The baron stopped him with a raised hand. “We can discuss that later, Bennet. Now is the time for action.” He swiveled around, puffed out his chest (so much so that Elizabeth thought she heard a faint popping noise coming from the vicinity of his stomach), and boomed: “Produce the object!”
With a sigh of weary irritation, Mr. Bennet pulled a swaddle-wrapped handkerchief from one of the pockets of his greatcoat. This he gave to Lord Lumpley.
“Master of the Quorn!” the baron bellowed.
A small, lean man hustled over, and Lord Lumpley handed him the handkerchief. The man then sprinted away toward the milling, whimpering foxhounds clustered nearby. With each step he took, the dogs grew louder, wilder, until they were practically dancing on each other’s backs, barking madly.
The Master of the Quorn knelt before them, unwrapped the handkerchief, and let the dogs crowd in for a good sniff.
“Is that what I think it is?” Elizabeth asked.
Her father nodded.
In the church, after dispatching Mr. Ford, Mr. Bennet had collected a peculiar memento mori: the dead man’s ears.
The hounds, it seemed, didn’t like the smell of them. Their yips turned to whines, their tails curled between their legs, their ears flattened back on their heads, they cringed and wet the ground. One by one, however, they stuck their noses in the air, nostrils flaring.
When the Master of the Quorn stood up, they circled each other uncertainly for a moment, then slowly set off across the lawn. Once they were under way, they seemed to forget their fear. The barking began again, and their hesitant lope became a dash.
“They’ve got the scent!” someone called out.
“Tallyho!” Lord Lumpley shouted, and he gave his horse a hard slap of the crop to set her off. Within seconds, two dozen huntsmen were thundering away after him—and two of the more besotted ones quickly rolled backward off their charging mounts. Mr. Bennet and his daughters trotted over to make sure they were still alive.
They were . . . though to judge by their groans, they weren’t especially happy about it.
“So,” Elizabeth said, “tallyho, then?”
Mr. Bennet nodded. “Jane, if you would please catch up with Lord Lumpley and see to it he doesn’t do anything too spectacularly stupid. Elizabeth . . .” Mr. Bennet reached over and patted her white-knuckled hands, which were wrapped so tightly around the reins that her fingernails bit into her palms. “Good luck.”
They set off after the hunting party, but they didn’t remain together long. Within a minute, Jane had not just caught up with the other riders but was passing most of them. Elizabeth, meanwhile, had to use all the skill and will at her disposal both to stay on her horse and to keep from screaming while doing so.
It didn’t help, of course, that she had to ride sidesaddle, an experience akin to sitting on a rocking chair with no back set adrift in a rowboat in stormy seas. She’d never had the best “seat” to begin with, and that had been when riding at a leisurely amble along smooth country lanes. Going at a gallop through field and brush—as the party was doing now—convinced her she soon would have no seat at all.
Elizabeth’s only consolation was the fact that she was doing better than many of the men. When she sent her horse flying over a narrow stream, she flashed past a red-coated fellow sitting in it shaking his head. When she took another leap over a low hedge, she noticed two huntsmen on the other side stumbling after the horses that had just thrown them. And when she rounded a stand of trees and barely avoided a gamekeeper’s cottage half hidden in the shadow, she saw a horse standing stock still before it—and its former rider hanging half on, half off the roof.
Nerve-racking as the chase was, Elizabeth would’ve realized she was grateful for the pure, thought-obliterating terror of it if she could’ve slowed down long enough to think at all. Better to worry about falling off a horse than ponder the unsettling question the ride itself presented.
What exactly were they chasing?
Eventually, however, Elizabeth could avoid the question no longer. From up ahead, she heard a strangled blast of the hunting horn and the sharp, yelping screams of injured dogs.
A moment later, she reined up her horse beside a small lake. The rest of the hunting party was already there, on foot now—except for the few who’d wheeled their mounts around and gone galloping in the opposite direction as soon as they saw what the hounds had found.
A dripping, bedraggled figure was struggling to pull itself out of the water. From its waterlogged dress and long, brown hair it was easy to see it had once been a woman. The rest of it, though, hardly even seemed human. The flesh was bloated and green, and a swollen tongue protruded obscenely from its mouth, giving the creature the look of a giant frog. It was trying to walk to the shore with outstretched arms, yet it seemed to make no progress, and Elizabeth didn’t understand why until she dismounted and forced herself to move closer.
A rope had been tied to the woman’s waist, and the other end was wound around a gray lump in the water just behind her: a stone the size of a Christmas goose.
“Oh, no,” Jane whispered, voice choked with pity and despair. “Not her.”
Bile burned the back of Elizabeth’s throat.
She was looking at her sister’s missing friend, Emily Ward. The girl had drowned herself. And now she was back.
Growling hounds ringed the shoreline before the dreadful. A few had apparently braved the shallows to attack it, for the creature’s right sleeve was torn off, the green flesh beneath hanging ragged where it had been chewed and torn. In the brush some distance away were two dogs whimpering as they limped away from the trees the unmentionable had hurled them against.
“Good God,” Lord Lumpley muttered, looking almost as green as the zombie. “Good God . . .”
“Not as sporting as you remember it, My Lord?” Mr. Bennet asked.
The baron simply shook his head. Most of his fellow huntsmen had stumbled off into the bracken to throw up, though a few—the older, sober ones, mostly—stood their ground.
The Reverend Mr. Cummings came rolling up in his little dogcart just as Lord Lumpley spun on his heel and streaked for the trees to join his retching friends. The vicar hopped from his carriage—then found his knees not entirely up to the task at hand. As he started toward the lake, his legs were wobbling so badly it looked like he’d slipped a pair of snakes down his trousers.
“B-but surely that’s not Miss W-w-w-w-ard? G-G-God save us!”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Mr. Bennet mumbled under his breath.
One of the more frenzied hounds made a running lunge for the dreadful, sinking its fangs deep into the thing’s throat. The zombie screamed, though more in rage than pain, it seemed to Elizabeth, and then knocked the dog aside into the shallows.
The dreadful’s shrieking suddenly stopped—because the hound had torn out all the flesh between the collarbone and jaw. There was no windpipe left to scream with.
And still Emily Ward struggled to reach land, the stone behind her moving but a fraction of an inch with each lurching step. Her mouth remained open wide, her arms out straight before her, as if she were beseeching, pleading for help.
“Well,” Mr. Bennet said, “I don’t suppose we’ll have a better opportunity for practice than this. It’s not often you find an unmentionable staked down for you.”
Elizabeth moved a hand toward her sword. Not that she was so anxious to draw it. Gripping the hilt, she found, helped keep her hand from shaking.
“You . . . you want me to . . .?”
“No.” Her father’s eyes slowly slid from hers, locking onto the silent figure standing at her side. “It is Jane’s turn.”
“Sir!” the vicar said. “Why do you insi-si-sist on subjecting your own d-daughters to all this—”
“Last rites again, if you please!” Mr. Bennet snapped without taking his gaze from Jane.