Dreadfully Ever After

by Steve Hockensmith

  Still, he couldn’t just stand there all night. Well, perhaps he could, if he tried, but that wouldn’t get him the answers he so desperately wanted—and dreaded. Another two hundred breaths, tallied with the infinite patience of one trained in the ways of the Shinobi, and then he’d risk it.

  On breath one hundred and twelve, he heard the opening and closing of a far-off door—a heavy jade one, as indicated by the tortured squeak of its hinges and the dull thunk as it swung shut. Darcy slipped into the hall and hurried to the windows overlooking the large barnlike structure that served as dojo and armory and barracks for Her Ladyship’s private army.

  Soon enough, he saw it. A shimmery-gray shape moving through the black of night: Anne walking to the dojo. Darcy had spotted his cousin heading that way twice before, both times, as now, in the middle of the night. It was enough to make him wonder if she had a lover among the ninjas. Such things simply weren’t done, of course, and Darcy could imagine the fate that awaited any of his aunt’s assassins who dared an indiscretion with her daughter. After all, this was the woman who, that morning, had taken a whip to the entire kitchen staff because she’d been served a currant scone.

  Lady Catherine de Bourgh loathed currants.

  Come to think of it, though, Anne did sometimes mention slipping out to visit “friends.” In fact, she’d said it was a friend who taught her how to go unnoticed by dreadfuls. And who better to perfect such a technique than ninjas, for whom concealment and deception were akin to a religion?

  Whatever it was her cousin did in the dojo, Darcy hoped it made her happy. He was growing fonder of his cousin, strange though she was. She seemed to understand him instinctively, to sympathize with his plight in a way he wouldn’t have thought possible, given their past. For years, she’d simply been the sickly, dreary girl he knew he wouldn’t marry. Now, she was … more. What exactly that made her, though, he wasn’t sure.

  When she finally disappeared into the darkness, he started downstairs.

  When Darcy was a boy, the fact that his aunt had declared her study off limits to everyone made it, of course, the very place he most wanted to be. During his many visits to Rosings, he’d spend entire nights tinkering with the intricate locks on its door, slowly mastering each in turn until only one thwarted him. He finally decided to give up when he came downstairs one morning to find footmen carrying out a dead ninja.

  “It appears Hashimoto was either a sneak-thief or a spy,” Lady Catherine told him. “The locks on my study door did not stop him, but one of the booby traps beyond them did.”

  Darcy could only hope he’d get the chance to risk those booby traps himself. It had been fifteen years since he’d last tried to break into the study. Even if his aunt hadn’t changed the locks, he might not remember how to get past them, and there would still be the one he had never bested.

  The study was just off the trophy room, so Darcy had an audience as he examined the door: hundreds of dreadful heads staring out from the walls. Their eyes were glass, their heads stuffed with sawdust, so no one was truly on hand to see Darcy’s first smile in weeks. It was a grim smile, one of relief and satisfaction rather than cheer, and it was gone in an instant.

  All the old locks were still in place. If he was patient and cautious and very, very lucky, he might soon know the truth that would, without doubt, break his heart one way or another.

  It took just five minutes with a handful of hairpins (pilfered at great risk from his aunt’s boudoir) to get through the first six locks. The seventh had always been a particular challenge, but after another five minutes’ work, Darcy felt the springs lift, as if at the turn of a key.

  And then, to his dismay, the door moved. Just a fraction of an inch, giving way to the slight pressure he’d been putting against it as he worked at the lock. But it was enough to tell him he’d finally succeeded where his younger self had so often failed.

  He gave the door a push, and it swung slowly open. The last, lowermost lock—a mysterious brass disc with a thin slot in the middle, as opposed to the simple keyholes above it—hadn’t been fastened.

  He’d been patient and he’d been lucky. Now it was time for the caution. It would be a shame to have come so far only to be carried out in the morning stretched between two footmen.

