“Thank you. Once again, I find myself indebted to my native guide.” Dr. Keckilpenny nodded at the katana at Elizabeth’s side. “And it reassures me to see you’ve brought something a tad more formidable than that wee stickpin you were using the other day—not that you didn’t use it as well as one might. I’ve managed to misplace my pistol, you see, and my net here isn’t going to do us much good if we happen upon a zombie herd. So our lives could be very much in your dainty hands.”
“It flatters me that you seem so sanguine about that, Doctor. And surprises me. Not all are so liberal in their thinking when young ladies take up the sword.”
“For anyone who has made a serious study of The Troubles, it is not liberality but simple good sense. Clinging to the old ways in times such as these would be like . . .” Dr. Keckilpenny rolled his eyes heavenward and chewed at his lower lip. “A drowning man clutching a brick? Does that make sense? Metaphors are not my forte.”
“I beg to differ. That one was rather good.”
“Really? Thank you. I shall have to use it again sometime, provided I can remember it.”
They took their next few steps without speaking. But Dr. Keckilpenny, rather like Elizabeth’s mother, seemed averse to silence, and soon he looked over and said, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me why anyone should wish to capture a zombie?”
“I thought it obvious, given your interests. You want to examine it. Observe it at close quarter. Learn from it.”
“Precisely!” The young doctor flashed one of his toothy grins. “Then you don’t think me mad?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Curiosity hardly makes one mad.”
Dr. Keckilpenny’s smile grew so broad Elizabeth almost wondered how his lean, narrow face could contain it.
“What a splendid sentiment! And so, so rare. I should translate it into Latin and declare it my motto. Now, how would that go? Curiositas non novo a vir rabidus, perhaps? I’m not sure. I was always so much better with Greek, but it doesn’t look nearly so good carved into marble.”
To her surprise, Elizabeth found herself laughing.
“Ahhhh,” Dr. Keckilpenny said, “now you think me mad.”
“Not at all. Though I suppose I could ask why you’d bother making a study of the unmentionables. We have a chronicle of The Troubles at home, and from what I’ve read—”
“Which one?”
“Pardon?”
“Which ‘chronicle of The Troubles’?”
“Gibbon’s A Complete History of the Most Tragic and Awful Events Following the Rise of the Sorry Stricken from Their Graves and the Ensuing Horrors Which—”
“Yes yes yes, I know it well.” Dr. Keckilpenny waved a long hand before his face, as if dispelling an unpleasant odor. “Rubbish, every word. But do go on, please.”
“Well, according to Mr. Gibbon, the greatest minds in England tried to study captive dreadfuls when the strange plague first appeared, the only result being that many of those great minds were very quickly ripped from their vessels and devoured.”
“Assuming all that’s true—and when it comes to the history of the plague, I’ve found that to be a foolish thing to do—” Dr. Keckilpenny paused just long enough to wink and put a finger beside his beaklike nose. “I would point out that we are now in the nineteenth century. Time has marched on, and knowledge with it. The menace may have returned, but there are modern men of science ready to confront it. And this time, science shall prevail.”
“Perhaps. I think I know, however, how my mmm—”
The word Elizabeth had said so often, so freely of late—master—stuck in her throat.
Was it that she was beginning to see Geoffrey Hawksworth as something less than a master . . . or something more?
She brought a fist to her lips and coughed demurely until she could carry on.
“Ah, how my instructor in the deadly arts would respond to that. Science, he would say, has created no weapon more dependably lethal than a sharp blade wielded by strong hands.”
Dr. Keckilpenny gave Elizabeth the same look of amused bemusement she’d seen a thousand times on her father’s face.
“Oh?” he chuckled. “Well, I should very much like to see how your instructor would fare with his sharp blade and strong hands were he up against a single man armed with a—”
There was a sharp crack, and a little burst of dirt and gravel flew up a few inches from Elizabeth’s right foot. Elizabeth and Dr. Keckilpenny stared down at the newly dug pockmark in the road, then stared at each other, then stared straight ahead.
A soldier was before them, perhaps forty feet off, a musket clutched in his hands and a puff of smoking floating off above his head. It was the same sentry who’d challenged Elizabeth and Jane and Mr. Bennet when they’d approached Netherfield Park that morning.
“Uhhhh . . . who goes there?” he said.
“I am not a military man, so you might want to take this with a grain of salt,” Dr. Keckilpenny replied. “But in my experience, one asks that before one shoots.”
“Yes, Sir. Sorry, Sir. It was an accident, Sir.”
“Think nothing of it, Corporal Holmes. What’s a little crossfire between friends?”
“It’s Private Jones, Sir. And thank you, Sir. It won’t happen again, Sir.”
“Good, good. We’ll just be on our way, then. Miss Bennet?”
The doctor bowed and swept an arm out toward the road ahead.
“Actually, this is where we leave the lane anyway,” Elizabeth said. “We’ll need to cross this meadow and go over that knoll to reach the lake.”
Dr. Keckilpenny pivoted so his arm was now stretched out toward the hill beyond. “Lead on.”
The close call with a musket ball squelched, for a time, anyone’s taste for banter, and it wasn’t until they were halfway across the field that Dr. Keckilpenny looked back over his shoulder and said, “I suggest we return by a different route.”
Elizabeth glanced back, too. Three other soldiers had joined Pvt. Jones, drawn by the sound of gunfire, no doubt. The sentry was simultaneously gesturing at Elizabeth and the doctor and squinting down into the barrel of his Brown Bess as if he’d lost his ramrod in it.
“I agree,” Elizabeth said. “Though I wouldn’t worry overmuch about being shot by mistake, since most of the soldiers I’ve seen have neither the skill nor the inclination to fire their muskets at all. I know that you said you’re not a military man, yet don’t you find it queer that Captain Cannon should come to Hertfordshire with such poorly trained troops?”
“I do when I let myself notice it. Unfortunately—or, perhaps, fortunately—my mind is rather like a microscope or a spyglass: It can focus with great clarity upon one point, but all else is consequently blocked out. And for the past two months, my focus has been on zombies.”
“Two months?” Elizabeth said. It hadn’t been one since Mr. Ford crashed his own funeral. Apparently, Dr. Keckilpenny was as haphazard with dates as he was with names.
“Yes, and the most fascinating months of my life they’ve been!” the doctor enthused. “To think I once believed I’d never see a zombie. Their very existence flies in the face of science, and now we’ve been given a second chance to answer all the old questions. What could reanimate the flesh of the dead? What drives the resurrected to feed on the living? Why only people? Why only in Britain? Why are you taking out your sword?”
It took Elizabeth a moment to realize this last was not one of the “old questions” but a very new and immediate one: She’d drawn her katana without even thinking about it.
“I . . .,” she began, not knowing what words might come next. And then there it was, rising up from the level of instinct and pure sensation to tangible, relatable thought. “I smell something.”
They’d stopped halfway up the wooded rise blocking the way to the lake, and Dr. Keckilpenny turned a wary gaze to the top of the hill.
“Or some things, I warrant,” he whispered.