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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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.
"It was all for naught," Elizabeth said. "Why don"t they retreat into the house?"
Her answer came as the scream of a horse off to the left. The rider no doubt screamed as well, but this was drowned out-and it couldn"t have lasted long, anyway. The soldier was quickly pulled from the saddle, and within seconds he was butchered as efficiently (if not as tidily) as in the most modern abattoir. The proceeds were divided among a score of ravenously gorging unmentionables.
No one else made it out of the stables.
The soldiers fought on, buying time for a deliverance that didn"t come. They lasted much longer than Elizabeth would have predicted, but they couldn"t last forever. Eventually, one of the lines buckled completely, and zombies poured into the center of the square. The other three lines dissolved soon after, the red of the soldiers" uniforms-and spurting blood-mixing with the dirty-shroud brown and decaying green and gray of the dreadfuls.
Elizabeth saw Capt. Cannon"s Limbs ripped away and devoured.
She saw him trying to fight off unmentionables with head b.u.t.ts until his stomach was ripped open and his steaming bowels stuffed into furiously working mouths before he"d even stopped writhing.
And she saw Lt. Tindall facing the house, staring at Jane beside her as he put a flintlock to the side of his head and pulled the trigger. He was keeping his word: They wouldn"t find him pounding on a window the next morning, ravenous for the very thing he"d died to protect.
Jane turned away with a sob.
Elizabeth placed a hand on her sister"s shoulder.
Lord Lumpley bolted from the balcony and out through the bedroom.
"Seal the doors!" he cried as he flew down the hall. "Seal the doors!"
"No!"
Elizabeth started after him.
Her father caught her by the arm.
"He"s right," he said. "d.a.m.n him."
He let Elizabeth go.
She ran out to the hall, but she wasn"t trying to stop the baron now.
"How many made it back?" she asked when she reached the top of the staircase.
Down in the foyer, men were busy nailing boards across the front doors again. None of them had the heart to answer. Not that they needed to.
There wasn"t a red coat in sight.
CHAPTER 36.
THERE WAS NO DIVISION between upstairs and downstairs now. There couldn"t be, with the soldiers gone. Everyone was needed at a window or door with a gun or a sword or a knife or a poker or even just a leg from a broken chair. Tradesman, yeoman, gentleman, seamstress, fishwife, farmwife, lady-they all fought side by side, for surely the dreadfuls would be equally democratic. They would eat anyone and everyone.
For a time, at least, the unmentionables had full stomachs (those that still had them), and the a.s.saults on the house tapered off while they enjoyed their picnic on the lawn. When the attacks began again, they were sporadic and easily beaten back. At first.
By nightfall, however, the onslaught was once again relentless, and hardly five minutes went by without a board somewhere giving way. It took Elizabeth nearly half an hour just to walk down a hallway with a bust of the Prince Regent-which she intended to drop onto the zombies from a second-story window-for every few steps she had to set down the prince and pull out her sword and add to the collection of freshly severed limbs lined up along the wainscoting. One would-be intruder was particularly persistent, managing to squirm its way inside even after all but its head and chest and left arm had been sliced away. A woman in a tattered yellow ball gown smashed a chamber pot into its face as it slithered after Elizabeth, slowing it for a moment. When it whirled on the lady, hissing, Elizabeth was finally able to slice through the top of its skull, and its brain-filled crown fell forward onto the floor looking like a hairy bowl of porridge.
BY NIGHTFALL, HOWEVER, THE ONSLAUGHT WAS ONCE AGAIN RELENTLESS.
Elizabeth sheathed her katana and looked up at the woman who"d helped her-and was shocked to find that it was Mrs. Goswick.
"Thank you," Elizabeth said.
Mrs. Goswick shook her head. "No. Thank you, Miss Bennet."
When Elizabeth finally got the Prince Regent upstairs and out a window, she was only mildly disappointed that it was too dark to see the damage he did down below. It was a cloudy, moonless night, sparing her the sight of the zombie host ringing them in. At last count, it had been nearly a thousand strong.
"Do you think he made it?" Mary asked, stepping up to the window with a large, lumpy satchel. She reached in, pulled out a blue croquet ball, and hurled it down into the darkness. "The Master, I mean?"