  He stepped over the tripwire stretching out from the door to its frame, walked around the pressure-sensitive plates that created shallow depressions in the Persian rug, ducked beneath the razor wire that was visible only because a spider had helpfully begun spinning a web from one end, and moved with special slowness past the portrait of Lady Catherine herself—and the small holes in the pupils that would no doubt spit poisoned darts if the breeze stirred by his passing should cause even the slightest quiver on the canvas.

  At last, he reached Lady Catherine’s compact cherry wood bureau à gradin, and he paused to look up at the lone head mounted directly above it. Darcy had known its owner well: It belonged to Sir Lewis de Bourgh, Lady Catherine’s second husband, Anne’s father. The circumstances of his death had always remained vague, and Darcy once overheard a colonel joking that Her Ladyship had simply lopped off Sir Lewis’s head so that, as a widow, she would be free to keep the sword in her hand. Unfortunately, Lady Catherine also overheard the jest (if such it was), and the last time Darcy saw the colonel alive, he was an ensign leading a patrol into a Scottish bog infested with unmentionables.

  Darcy hadn’t given the incident a second thought until now, years later; looking up at his uncle’s waxy face, he found himself searching for any sign the man hadn’t been dead when he died (so to speak). The greenish tint to the skin looked right for a dreadful, but couldn’t that be a taxidermist’s trick? Sir Lewis and Lady Catherine had always seemed comfortable enough with each other, yet Darcy knew from hard experience that Her Ladyship wasn’t one to take being thwarted lightly. If she felt herself more warrior than wife and mother—and surely she had and did—what wouldn’t she do to reclaim her destiny?

  It made him think of someone else who faced the same dilemma. Someone he already had been thinking of almost every waking second (which seemed like all of them, these days). Someone who was the whole reason he’d risked death to be standing where he was.

  He began going through the papers on his aunt’s desk.

  There were communiqués, maps, government white papers on this or that new strategy or weapon. And there were more booby traps, too. An asp in a portmanteau. A drawer filled with gunpowder and a lucifer, rigged to explode when opened. A toxin-coated scroll.

  Darcy didn’t find what he was looking for, though: the letters to him from his wife. The letters his aunt said didn’t exist. His heart sank as he began to accept that she might not be lying.

  Then he found proof that she wasn’t, and his heart did more than sink. It plunged like an unchained anchor bound for the darkest depths of the abyss.

  Underneath the leather desk pad were four faint lines arranged in a square. With some experimentation—pushing one corner, then another, then two at once, then all four—Darcy unlatched the hidden springs that held the little board in place. It covered a shallow compartment containing a single, neatly folded piece of paper. When Darcy picked it up, he found that it was a report, written in Japanese, from one of Her Ladyship’s ninjas.

  Highest One Who Is unto Me Like the Sun, the Brilliance around Which All Revolves, the Source of All Light, Whose Righteousness Burns the Unworthy without Mercy:

  It is as you suspected (of course, as always, Infallible One). Mrs. Jane Bingham made a fast and full recovery from the delivery of her child and is not ailing in any way. Her supposed illness was an excuse concocted by her sister, She Whose Name Would Befoul This Paper. I did not confront The Dishonorable One with this, but I did convey your latest request that she come to Rosings to minister to her husband as he struggles to overcome the strange plague. Once again, she refused. Her words (which were seared into my memory like the sizzlings of acid they so sounded like) were this: “If I did as your m
istress asks, I would be far more likely to behead Darcy than to offer him succor, for he has been tainted by the very vileness I once devoted myself to destroying. Her Ladyship may attempt to cure him if she must, but in my mind he has been forever befouled, and it matters not whether he begins drooling on himself and eating the servants. Fitzwilliam Darcy is dead to me, as is whatever love I once felt for him. That will not change.” As you ordered, I did not kill her immediately, but I stand ready to repay her perfidy with sharpened steel whenever you command it.

  Yours in abject insignificance,

  Nezu

  Darcy felt his knees start to buckle, and he staggered back toward the chair he’d pushed away from the desk a few minutes before.

  “Don’t!” Anne cried out. “You would be dead in seconds!”

  She was watching from the doorway. Her wide, sad eyes moved from him to the chair and back again.

  “In the seat cushion are pins tipped with scorpion venom.”

