Dreadfully Ever After (11 page)

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 right 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.”

“Yes, well ... I do appreciate your attentiveness since I arrived. You’ve been extraordinarily understanding, given the circumstances. After all that’s happened these past few years, I could hardly have expected you to show such concern for me.”

“How could I not support my cousin when I find him on my doorstep in such need—and so very alone?”

If Darcy hadn’t been trained to withstand every torture known to man, he would have winced.

Anne gave his hand a squeeze. It was a cold grip, but one Darcy found, to his surprise, not entirely unwelcome. It was good to have
something
to cling to when all else seemed to be slipping from his grasp.

“Ahh! Look! Isn’t it beautiful?”

Anne stopped and leaned toward one of the bushes lining the path, pulling Darcy in beside her. Before them were half a dozen flowers in full bloom, though Darcy couldn’t tell what color they were. They looked washed out and drab in the hazy half-light, and he could smell them not at all. It made him wonder what his cousin was admiring.

“I’m ever so fond of roses,” Anne said. “They don’t close their blossoms when the sun goes down like those haughty daisies and poppies. I think that’s quite sporting of them, don’t you? The night creatures deserve their beauty, too.”

Darcy was about to make some neutral reply when he noticed a glimmer of light just beyond the nearest flowers. The little points of light were back—two of them, close together, hovering not a foot from him. When he squinted at them, he saw that they were suspended on a lattice of thin, interconnected lines stretching from one rose stem to another.

He was looking at a web, and the lights were a spider and the cocooned fly over which it hovered.

Darcy felt the strange urge to reach out and touch them. Feel their radiance.

“Yes, I do dearly love them,” Anne said. “Day, night—it’s all the same to them.”

The two glows seemed to merge for a moment; then the fly’s flickered and went out.

The spider’s light burned on all the brighter.

Kitty Bennet had studied under four masters in her life. Her father and a young man named Geoffrey Hawksworth had introduced her to the deadly arts. Master Liu of Shaolin had deepened her understanding and broadened her skills through years of grueling training in China. Yet it was her fourth master—her final and yet also her first—whom she found herself most indebted to now.

Kitty was drawing upon all the lessons she’d learned during her years as an acolyte to her sister Lydia.

Bunny MacFarquhar and his dandified friends were gathered around her as their toadies wrestled away the dreadful that had cleared Hyde Park just minutes before. And Kitty was doing all that Master Lydia would have done in her place.

When the men made bad jokes, she laughed.

When they gave her long, leering looks, she simpered and bit her thumbnail.

When they made disparaging remarks about her father and the comical way he’d run screaming from the unmentionable, she said, “Oh, you’re beastly!” in a tone that added, “And I just
adore
beastly boys!”

To her own dismay, it worked. With no dagger-dangling bandoliers or scabbarded katana or dowdy battle gown to hold her back, she could actually charm these wild young London bucks. Or Avis Shevington could, at any rate. In fact, it became obvious quite quickly that Avis Shevington could have a lot more fun than Kitty Bennet ever did.

Kitty had only ten minutes in Avis’s skin, however. Then the soldiers began moving in from the guard towers, and Bunny called for a hasty retreat before their most excellent joke could be ruined by those twin spoilsports: responsibility and consequence.

“I do hope I shall be seeing you tomorrow at Ascot,” Bunny said as he scooped up his rabbit, Brummell, and got ready to run.

“You can bet on it,” Kitty told him, “and count on a better return on your investment than the races will bring!”

“Ho!” Bunny guffawed, and off he went, in the company of his little troop, scampering into the trees.

Kitty turned and walked back to the barouche from which Lizzy and her father had watched her impromptu debut into London society.

“Well, it would seem we’re off to the races. La!”

“Indeed,” Lizzy said. “Well done, Kitty.”

Kitty climbed up and settled herself beside Mr. Bennet.

“It was my pleasure. Truly! Why, I’m half-tempted to stay Avis Shevington forever. Who would miss boring old Kitty Bennet anyway?”

This, of course, was a hint for her father and sister to exclaim, “We would! Never change, dear Kitty!”

They missed their cue. Instead, strangely enough, it was only Nezu who seemed to note the comment at all. He glanced back from the driver’s seat with a quizzical look upon his face. But, just as he opened his mouth to speak, there was a thundering of hoofbeats and the crash of something tearing through brush.

A black ambulance was bursting out of the thicket nearby, and from the hoots and giggles coming from inside it was clear who the passengers were.

