Lydia and Kitty sheathed their swords and fell into each other’s arms, laughing. It wasn’t their usual giddy, frivolous tittering, though. They were laughs of disbelief and relief to find themselves still alive.
A hand settled lightly on Mr. Bennet’s forearm.
“Papa?” Jane said. “How did we do?”
Mr. Bennet glanced at Master Hawksworth, who was sitting, legs spread out, back propped against a wall. Both Elizabeth and Mary were leaning in over him.
“You were splendid,” Mr. Bennet said to Jane. “But there are tests yet for you to face.”
“What?” Capt. Cannon said. “Limbs! Pace!”
Right Limb and Left Limb began wheeling him around the foyer so he could scowl at panting, shame-faced soldiers.
“I’d say your daughters have already proved themselves more warrior than many another here.”
“If I’d had more men, it would have looked different,” Lt. Tindall protested. “So many were held back in the house.”
“One doesn’t fight dreadfuls in the dark, Lieutenant,” Capt. Cannon snapped. “When we face them again on the battlefield, it will be on our terms. Now, let us see to the—”
“I would have words with you, Cannon,” Mr. Bennet said. “Alone.”
“Limbs. Halt.”
The two men looked into each other’s eyes a moment. Mr. Bennet’s were full of rage; the captain’s, remorse.
“Limbs, to my chambers. Lieutenant, see to it there’s a man—or a lady—at every window and door. It’s going to be a long night.”
The pounding began before he’d even finished. One fist thumped against the door, then another smashed into a window, then another started in, and another and another and another until the whole house rattled and seemed to shudder. Some of the villagers packed into the rooms nearby screamed in terror, and their cries were answered by screeches from just outside.
“We must have calm!” Capt. Cannon roared. “The next person I hear shrieking will be put outside with the other banshees!”
The screaming stopped, for a time. As the captain and Mr. Bennet moved off into the north wing, they approached the room where Dr. Thorne, the company’s gruff old duffer of a surgeon, was seeing to the wounded.
“You’re lucky, boy. That’s not a bad scratch at all,” the doctor was saying as they passed by. “You’ll only lose the arm up to the elbow.”
Mr. Cummings could be heard offering comfort by reading haltingly from his Book of Common Prayer. It seemed to be a selection from the table of contents, however, and it was soon drowned out by the sound of sawing and all the attendant lamentations.
When they reached the bedroom Capt. Cannon had commandeered for his headquarters, the soldiers guarding the windows were dismissed and Left Limb and Right Limb positioned in their place. The captain was left in the middle of the room in his cart. Mr. Bennet, although offered a seat, chose to stand directly before him.
“Are you sure you want your men to hear this?” Mr. Bennet said, nodding at the Limbs.
“By necessity, I have no secrets from them.”
“So they know already that which has been withheld from me?”
Capt. Cannon nodded slowly, head hanging. “They do.”
“Then you have grievously insulted me, Captain. When you first arrived in Hertfordshire, I greeted you as a comrade. Yet you were deceiving me from the very beginning.”
“Yes. And how it has weighed on me!” the captain cried out in anguish. “You are a good man, Bennet, and I have treated you shamefully. I welcome the opportunity to expunge some of my guilt by acknowledging my dishonor now.” He took in a deep, shuddering breath before going on. “Your suspicions are correct. I have been wooing your good lady wife.”
Mr. Bennet nodded impatiently, opened his mouth, and then froze, utterly dumbstruck.
A softly wheezed “What?” was all he could get off his lips.
“Prudence was the one true love of my life,” Capt. Cannon went on. “The one love Fate allowed me before I became as you find me. When I saw her again, it was as if parts of me that were long dead suddenly sprang to life again. I became, in those precious moments I could be with her, some semblance of my younger self . . . my whole self, so long lost to—”
Mr. Bennet held up a hand.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “What?”
The captain blinked at him. “You didn’t suspect?”
“No! I was talking about the dreadful hordes. You’ve known all along that the strange plague has spread far beyond Meryton. As far as I know, we’re the last to see its return, not the first. It’s why the War Office could spare only one company of new recruits commanded by callow youths and an officer who has, to be blunt, seen better days. It’s why some of the unmentionables I saw tonight obviously came from Cambridge and companies of soldiers other than your own. It’s why you already had your men preparing boards for the windows and doors. It’s why the mails and hackney coaches haven’t been . . . my God, really? You’ve been dillydallying with Mrs. Bennet?”
“Yes. Courting her with all my heart.”
“When you knew we were probably all about to die?”
“In which case there would be no opportunity later.”
“But . . . why?”
“As I said. Because I love her. And should you fall in the days ahead and I survive, I fully intend to claim the happiness that chance has denied me the last twenty years.”
“You assume Prudence would marry you?”
“Can you truly say you have been so attentive and loving a husband she would stay in mourning all her remaining days?”
Mr. Bennet gaped at the man a moment, put a hand to the side of his head as if to assure himself it was still there, then waved his confusion away and tried to focus on what he thought mattered most.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the dreadfuls?”
“Orders. The War Office was desperate to avoid a panic in the Home Counties. You remember The Troubles. People try to flee, the roads become clogged, the dreadfuls descend, and before long you’ve got one thousand zombies where before you had one hundred.”
“Yes, yes, I remember. Tell me—”
Mr. Bennet had a dozen more questions he wished to ask, but he realized they all really came down to one thing.
“Is there any hope for us?”
It was a question that could be answered with a yes or a no, of course, and Mr. Bennet found it instructive—if not encouraging—that Capt. Cannon didn’t use either word.
“The North is overrun. If you didn’t have friends in the War Office, even my one company of untrained London urchins would not have been sent to your aid. Lord Paget is moving a battalion over from Suffolk to reinforce the capital—to think anyone was worried about Napoleon at a time like this!—but I can’t say for certain where he is at the moment. Assuming he hasn’t met with disaster already, however, his column might be in or near Hertfordshire, and if we could get word to him somehow he might decide to send reinforcements.”
“‘Might,’ ‘somehow,’ and ‘might’ again,” Mr. Bennet said. “It is little to pin our lives on.”
Capt. Cannon shrugged. “Yet it is something.”
Mr. Bennet nodded, then sucked in a long, deep breath.
“You know that my code of honor demands your death,” he said.
“Of course. And you know that, shamed though I might be to have betrayed the trust of a worthy man, a soldier does not face death without defending himself. My Limbs stand ready to act as my seconds.”
“Of course.”
Something began scratching at the planks over the nearest window.
“And yet,” Mr. Bennet said, “this does not strike me as an opportune time for a duel.”
“Nor I.”
The scratching grew louder and was soon joined by the sound of clumsy pawing from another pair of hands.
“I propose, then, a gentleman’s agreement,” Mr. Bennet said. “For now, we will continue to work together. If we are both alive in two days’ time, however, we may do our utmost to kill each other.”