Mr. Cummings cleared his throat. “All right, then. I shall b-b-b-bow to your superior experience in these matters. B-but,” he dropped his voice and nodded at Elizabeth and Mary, “surely they needn’t b-be present.”
“On the contrary,” Mr. Bennet said, “surely they should. Now, tell me, Sir: You have a shed around back, do you not? Where the groundskeepers and gravediggers keep their equipage?”
“Yes.”
“Is it locked?”
“It shouldn’t b-be. Not at the moment. Haines and Rainey are waiting just outside to b-b-b-bury Mr. Ford.”
“Excellent. Mary—”
She didn’t hear him, nor did Elizabeth. They were both totally absorbed by the sight of Mr. Ford gnawing uncertainly on his own left hand. The taste of death seemed to displease him, for he’d quickly spat up his half-masticated tongue, and his fingers went down with no more relish.
He looked up then, fixing upon Elizabeth’s face with the dark, blank eyes of a mounted animal, and growled.
“Mary,” Mr. Bennet said again.
“Yes, Papa?”
“Run out to the tool shed and fetch along the biggest pair of shears you can.”
“Yes, Papa.”
Mary started up the aisle.
“Oh, and daughter?” her father called after her, “I mean as big as you can handle. Do you understand?”
Mary was a rather pale, wan-looking thing, so one couldn’t say she went white as a sheet: She’d already been so since birth. Now, however, she went nearly transparent. Yet she nodded and started off again at a smooth, steady pace.
Mr. Bennet smiled. “There’s a good girl.”
“Y-y-you mean to have her—? You would a-a-ask your own—? Sir! She’s but a child!”
“Childhood is a luxury we can no longer afford,” Mr. Bennet said. “But fear not, Mr. Cummings. I don’t expect young Mary there to do what need be done.” He turned to Elizabeth. “Not unless her sister fails.”
Elizabeth gawked at her father. He was a man of keen wit, of jests and winks and sly asides. But he wasn’t joking now. For some unfathomable reason, he wanted her to—
It was too awful even to contemplate.
“Papa . . . I can’t.”
“Tut tut, child. You can. This one is newly born to darkness. Still weak. Those to come won’t be nearly so easy to deal with.”
Mr. Ford swatted at the vicar hard enough to rock his coffin, sliding it a little closer to the edge of the bier. His rigor-stiffened muscles were relaxing, becoming more limber, gaining strength.
Elizabeth took a step back. “Why me?”
Her father’s gaze, usually so full of impish affection when pointed her way, hardened till it bore into her like an augur. “Why not?”
She could think of a dozen reasons, of course, first and foremost being that she was a young lady. Yet something in her father’s eyes gave his reply before she could even speak.
None of that matters. Not if the dreadfuls have returned.
At that moment, Mary came back inside carrying a huge pair of hedge clippers and, showing an initiative that put a smile on her father’s face, a scythe.
“Capital! Well done, my child!” Mr. Bennet called to her. “Now, Mr. Cummings, don’t faint just yet, if you please. I very much doubt you had the opportunity to administer last rites the first time Mr. Ford died.” He leaned closer to the coffin and addressed himself to the moaning, slavering thing clawing at the empty air between them. “Looks like you’re both in luck.”
When Mary reached the bier, Mr. Bennet had her hand the clippers to her sister.
CHAPTER 3
A SHRIEK ECHOED OUT from the church, and Mrs. Bennet shrieked, too.
A moment later, there was a howl, and Mrs. Bennet howled.
Then there was a bellow and a squeal and a yelp and finally silence, and Mrs. Bennet bellowed and squealed and yelped but—a stranger to silence all her days—didn’t stop there. Instead, she comforted herself (as was her way) with a caterwauled cataloging of the various and sundry misfortunes about to beset her and hers.
Jane and Kitty and Lydia huddled around their mother on the church steps, patting her and fanning her and cooing comfort. They were up to their twenty-third “Everything’s going to be all right” when a grim-faced Mr. Bennet stalked from the church and swept right past the four of them.
“Where are you going, Mr. Bennet?” his wife called after him.
“Home!” he barked without looking back.
“Surely you’re not walking!”
“We walked here, we can walk back!”
“But that was before—”
At last, Mr. Bennet stopped. “I will have no more of your buts! I have let them vex me too long!” He looked past Mrs. Bennet at his daughters, including Elizabeth and Mary, who were now trudging slump-shouldered from the chapel. “Fall in behind me, girls. We must quick-march to Longbourn. And if your mother can’t keep up,” he locked eyes with his wife, “we leave her.”
He spun on his heel and stomped off again.
“Oh, Mr. Bennet, you can’t, you can’t!” Mrs. Bennet moaned, throwing the back of a hand to her forehead and going into a long, staggering swoon.
“He’s not stopping, Mamma,” Kitty told her.
“Well, come along, then, come along,” Mrs. Bennet said, setting off after her husband.
Elizabeth, Mary, and Jane had already done so without pause.
It was a sunny, unseasonably warm April day—the reason they’d decided to walk to the church rather than take the carriage. Yet there was no birdsong to be heard as the Bennets began the mile-long trek home, nor were there foals, calves, or lambs to watch frolicking in the fields. All creatures great and small and in between, it seemed, had been put to flight by the horrible keening screeches cutting through the Hertfordshire woodlands.
And it wasn’t even zombies making all the noise.
“They’re back! They’re back, after all these years!” Mrs. Bennet wailed. “The dreadfuls, right here in Meryton! And your father will be ripped to shreds and Longbourn will fall to that frightful cousin of his and he’ll surely throw us out to starve in the gutter—if we should be so lucky before the unmentionables get us—and why oh why are we walking home when we could be set upon at any moment by a horde of sorry stricken and torn limb from limb? That must be what happened to that poor, dear, lovely what’s-her-name who’s been missing these past two weeks.”
“Emily Ward,” Jane said softly. Unlike her mother, she knew the name welclass="underline" Emily Ward had been her friend.
“Why, if they can grab perfectly healthy young girls like her, a mature individual such as myself will be no match for them,” Mrs. Bennet prattled on. “Look sharp, girls! They’ll be coming for your beloved mother first!”
“You must try to remain calm, Mamma,” said Mary. She herself did not look calm so much as addled: Her eyes were glassy, and she walked with the shuffling, stumbling steps of a clumsy somnambulist. “Remember: Mr. Ford hadn’t been interred yet. If what I’ve read of the sorry stricken is correct, it will be days, perhaps even weeks, before more can dig their way from the grave to attack us.”
“Days? Weeks?” Mrs. Bennet cried. “Do you hear that, Jane? You have mere days to marry a man of means and rescue us all! Or you, Elizabeth—you’ll be out in two weeks’ time. Catch a husband at the Goswicks’ ball and spare us a fate worse than death! Oh! Oh, my! You don’t suppose they’d cancel the ball, do you? They wouldn’t! They can’t! I need both of you on the market if we’re to head off utter disaster! Ohhh, by the time this business is done, we’ll all be roaming about in our shrouds with fresh brain smeared around our mouths like so much marmalade, you mark my words!”
Mr. Bennet stayed well ahead of the rest of the party, either scouting for zombies or merely sparing his ears. Jane and Elizabeth, meanwhile, fell behind together, leaving it to their sisters to prop up their mother and, more importantly, so far as Mrs. Bennet was concerned, provide a captive audience for her babblings.