“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.

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.

But mostly she thought about how much she missed Elizabeth. There could be no dash across the hall for comfort and wisdom here. It would be a long dash indeed to find anyone she knew at all, for Jane had been quartered (for propriety’s sake, the baron explained) in a deserted wing of the house far from the other guests. Lt. Tindall and Capt. Cannon (how wonderfully cheerful the man had been when returning from his “reconnoiter” that afternoon!) had been given rooms downstairs on the opposite side of the grand foyer, along with Ensign Pratt and the company surgeon, a crusty old campaigner named Dr. Thorne. The rest of the soldiers were in tents out on the lawn, the only exceptions being Right Limb and Left Limb (who slept in the captain’s room, though in what arrangement Jane couldn’t guess) and a single guard dozing in a chair outside “Dr. Keckilpenny’s sanitarium” (as Papa had cryptically called it).

So she was alone—as alone as she’d ever been, except when out walking or riding by herself. Certainly, she’d never felt more alone. And it wasn’t a feeling she liked.

Of what importance were her feelings, though? So she’d been ruined socially. So no matter what the baron might do, she’d never make a match with a gentleman of the sort she admired most—a true gentle man, as warm and soft and pliant as a puppy’s fuzzy belly. So it would only be cold, hard warriors like Master Hawksworth who’d look twice at a woman who wore the sword, except to gape or sneer. So . . . what of it? It would be pure, selfish vanity to think of all that when the unmentionables might be on the rise again.

But, oh, how she longed for love! How she longed for kisses! How she longed for . . . the rest of it. Whatever that looked like.

Yet none of this was to be hers. She would be forever denied, forever alone.

There was a soft knock on the door.

For a moment, Jane was torn between her nunchucks and her dirk. The dirk won.

“Yes?” Jane said, lifting the dagger by the tip of the blade.

A woman answered.

“Are you awake, Miss?”

Jane could guess how Elizabeth might reply to that: “Not unless I’m talking in my sleep.” (Jane wasn’t without wit herself. It just rarely seemed charitable to wield it, and charity for Jane always came first.)

“Yes, I am,” she said.

Her bedroom was blessed with its own hearth, and by the orange glow of the dying embers within, she saw the knob on the door begin to turn.

“I brought you something, Miss.”

As the door swung slowly open, a new light spread into the room—the dull yellow gleam of a candle. It sat upon a tray being carried by a roly-poly young chambermaid.