  Darcy blinked blankly at her and then stared back down at the letter. “Why didn’t Lady Catherine tell me?”

  “She was trying to protect you. A blow like this, when you are so weak … it might have finished you.”

  “Finished me? What a capital idea,” he joked grimly.

  Or was he joking?

  He looked at the chair behind him.

  “I suddenly feel so weary, Anne. More weary than I have in days.”

  How easy it would be to simply sit down and … rest.

  His cousin scurried toward him, zigzagging around every death trap with swift, practiced ease. When she reached him, she took his hands in hers and held them tightly, as if he were dangling from some great height and she alone could keep him from falling.

  Don’t worry, Fitzwilliam, he almost expected her to say. I’ve got you.

  CHAPTER 24

  Time and again, as the night crawled with agonizing slowness toward morning, Elizabeth thought of the one thing that might soothe her enough to sleep: Jane Bingley’s hair. Elizabeth felt anxious, frustrated, angry, guilty, and, despite the sisters and father slumbering soundly in the rooms around hers, alone. She longed to steal up the hall and slip into one of the other bedchambers and whisper, “Jane? Are you awake?” And whether she had been or not, Jane would sit up and say, “Yes.” And they would talk and talk as they had those many nights when they were girls brushing each other’s hair before bed, untangling—or trying to—the mysteries of life and love.

  Only Jane was at far-off Fernworthy recovering from the birth of yet another child, and thinking of her only reminded Elizabeth of one more thing she had to worry about … and regret. If she hadn’t been so honest with Darcy about how her young nieces made her feel—if she hadn’t had those feelings to begin with—perhaps she wouldn’t be lying here now in a strange bed in a strange house in such a strange, strange predicament.

  The outing with the MacFarquhars had been a disaster. The way Elizabeth and her father had thrown the blame on poor Kitty afterward had been shameful. And Elizabeth couldn’t even brood properly at first, for when they entered the house Mary was nowhere to be found. Only after an hour wasted on anxious pacing did her sister return, smug and (for once) mute on the subject of her own whereabouts.

  It was almost a relief not to sleep after such a day, for what would that have brought but nightmares?

  At long last, the black of night gave way to the dull gray glow of dawn. Elizabeth rose from bed and dressed herself and went downstairs … only to discover that she wasn’t the first of her family to awaken. Nezu stood in the hallway, head bent over a slip of paper. He held it out for her without a word. When she had it in hand, he walked out the front door.

  Elizabeth read.

  Independence, Mary Wollstonecraft tells us, is the basis of every virtue. If this is correct—and I believe little that comes to us from Mrs. Wollstonecraft is not—then I, who have so long fancied myself a peerless judge of personal quality, have, in fact, none of my own. On scruples I could lecture all day, while of initiative I have known nothing. No more. I am a Shaolin warrior, and I should act—act!—accordingly. “The beginning is always today,” Mrs. Wollstonecraft wrote. For me, it was yesterday. Today, it continues.

  M.B.

  “Oh, Mary,” Elizabeth groaned.

  Why did her sister have to be so sanctimonious?

  Why did she have to be so mulish?

  And why did she have to be so right?

  Elizabeth walked out to the portico and saw Nezu looking up and down the street. He wasn’t at it long before he headed back toward the house.

  “We will soon know where she has gone,” he said as he and Elizabeth went inside again.

  “Oh? How?”

  Nezu closed the door and turned to Elizabeth, speaking as if her question hadn’t been asked.

  “Whatever your sister has set herself to doing, we are unable to stop it now. Fortunately, she does not strike me as a reckless or capricious girl … unlike some. I think, therefore, that we may continue with our current course of action.”

  “You mean, we should simply wait here for one of the MacFarquhars to come calling or, at most, connive to put ourselves again in their path.”

  “Yes.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “That is the course of inaction, and we can’t afford to take it another day.”

  “There is no need for undue haste, Mrs. Darcy. Her Ladyship assures me that your husband has grown no worse, and if we force the issue—”

  “These assurances would mean more if they had come to me,” Elizabeth interrupted. “From Miss Darcy. And even if they had, hearing that my husband ‘has grown no worse’ is hardly an inducement to do nothing.”