“Let us follow young master MacFarquhar’s party,” Mr. Bennet said. “I don’t think answering a lot of questions would serve us any better than it would them.”

At a word from Nezu, the coachman snapped the reins, and the carriage darted off before the soldiers could reach them. A moment later, they were following the ambulance as it streaked through the easternmost gate onto the streets of Section Two Central. Bunny apparently noticed who was behind them, for Brummell appeared at the ambulance’s barred back window and (with the help of an unseen hand) waved one of his floppy paws at them.

Kitty waved back—and kept on waving for quite some time, for they ended up following Brummell northeast through London. Both Sir Angus’s hospital and the MacFarquhar residence were near the home Lady Catherine had secured for the Shevingtons, Nezu explained, so their destination and that of Bunny MacFarquhar weren’t far apart.

Mr. Bennet and Lizzy seemed to find this illuminating. Kitty could think little beyond,
I’m going to Ascot!

When they returned to the house, Nezu had to rush off to make preparations—
for Ascot!
—while the Bennets went through their usual evening rituals: stretching, sparring, meditating. (
Ascot Ascot Ascot Ascot Ascot!
was Kitty’s mantra that night). Then, after supper and a night of Ascot-filled dreams, Kitty was awakened at five in the morning to begin the journey.

To Ascot!

It took hours to make their way there, and Mr. Bennet passed the time napping while Lizzy, looking dour, merely stared off at the horizon. By contrast, Kitty was so excited she couldn’t even concentrate on the novel she’d brought along. A little flirting at
the
event of the Season—the races at Ascot Heath—and they would soon put all their troubles behind them.

When she shared this optimistic thought with her sister, Lizzy replied only with a grim, “We shall see,” while Nezu glanced back from the driver’s seat and shot her another of his curious looks.

Soon after they were weaving their way around the hoi-polloi-packed omnibuses that clogged the last stretch of road to the racecourse. When at last they were close enough to step out of the barouche, Nezu led them through the crowds milling about outside the blinding white grand stands.

“What goes on in there?” Kitty asked, nodding at a row of nearby canvas tents. They were quite the hive of activity, with a constant stream of men (and only men) pushing in and stumbling out.

“Things beneath a proper person’s notice,” Nezu said. “I would suggest that you restrict your attention to the ladies’ fine gloves and gowns.”

“Now, look here. You might be Lady Catherine’s proxy, but you are not Herself. When I ask you a question—”

Lizzy and Mr. Bennet leaned in on Kitty’s either side.

“Gambling,” Lizzy whispered.

“Gin,” said Mr. Bennet.

“Dreadful baiting.”

“
Worse
.”

“Oh,” said Kitty.

None of the accounts she’d read of the races had mentioned any of that. The gloves and gowns, yes. The
worse
(whatever that was), no.

“Why, just look over there, Ursula,” she said to her sister. “Have you ever seen such a magnificent hat?”

Just before they moved on into the stands, they passed one final distraction: A pair of zealots from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Z______s was being dragged out screaming the group’s slogan (“Undead isn’t inhuman!”) as the leaflets they’d been trying to distribute littered the ground behind them.

“Let’s see you prevent
this!
” someone called out (sounding as if he’d paid an especially long visit to the gin tent), and a pack of men fell on the SPCZed fanatics with drunken kicks and punches.

“This isn’t as dignified as I’d imagined,” Kitty said.

“Dignity one must sometimes bring to a thing oneself,” Lizzy replied gravely. It seemed to be a thought she’d been pondering for a while.

At last, they reached the private box in the upper stands that Nezu had secured for them. The seats inside were perfectly situated for the viewing of the races—and the crowd’s viewing of their occupants. Kitty’s excitement to find herself in such an enviable spot faded quickly, however, once she noticed the sneers and nasty laughs being directed at them from those both above and below.

“Why are we getting such horrid looks?”

“You are social unknowns who have presumed to claim one of the racecourse’s finest boxes,” said Nezu, who was standing at the back of the booth trying to look like a servant awaiting orders rather than a puppeteer peeking out from behind his Punch and Judy. “You are no doubt being accused of making a tasteless, ostentatious display of wealth.”

“As, of course, we are,” Lizzy added.

“A calculated risk. We must pique the MacFarquhars’ interest. To appear gauche is acceptable so long as you appear rich and ambitious in the process.”

“Well, I don’t see Bunny or his friends,” Kitty said, leaning out to peer down into the crowd. “I can’t pique a man if he’s not here.”