He reached beneath his cutaway coat, produced a flintlock pistol and said something to Elizabeth she couldn’t quite hear.
“What?”
“I said, ‘The diversion for the diversion has gone on long enough!’”
He pointed the pistol at the sky but then changed his mind, leaned over the balcony, and aimed at the little girl.
“Why waste a bullet when it might offer deliverance?”
Both Elizabeth and Jane started to say something, but neither got out a full word.
Their father pulled the trigger, and the zombie child toppled over backward. For a moment, Elizabeth could still see its pure-white dress beneath the milling feet of the other dreadfuls, but before long even that was blotted out by the throng.
A flurry of movement caught Elizabeth’s eye, and she looked up to find that the front doors of the house had been opened. The soldiers were charging out through them, hurling themselves like a great red lance bound for the heart of the lawn. Lt. Tindall led the charge, while Capt. Cannon was at the center of the column, his cart swerving and tipping treacherously as the Limbs maneuvered it around and over the bloody cornucopia of body parts and well-gnawed bones left over from the night before.
With a deafening roar, the zombies turned and hurtled after them.
“Why aren’t we out there, too?” Elizabeth asked. “We should be joining the battle, not watching it.”
Her father glanced over at her and, worn and worried as he was, managed to look almost pleased at the same time.
“The deadly arts have their place, but volley fire—that’s what will do the greatest damage to a herd. Get them clumped up together on an open plain, and you can mow down dozens like so many weeds.”
The soldiers had stopped now and were trying to form themselves into a box—four lines facing outward, each two rows deep, the first kneeling, the second standing. The unmentionables gave them little time to arrange themselves, however, running in madly no matter how torn and mangled they might be, and the lines wavered and broke into chaos each time they almost seemed set.
“They can’t even get into formation to fire,” Elizabeth said. “If we were with them—”
Mr. Bennet shook his head, eyes still fixed on his daughter. “Your sisters and I are being held in reserve, at the captain’s insistence. But a volunteer did go along. . . .”
“Oh, Lizzy. Look!”
Jane thrust a finger toward the soldiers, and Elizabeth saw a swirl of black and pink twisting and twirling within their ranks. It bounced away from a break in the line straight into another before flipping itself over a dreadful’s head, spinning then springing then spinning again.
“Master Hawksworth!”
Elizabeth grabbed the balcony railing as if about to vault herself over and into the fray.
Her father made no move to stop her.
“If anything goes wrong,” he said, “we are the last line of defense for every soul in this house.”
“Lizzy, you mustn’t,” Jane began, but Mr. Bennet silenced her with a raised hand and a hard stare. Then he looked at Elizabeth again.
She let go of the railing.
There was a staccato blast from out on the battlefield, and the men there sent up a “Huzzah!” They’d got off their first volley, and twenty dreadfuls went down at once.
“‘If anything goes wrong,’” Lord Lumpley scoffed. “Look at that! We probably won’t need any reinforcements at all!”
Half the fallen zombies got back up and immediately began lumbering toward the lines again.
“Well,” the baron mumbled, “not many, at least.”
Mr. Bennet was still watching Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was still watching Hawksworth.
She recognized most of the moves—the Bounding This and the Leaping That and the Soaring What-Have-You. They were all jumps and twirls and rolls, and they were beautiful, marred only by a rushed, uncontrolled sloppiness whenever Hawksworth had to actually throw a punch to escape a dreadful’s grasp.
He never so much as unsheathed his katana.
“He’s not bad, but he’s not good, either,” Mr. Bennet said. “He moves well, yet he has no fire for a fight. He never has, I’d say. His master obviously sent him to us because all the more, ah, ardent warriors were needed elsewhere. Why do you think he couldn’t admit that to us?”
“Pride,” Elizabeth said.
“Perhaps,” said her father.
The soldiers sent up another cheer even as more unmentionables poured out of the woods and around the sides of the house. A huge black stallion was galloping up the drive, headed for the road. On its back was what looked like a red-clad leprechaun holding on for dear life.
“Ensign Pratt?” Elizabeth asked.
Mr. Bennet nodded. “The lad’s small enough to ride at Ascot. It was thought the younger ones, like him, would have the best chance.”
“Oh, no!” Jane cried.
There were dreadfuls all along the drive, and a big, burly, fresh one had grabbed hold of the horse’s tail. Its grip seemed utterly unbreakable: Though the zombie lost its footing, it didn’t let go, and it was soon being towed toward the road, chewing on the stallion’s tail the whole time.
The horse slowed, then stopped and reared, and Ensign Pratt was thrown from the saddle. He scrambled to his feet just in time to dodge the dreadful that had grabbed his steed. It was after him now, and other unmentionables began closing in from all sides.
But they weren’t alone.
Geoffrey Hawksworth came bouncing out of the soldiers’ square, careening over and around scores of dreadfuls. He was headed for Ensign Pratt.
As Elizabeth watched him, she found her heart pounding, her skin atingle. Hawksworth had been looking to her to teach him courage. Yet he’d had it within himself all along. All he’d needed was the right moment to take action and be redeemed. And that moment had arrived.
Hawksworth was closing the remaining distance at a sprint. Elizabeth kept waiting for him to draw his katana, begin hacking off heads, but instead he just raced up to Ensign Pratt . . . then dashed past him, to his horse.
He threw himself onto the stallion’s back and snatched up the reins. As he galloped off, a dozen unmentionables converged on the Ensign. A moment later, they were going their separate ways again, each with its face buried in a hand or a foot or a gob of oozing innards.
Hawksworth never looked back. When he reached the road, he turned the horse west and dug in his heels.
Elizabeth leaned against the banister again, this time because she needed the support.
So much for redemption . . . .
“Egad,” Mr. Bennet muttered. “Even I thought better of him than that.”
Lord Lumpley leaned against the banister, too. “He can’t send anyone back for us. You realize that, don’t you? Even if he finds Lord Paget, he’ll just tell him we’re all dead.”
Jane gaped at him. “Why would he do that?”
The baron hacked out a bitter laugh. “There’s really not an evil bone in your body, is there?”
“We saw what he did,” Elizabeth explained. “We know his shame.”
She watched Hawksworth and his horse become a black speck on the horizon and then disappear behind distant trees. Far, far too late she’d recognized the fault within the man—perhaps because all that was outward about him was so very pleasing. It was a mistake she would never make again.
She turned back to the battle.
Clouds of thick, white powder smoke were drifting up over the field now, for the soldiers on two sides of the square were firing off volleys regularly, and the corpses—the still ones, that is—were heaped up before them to such a height they formed a makeshift rampart as high as a man’s chest. The troops in the other two lines, however, were fighting off zombies by hand, and more of the undead were pressing in on them all the time. If the odds had been three to one when the battle began, they were easily six to one now.