’is. I reckon we all will.” The big ruffian looked Mary up and down. “Ten bob for the dress, five for the shoes, maybe a tanner for the purse—not to mention whatever’s in it—and then thruppence for dragging another bogey to the furnace. Yeah, there’ll be plenty to go ’round by the time we’re through.”

  For the first time in her life, Mary found herself envying her sister Elizabeth’s wit. She racked her brain, but the gang was nearly on her—two from the front, three from behind. All she could think to say was, “Yes, well, perhaps, perhaps not.”

  She whipped out her pistol and shot the first thug through the forehead. As he toppled over, she quickly clubbed the stunned man beside him with the smoking barrel while kicking backward. She felt her foot crush half a ribcage, and when she spun around she found, quite incongruously, that the other two hooligans behind her were being attacked by mongrel dogs. As the men kicked at them, screaming, Mary turned again and hurled her pistol end over end at the ringleader. The stock thunked into the man’s thick skull, sending him reeling.

  The two footpads still on their feet fled toward the street, the dogs at their heels, while
the little boy darted off down the alleyway.

  Mary strolled over to the gang’s leader, who was on his knees, head in hands, and flattened him with a casual snap kick.

  “Less expenses,” she said.

  The man blinked up at her, barely conscious. “Huh?”

  “That’s what I should have said before. When you were calculating what you might earn from robbing … never mind.” She put her foot on his throat. “Tell me how to get to Bethlem Royal Hospital—truthfully—or my first step away from here will be through your esophagus.”

  He told her.

  “Thank you,” Mary said, and she pivoted crisply and went on her way.

  “Miss? Oh, Miss?” the thug called after her.

  She stopped and turned.

  “You wouldn’t want to come work for me, would you?” the man wheezed.

  A strange sensation came over Mary’s face. Her lips tightened. Her eyes crinkled.

  It took her a moment to realize she was smiling.

  “I am flattered by your offer,” she said. “But no, thank you. I find myself quite gainfully employed already.”

  It was about time, too.

  Less than five minutes later, she was at the gates of Bedlam.

  CHAPTER 20

  No matter how many times Darcy asked, Anne wouldn’t tell him where she’d learned the tree trick.

  “Actually, I had no idea any dreadfuls were even in that cave,” she said as they walked back to the house. “I just thought you’d look smashing with branches.”

  “Anne, please. I really would like to know.”

  “Oh, it’s simply a parlor trick some friends taught me. And that is all I care to say about it at present.”

  “Fine. If you feel you don’t owe me a serious explanation after what we’ve just been through.…”

  “I am being serious. Or don’t you think I could have friends?”

  “No, no!” Darcy said. “That is, yes, yes! Of course, you could. That’s not what I meant.”

  Anne finally lost the smile she’d been wearing for the last ten minutes. “I didn’t, you know. Have friends of my own. Not for the longest time. All I had was Lady Catherine. Do you think that should have been enough?”