“Are you sure you want your men to hear this?” Mr. Bennet said, nodding at the Limbs.

“By necessity, I have no secrets from them.”

“So they know already that which has been withheld from me?”

Capt. Cannon nodded slowly, head hanging. “They do.”

“Then you have grievously insulted me, Captain. When you first arrived in Hertfordshire, I greeted you as a comrade. Yet you were deceiving me from the very beginning.”

“Yes. And how it has weighed on me!” the captain cried out in anguish. “You are a good man, Bennet, and I have treated you shamefully. I welcome the opportunity to expunge some of my guilt by acknowledging my dishonor now.” He took in a deep, shuddering breath before going on. “Your suspicions are correct. I have been wooing your good lady wife.”

Mr. Bennet nodded impatiently, opened his mouth, and then froze, utterly dumbstruck.

A softly wheezed “What?” was all he could get off his lips.

“Prudence was the one true love of my life,” Capt. Cannon went on. “The one love Fate allowed me before I became as you find me. When I saw her again, it was as if parts of me that were long dead suddenly sprang to life again. I became, in those precious moments I could be with her, some semblance of my younger self . . . my whole self, so long lost to—”

Mr. Bennet held up a hand.

“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “What?”

The captain blinked at him. “You didn’t suspect?”

“No! I was talking about the dreadful hordes. You’ve known all along that the strange plague has spread far beyond Meryton. As far as I know, we’re the last to see its return, not the first. It’s why the War Office could spare only one company of new recruits commanded by callow youths and an officer who has, to be blunt, seen better days. It’s why some of the unmentionables I saw tonight obviously came from Cambridge and companies of soldiers other than your own. It’s why you already had your men preparing boards for the windows and doors. It’s why the mails and hackney coaches haven’t been . . . my God, really? You’ve been dillydallying with Mrs. Bennet?”

“Yes. Courting her with all my heart.”

“When you knew we were probably all about to die?”

“In which case there would be no opportunity later.”

“But . . . why?”

“As I said. Because I love her. And should you fall in the days ahead and I survive, I fully intend to claim the happiness that chance has denied me the last twenty years.”

“You assume Prudence would marry you?”

“Can you truly say you have been so attentive and loving a husband she would stay in mourning all her remaining days?”

Mr. Bennet gaped at the man a moment, put a hand to the side of his head as if to assure himself it was still there, then waved his confusion away and tried to focus on what he thought mattered most.

“Why didn’t you tell me about the dreadfuls?”

“Orders. The War Office was desperate to avoid a panic in the Home Counties. You remember The Troubles. People try to flee, the roads become clogged, the dreadfuls descend, and before long you’ve got one thousand zombies where before you had one hundred.”

“Yes, yes, I remember. Tell me—”

Mr. Bennet had a dozen more questions he wished to ask, but he realized they all really came down to one thing.

“Is there any hope for us?”

It was a question that could be answered with a yes or a no, of course, and Mr. Bennet found it instructive—if not encouraging—that Capt. Cannon didn’t use either word.

“The North is overrun. If you didn’t have friends in the War Office, even my one company of untrained London urchins would not have been sent to your aid. Lord Paget is moving a battalion over from Suffolk to reinforce the capital—to think anyone was worried about Napoleon at a time like this!—but I can’t say for certain where he is at the moment. Assuming he hasn’t met with disaster already, however, his column might be in or near Hertfordshire, and if we could get word to him somehow he might decide to send reinforcements.”

“‘Might,’ ‘somehow,’ and ‘might’ again,” Mr. Bennet said. “It is little to pin our lives on.”

Capt. Cannon shrugged. “Yet it is something.”

Mr. Bennet nodded, then sucked in a long, deep breath.

“You know that my code of honor demands your death,” he said.

“Of course. And you know that, shamed though I might be to have betrayed the trust of a worthy man, a soldier does not face death without defending himself. My Limbs stand ready to act as my seconds.”

“Of course.”

Something began scratching at the planks over the nearest window.

“And yet,” Mr. Bennet said, “this does not strike me as an opportune time for a duel.”

“Nor I.”

The scratching grew louder and was soon joined by the sound of clumsy pawing from another pair of hands.

“I propose, then, a gentleman’s agreement,” Mr. Bennet said. “For now, we will continue to work together. If we are both alive in two days’ time, however, we may do our utmost to kill each other.”

“Done. Right Limb, shake the man’s hand.”

And so they shook.

EVENTUALLY, ELIZABETH TIRED of chopping off limbs and wandered away from her post. Mary had relieved her an hour before, yet she’d lingered by the window with her anyway, shouting “Breach!” and hacking away every time a plank popped free. By the time a soldier rushed over to nail the board back in place, the pile of splotchy, tatter-fleshed arms under the sill would have grown taller by at least two.

“Interesting. That one looks like it came from a blackamoor,” Mary said at one point. “Or do you think that’s just the way he was decaying?”

“I’m done,” Elizabeth mumbled, and she simply walked off.

Just getting out of the room and down the hall was a challenge, crowded as the lower floor was: Lord Lumpley had insisted that “the un-invited” stay downstairs while the upper floor remained reserved for him and his guests. (The ballroom had been abandoned straight off, for its long rows of broad, tall windows made it impossible to defend.)

Yet the villagers cleared a path for Elizabeth as best they could, and those who weren’t huddled up weeping or asleep nodded tight-lipped encouragement. Some even thanked her. They’d seen what she and her sisters had done to help hold the dreadfuls back. No one looked at them as pariahs now. They were saviors.

It was the same when Elizabeth went up to the second floor (to escape the constant pounding and the choking smell of fear and death downstairs, she told herself). The very people who’d snubbed her hours before were offering her grim smiles and the occasional “Well done” or “Good show.” They were currying her favor now, and it sickened her.

Her father would understand her weariness and disgust, but he was in conference with Capt. Cannon and Lt. Tindall, planning an “action” for the next morning (assuming they lasted out the night). She knew where Jane was—just down the hall, posted outside Lord Lumpley’s bedchamber door. There was no use talking to her at such a time, however. Jane was too pure-hearted to appreciate bitterness.

And then there was Master Hawksworth. Once, she would have thought that he, a proud warrior, would understand. But he’d hobbled off to stand guard in some far corner of the house, and Elizabeth found she lacked the will to seek him out. She had many questions for the Master—and little stomach for the likely answers. Easier to simply escape.

She kept going up until there was no higher to climb.

Mr. Smith noticed her first.

“Buh ruhzzzzz!” he said. “Buh ruhzzzzz!”

“And good evening to you.”

Dr. Keckilpenny was half-dozing on the floor, his head against his trunk. At the sound of Elizabeth’s voice, though, he hopped up smiling, instantly alert.