And just as suddenly as it had begun, the tirade ended, and the man looked into Elizabeth’s eyes and smiled.
“What else were you wondering about?”
“Who are you?”
The question popped out with far less subtlety than Elizabeth would have preferred, and the man opened his eyes wide again, clapping a hand to his cheek as if he’d just been slapped.
“Oh, dear me! I’ve done it again! I am forever forgetting the importance of proper introductions. As there is no one here to do the honors for us . . .” He cleared his throat and, without missing a step, offered Elizabeth a bow. “Dr. Bertram Keckilpenny, at your service.”
Elizabeth hoped her eyebrows didn’t fly up too high at that “Doctor.” Keckilpenny’s intelligence was obvious, but he hardly seemed old enough to be anything but a particularly gifted (and eccentric) second-year at Cambridge.
“I am pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is Elizabeth Bennet.”
It seemed horribly forward, introducing herself like that, and she felt all the more self-conscious when Keckilpenny goggled his eyes at her yet again.
“Bennet, you say? Bennet, Bennet, Bennet. Hmm. It seems to me that name’s ever so important, somehow. You’re not famous are you, Miss Bennet?”
“Me?” Elizabeth laughed. “No, I should think not.”
The laughter died on her lips when she saw what stood in their path.
Up the lane a way was one of her neighbors—a gossip-prone crone by the name of Mrs. Adams. The old woman was watching their approach with a mix of horror and exhilaration on her face. She obviously couldn’t wait to tell someone, anyone, of what she’d seen, and she wouldn’t have far to go to do it, either: Meryton was just around the next bend.
“Good morning, Mrs. Adams!” Elizabeth called to her.
The woman managed a brusque nod, then turned and scurried toward town.
“Your question has proved prophetic, Doctor,” Elizabeth said. “I believe I soon will be famous in these parts. Notorious, even . . . if I’m not already.”
It took Keckilpenny a moment to grasp her meaning, so far removed were his thoughts from propriety and the need to keep up appearances.
“Ahhhhh.” He looked over at Elizabeth’s dirty, blood-speckled sparring gown, then down at his own shabby attempt to dress like a moldy old dreadful. “Well, I should think any young lady able to face a zombie without flinching wouldn’t have any trouble facing her neighbors.”
And he offered Elizabeth his arm.
She smiled gratefully and accepted, and the two of them strolled into Meryton with the stately grace of a lord and his lady about to be announced at a court ball. Elizabeth kept up conversation with Dr. Keckilpenny all through town, singling out points of particular interest to him (St. Chad’s Church, the adjacent graveyard, the haberdashery where Emily Ward had once worked), the better to blot out the titters and whispers from all around. The shock and shame of being uninvited to the ball had nearly killed her mother, and now this scene—when, inevitably, relayed back to Longbourn by her Aunt Philips—might well finish the job.
Elizabeth silently castigated herself for thinking of this, even ever so briefly, as a possible silver lining to her humiliation.
She finally found refuge from her neighbors’ reproachful stares when they reached the village green, for here it was soldiers doing all the staring. Some were putting up white-peaked tents, others were in the midst of marching drills complete with fife and drum, yet all (it seemed to Elizabeth) had their eyes on her.
“Porter!” Dr. Keckilpenny called to one of them. “I say, Private Porter!”
The soldier peered at him in confusion, then said, “It’s Corporal Parker, Sir.”
“Yes, yes, Parker, Parker. Do be a good fellow and fetch the colonel, would you? There’s someone here I think he should meet.”
“Very good, Sir. I’ll go get the captain.”
Cpl. Parker favored Elizabeth with a smirk before hustling away.
“I’m afraid I must bid you au revoir, Miss Bennet,” Dr. Keckilpenny said, and he tapped the side of his head with a crooked finger. “There is fresh data here, much of it, and I must set it all down in my journals before it degrades. Friend Parker’s name I can get wrong—as I get almost all names wrong until I’ve known someone at least a decade—but science demands precision. Before we part, however, I must thank you for taking the time and care to guide me here safely. You have my deepest gratitude,” the young man put his hands over his heart, “and admiration. Ah! Capt. Cannon!”
The doctor looked off to the left, and before Elizabeth turned that way, too, she might have guessed from the sound of squeaking axles and grass being flattened that someone was pushing a wheelbarrow their way. As indeed someone was, though it wasn’t so much a wheelbarrow as a wheeled man.
Strapped to a seatback mounted on a small cart was a big, bluff officer with bushy white eyebrows and mustache and mutton chops . . . and no arms or legs.
“Limbs, halt!” he barked.
The soldiers pushing him—one for each wooden shaft of the wheelbarrow—came to a sudden stop.
“Dr. Keckilpenny,” the torso-man growled, “I’ve had two squads out combing the countryside for you when I can’t spare so much as—”
“Oh, I know, I know, apologies, apologies!” Dr. Keckilpenny said cheerfully, and he began hurrying off into the camp. “But I’m back now, thanks to the young lady here. Allow me to introduce Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Miss Bennet—Capt. Cannon. Good-bye now. Must dash!”
He darted around a tent and was gone.
It seemed a decidedly unchivalrous exit, abandoning her to the fuming glower of a stranger, and such a truly strange one, at that.
Capt. Cannon took a moment to look Elizabeth up and down—then surprised her with a warm smile.
“You wouldn’t be a relation of Mr. Oscar Bennet, would you?”
“Indeed, I would. He is my father.”
“Capital!” the captain boomed. “Then once you’re rested and refreshed, you may lead me straight to him. He’s just the man we’ve come here to see!”
CHAPTER 15
CAPT. CANNON’S GOOD CHEER didn’t last long: He turned grim again when Elizabeth told him, in answer to his question about her scrapes and bruises, that some she’d acquired courtesy of an unmentionable not half an hour before.
“Limbs! Lean!”
The soldiers behind him tilted his little cart up on its front wheel, lifting the armless, legless man closer to Elizabeth’s ear.
“The dreadful,” Capt. Cannon whispered. “He didn’t nip you, did he?”
“No.”
The captain sighed with relief. He obviously knew firsthand what had to be done after a nip from an unmentionable.
“Limbs! Pace!” he commanded, and his attendants lowered him again and began wheeling him first this way, then that. “So. Another rotter already. Blast!”
“We’ve encountered one other unmentionable, as well,” Elizabeth said. “Aside from Mr. Ford, I mean. He was the first, from the church. I assume it was news of his . . . awakening that brought you to Meryton?”
“Precisely. Your father has friends in London who . . . ah! Lieutenant Tindall! What splendid timing. Limbs! Halt!”
The captain’s “pacing” stopped just as a handsome, flaxen-haired young officer came striding up to offer a crisp salute.
“Sir,” Lt. Tindall said, “we never found him.”
“That’s because he’s back in his tent scribbling in his journals. Miss Bennet here was kind enough to return him to us.”