To Elizabeth’s great surprise, the doctor took her by the shoulders and shifted her a few steps to the left. When she was directly before the trunk they’d used to haul up the zombie, he pushed down gently until she was seated atop it. Then he stepped back and clapped his hands together.
“In the old days, during The Troubles, many men of science studied the zombies, yes. But always the goal was the same: How to destroy them? What are their weaknesses? How best to fight them? No one stopped to ask, ‘Why do they want to eat us?’”
“I suspect no one bothered asking because the dreadfuls were not inclined to reply.”
Dr. Keckilpenny stomped a foot and thrust a pointed finger toward the ceiling, yet he never lost his broad, almost manic smile.
“That is an assumption! What if the zombies would tell us, if only they could? It’s clear some part of the mind survives in them. Exempli gratia: They’re drawn to places where they can find food, that is, people—roads and homes and the like. There are eyewitness accounts of them using rudimentary tools, such as rocks or logs, to break through windows and doors. And they were known to flee when faced with superior numbers of well-armed men—proof that the instinct for self-preservation lives on. And if they retain that, who knows what else might still reside in those rotting heads of theirs?”
The doctor had been waving and thrusting wildly with his right index finger, and now he brought it up to give a hard tap-tap-tap to the side of his forehead.
“The answers we need are here.” Tap-tap-tap again. “The answers are always here! Even the zombies know it. What is the one thing they hunger for above all else? Brains! They’re trying to regain that which they have lost. I propose to help them find it again. And then, no matter how far the plague might spread this time, it won’t matter, for we shall have peace!”
“Because we’ll be able to talk to them?”
“Because—” Dr. Keckilpenny’s finger wilted, and the rest of him wilted with it. “Something like that. We’ll have to see where it all leads. But of this much I’m certain: Understanding a problem is the only way to solve it. You do agree, don’t you?”
“Well. It sounds . . .”
The doctor’s eyes widened. “Mad?”
“Reasonable,” Elizabeth finished.
Dr. Keckilpenny smiled.
And mad, Elizabeth thought. Yet she liked the young man’s smile too much to wipe it away.
“So,” she said, “how do you propose to begin? Aside from chaining your subject to a wall, that is.”
The doctor turned and took a few steps toward the dreadful. It pushed all its weight toward him, its shackled arms stretched out straight to the sides, turning its body into a great leaning T.
“We shall treat him like a man. Remind him that he is a man. And every man’s sense of self starts in the same place. With his name. Miss Bennet, allow me to introduce . . . Mr. Smith.”
“Mr. Smith?”
“Yes, Mr. Smith. It’s as good a guess as any. One in ten Englishmen is named Smith, you know.”
“I don’t believe we have quite so many in Hertfordshire.”
“Well, now you have one more. Isn’t that right, Mr. Smith?”
“Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” Mr. Smith said.
“Excellent! Your turn, Miss Bennet. Tell him you’re glad to make his acquaintance.”
Elizabeth tried to force a smile, thinking the doctor was joking. But then he rolled his hands in the air and said, “Go on.”
Elizabeth looked into the zombie’s eyes. It was still staring at Dr. Keckilpenny, who’d stopped just a few steps beyond the thing’s reach. There seemed to be more . . . life to it now. Not intelligence, certainly, but awareness, perhaps. Awareness of what, though?
She cleared her throat.
“Pleased to meet you.”
Yet she wasn’t—and she wasn’t alone in that.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Smith,” the doctor was prodding when footsteps clunked up the stairwell behind them, and they both turned to find Mr. Bennet joining them in the attic, a look of revulsion upon his face.
“What the devil is going on here?”
“Father, you’re back! Has Jane returned, as well?”
Mr. Bennet nodded without taking his eyes off Mr. Smith. “She’s in the library with Lord Lumpley making plans for tomorrow. The spring ball is to be held here instead of Pulvis Lodge, and there is much to be done.”
“The ball? Here? Mrs. Goswick agreed to that?”
“She will if the baron gets his way, and getting his way is the one thing he’s good at, I suspect. But enough about the ball. Would someone kindly explain the meaning of that?”
Even if Mr. Bennet hadn’t been pointing at the looming figure chained to the wall, there would have been no question what that was.
“He,” Dr. Keckilpenny said with a smile of almost paternal pride, “is Mr. Smith.”
Mr. Bennet gaped at him.
Before, Elizabeth had fancied the doctor and her father would get along famously, both being intelligent men with a penchant for irony. Alas, things were not off to the start she had hoped for.
“Lizzy,” her father said, “who is this young man and is he quite sane?”
Elizabeth launched into introductions and explanations, and it helped smooth things over—somewhat—that Dr. Keckilpenny was the man who’d saved her life not long before. Still, Mr. Bennet never quite shook the look of perturbed perplexity with which he’d arrived.
“Well, one thing is clearer, at least,” he said to Elizabeth after hearing of the doctor’s plans. “LieutenantTindall told me I’d find you up here tilting at putrid windmills. Now I know what he meant.” He turned to Dr. Keckilpenny and shook his head. “It’s been tried before, you know.”
“Has it really?” The doctor mused a moment, then shrugged. “Well, not recently. And not by me.”
Mr. Bennet cocked an eyebrow at that, then slowly approached the dreadful who was now leaning toward him, fingers clawing listlessly at the air.
“I don’t recognize this man.”
“Should you?” Dr. Keckilpenny asked.
“Yes.” Mr. Bennet looked first at the doctor and then, not seeing realization dawn, at his daughter. “I should.”
“Because the body’s so fresh, so well dressed,” Elizabeth said. “He was given a proper burial, but not in Meryton.”
Mr. Bennet nodded. “I think I should hurry Lord Lumpley along with Mrs. Goswick. And I suddenly find there are certain other arrangements I must see to, as well. Lizzy—if you would assist me?”
He took his leave of the doctor with a nod, then headed for the stairs.
“Good-bye, Dr. Keckilpenny.” Elizabeth went up on her tiptoes to peer past him. “Good-bye, Mr. Smith.”
Both looked strangely bereft.
“Until we meet again,” the doctor said.
“Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” said Mr. Smith.
Elizabeth suspected they were saying more or less the same thing.
CHAPTER 29
FOR HER YOUNGEST SISTERS, it would’ve been a dream come true. Sleeping in a plush four-poster bed in a plush bedroom the size of a barn in the plush manor house of a plush nobleman. Yet for Jane Bennet, it was neither dream nor nightmare, for she wasn’t sleeping at all. She was lying on her back, staring up at the canopy stretched out above her, thinking.
She thought about the ball she’d be attending the next day—and how humiliating it would be when only Lord Lumpley dared dance with those social lepers, the Bennet girls. She thought about how persistent the baron had been when they’d paid a call on the Goswicks that afternoon—and how it had been his seemingly offhand remark about their daughter Julia’s “London friend, Mr. Schwartz” that convinced the couple to put the spring ball in his hands. She thought about her father’s rather anxious good-bye to her that evening, and how he’d looked truly distressed only after she’d told him not to worry about her, as Lord Lumpley had been a perfect host so far and, she hoped, might still grow into the role of sober, responsible squire.