Elizabeth helped herself to one of the b.a.l.l.s and threw it out the window with all her strength. A second later, there was a sharp clunk followed by the sound of something heavy falling to the ground.
"Does it really matter?" Elizabeth said.
Mary started to toss out a mallet but seemed to change her mind when she found its heft to her liking. She leaned it against the wall, then pulled out a ball and whipped it into the night.
There was another clunk, and a zombie wailed.
"I suppose not," Mary said.
She and Elizabeth kept throwing croquet b.a.l.l.s until they were all gone, at which time Mary announced that she was off to look for loose bricks. She took the mallets with her to hand out downstairs.
Elizabeth lingered a moment at the window, wondering if she might take advantage of a quiet moment to slip up to the attic and, if not apologize to Dr. Keckilpenny, at least a.s.sure herself of his well-being. She still felt a fondness for the man, despite the things she"d said the last time she"d seen him, and a part of her longed to put any awkwardness between them to rest.
But then someone screamed "They"re coming through the wall!" and she was running for the stairs with her sword in her hand.
It turned out to be a small hole-little more than a crack in the plaster just big enough for four broken, b.l.o.o.d.y fingers to wriggle into the drawing room. But it was going to get bigger.
"They"re scratching away the mortar between the building stones," Mr. Bennet announced. "When they get enough of it out, they"ll be able to pull out the stones themselves."
"And the walls with them," Elizabeth said.
Her father nodded, then hacked off the wriggling fingers.
"Lizzy," he said, "bring Lord Lumpley, Mr. c.u.mmings, and Dr. Thorne to the front hall, if you would. Your sister Jane, as well, if she"s not with His Lordship. There"s a difficult decision before us, I"m afraid, and I"d prefer if it were made in council."
Minutes later, there they all were, gathered before the main doors even as the dreadfuls outside kept knocking upon it in their clumsy, insistent way.
"Gentlemen," Mr. Bennet said, "we are running out of time."
He spoke loudly, obviously not just addressing the baron, the vicar, and the doctor but everyone scattered around the foyer and lining the halls nearby.
"Oh, my goodness! Running out of time, you say?" Lord Lumpley widened his eyes and slapped his hands to his round cheeks. "Whatever could make you jump to such a conclusion?"
"If it"s the food supply you"re thinking of, Mr. Bennet, I"ve an idea about that," said Dr. Thorne. (It was fitting that he should bring up food, actually, as his blood-smeared surgeon"s ap.r.o.n made him look like a particularly sloppy butcher. Which, in a way, is what he was.) "We"ve actually got all the meat we could possibly need, if we just looked at it as the dreadfuls do. At least a dozen of my patients died of shock after I removed a tainted limb, and of course I immediately took the next step and removed their heads, as well. The plague won"t take hold in them-so why just toss the bodies out a window?"
"Wh-what? You can"t possibly m-m-mean-!" Mr. c.u.mmings blubbered. He"d lost his Book of Common Prayer in a tussle with an unmentionable and had taken, for the sake of comfort, to clutching a book he"d picked at random from the baron"s library: Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised by the Marquis de Sade. "It"s unnnnnnnnthinkable!"
The doctor shrugged. "If it"ll keep me from starving to death, I"ll do more than think it."
"It"s not actually starvation I was thinking of, Doctor," Mr. Bennet said. "We have another, more immediate problem."
A look of discomfited surprise came over Dr. Thorne of the type that"s common among people who find that the previous minute"s conversation should be, and would if it could be, unspoken.
"Oh?" he said limply. "Do tell."
Mr. Bennet obliged, explaining that the dreadfuls were capable of taking the house apart stone by stone and had, in fact, begun to do so. Many gasped at the news, and Mr. Bennet paused a moment, waiting for their clamorings and murmurs to fade before carrying on again.
"They will get through. It is inevitable. So, as time is not on our side, nor are numbers, we must press the last advantage we have."
Lord Lumpley scoffed. "I wasn"t aware we had any in the first place."
"I believe the advantage my father alludes to doesn"t apply equally to all of us," Elizabeth said, and she quoted an observation Dr. Keckilpenny had once made to her about the unmentionables: "They"re thick as bricks."