The lieutenant devoted a long moment to grinding his perfect, pearly white teeth before speaking again.

“All right, then. You may keep the wretched thing on three conditions. One, it is to be sequestered out of sight. Two, all possible steps will be taken to ensure that it does not escape. And three, at the first sign that it is in any way endangering anyone, it will be destroyed.”

“Done, done, and done!” Dr. Keckilpenny said. “In fact, I can accommodate your first two provisos in one fell swoop. Just wait till you see my laboratory!”

Soon enough, that’s just what the lieutenant and the others were doing—though the doctor’s “laboratory” turned out to be nothing more than Netherfield’s largest, draftiest attic. Dr. Keckilpenny had found it, he explained, while exploring the house that morning, not letting anything so prosaic as a locked door keep him from getting inside.

“Medical student, remember?” he’d said when Elizabeth asked where he’d learned the fine art of lock-picking. “Every morgue or cemetery has its . . . well. Let’s let that lie, shall we? This way, everyone, this way! Allow me to present the pièce de résistance!”

He swept his long arms out toward a particularly gloomy, cobwebbed corner. Hanging from the wall was a pair of thick, black iron chains, each ending in manacles.

“What in heaven’s name?” Lt. Tindall muttered.

“I imagine some mad maiden aunt or idiot son spent many a year up here,” Dr. Keckilpenny said. “It’s what one does in the best families, I’ve found. You’re not considered a true aristocrat until you’ve got at least one daft relation howling away up in the attic. How fortunate for us that the penthouse, as it were, is currently untenanted.”

“Yes,” the lieutenant drawled. “How very.”

Still, despite his obvious reluctance, Lt. Tindall ordered his men to unpack the doctor’s prize, the zombie having been brought into the house stuffed in a trunk so as not to alarm the servants or the other soldiers. (This precaution met with only partial success, as “Dr. Keckilpenny’s equipment” kept moaning, kicking, and scratching as it was carried inside and up the stairs.) After a few frantic minutes of tugging and shoving with the zombie net, the soldiers had the dreadful chained in place.

“I’m going to keep a guard posted outside the door at the bottom of the stairs, with his musket loaded,” Lt. Tindall said as his men hurried down the staircase. He turned to leave, as well, then stopped and faced Elizabeth. “Miss Bennet,” he drew in a deep breath, “if you’re still interested in musketry instruction, I would be happy to have our Sergeant Meadows see to it.”

He couldn’t quite pull off the “happy” without a quiver in his voice, nor could he completely erase the look of distaste upon his face. He managed to jut out an elbow, though, bowing slightly as he offered to escort her outside.

Elizabeth shook her head. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Perhaps another time.”

Lt. Tindall dropped his arm.

“Suit yourself,” he said, spinning crisply on his heel and marching to and down the stairs.

Elizabeth actually felt a little sorry for him as she watched him go. The man was still a starchy martinet, but at least he’d tried.

“Thank you for staying, Miss Bennet,” Dr. Keckilpenny said. He was eyeing Elizabeth with a strange intensity, as if she were an experiment yielding unexpected—yet pleasing—results. “It’s an honor being chosen over the company of Sergeant Meadows and a Brown Beth.”

“Brown Bess. And . . . well, I . . . I just have so many questions.”

That was certainly true enough. Some of them Elizabeth couldn’t even find words for.

She turned away from the doctor’s stare and found herself looking into another.

The zombie was straining against its chains, wide eyes fixed on her. The creature seemed calm, though, as if it had accepted its captivity. It didn’t thrash, didn’t grimace, didn’t bite at the gag the soldiers had tied around its mouth to keep its screams from escaping the trunk. It almost could have passed for a living man—a youngish, not altogether unhandsome one out sleepwalking or staggering around drunk—if not for the putrid smell, the dingy tint of its skin, and the viscous black fluid that trickled from its ears and nose and mouth. Whoever he’d been, he hadn’t died violently, that much was obvious. No zombie had cursed him with a bite or scratch. The strange plague had awakened him from his grave.

“A fine specimen, isn’t he?” Dr. Keckilpenny said. “But I wonder how in the world we’re going to get him undressed.”

“Excuse me?”

The doctor nodded in the general direction of the unmentionable’s pants. “Those clothes of his—they’ll have to go. We don’t want him in the wormy old things he was buried in. He needs to be in something more . . . aliveish.”

And finally one of the questions in Elizabeth’s mind became refreshingly obvious, with obvious words to match.

“Doctor, what are you up to?”

Dr. Keckilpenny grinned. “It is a joy hearing you ask that. It can be so lonely being the only one thinking these things! May I have permission to babble?”

“Always, so long as it’s not about the weather.”

“I knew it! I knew it! A kindred spirit!”

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.