  “Biding one’s time is not doing nothing. And, at any rate, the wrong kind of something could jeopardize all our plans. I hardly need remind you that there are rules in polite society by which one must abide.”

  “Indeed. You do not have to tell me that which I know so well. All the same, my mind is made up. I am through waiting for a chance at a cure that might not even exist. We will pay a call on the MacFarquhars.”

  “That would be extremely forward.”

  Elizabeth shrugged. “The Shevingtons are like that, I suppose. Good thing they’re rich enough to ignore the rules when they choose. Now, why don’t you go make sure breakfast is ready while I tell my father and sister to prepare themselves for a morning call.”

  Nezu stared at Elizabeth for a long, silent moment. She had the feeling he was playing out a conversation in his head—one that began, “I’m sorry, Your Ladyship, but …,” and ended with his mistress’s knee going where no knee ever went with good intentions. Though he eventually bowed and said, “Very good,” the expression on his face seemed in no way in agreement with his words.

  Within the hour, Elizabeth was setting off with Kitty and Mr. Bennet. Since the MacFarquhars lived just six blocks away—and because Elizabeth wished (rather perversely, she knew) to deny Nezu an excuse to tag along as a coachman—it was decided that the party would walk. As they sauntered off, Nezu watched from the portico, a strangely forlorn look upon his face. Elizabeth almost expected him to howl like a hound watching its master ride away. To her surprise, Kitty glanced back and smiled in a way that seemed both comforting and cruel.

  “There’s just something about people who take themselves so seriously,” Kitty said when she noticed Elizabeth watching her. “I can’t help but tease them a little.”

  “Our young friend Nezu certainly isn’t what anyone would call frivolous,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “Oh, no! He makes Mr. Darcy seem as giddy as Lydia!” Kitty giggled with a very Lydia-like giddiness, and then took her sister’s arm and gave her an apologetic pat. “Not that I’m saying your Mr. Darcy lacks for humor. It’s just …” She grinned and looked back again at Nezu. “Oh, he’s like a male Mary!”

  “Mary’s like a male Mary,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “Papa! You’re simply horrid!” Kitty shot back, but she w
as laughing as she said it.

  “It’s nothing to make light of,” Elizabeth said, not laughing at all. “Whatever it is Mary’s doing, at least she’s—”

  A man ran around the next corner screaming. “That never bodes well,” Mr. Bennet said.

  There were more shrieks, followed by more fleeing men and women.

  The Bennets kept walking toward the corner.

  “I do wish someone would scream a word,” Mr. Bennet said.

  “You know what that kind of scream means,” Elizabeth replied.

  A phaeton came careening around the corner, the galloping horses wide-eyed with panic.

  “Dreadfulllllllllllll! Dreadfullllllllllll!” the coachman bellowed.

  “That’s more like it,” Mr. Bennet said. “I just prefer when people are clear about these things.”

  Even forewarned, however, the Bennets couldn’t have predicted what they found when they rounded the corner: four dreadfuls hunched over a still-twitching body.

  The zombies all seemed relatively fresh. The skin was still taut, not bloated or shriveled, and it had the jaundiced pallor of illness rather than the green or gray of decay. They all shared the same fiery red heads of hair as well, and their clothes were similarly tattered and smeared with muck. Two were adults, a male and a female, and two were children, a boy and a girl.

  This had been a family.

  At present, they were enjoying a meal together: a well-dressed middle-aged man whose ample belly the children were in the process of emptying into their mouths. Father, meanwhile, was gnawing on an ankle while Mother doggedly bashed the dead man’s skull against the cobblestones in an attempt to crack it open like a walnut and avail herself of the sweet meat within.

  “How did they get here?” Kitty asked as the last screaming ladies and gentlemen sped past them. The street was now deserted except for the unmentionables and their main course.

  “They certainly don’t look like residents of Section One North, do they?” Mr. Bennet said.

  Elizabeth eyed the wall and watch towers that loomed over the houses half a mile away.