Free Dreadfully Ever After by Steve Hockensmith

Catherine had sent up. “Just what we’ve needed around here for so long.”
    Another time, Georgiana checked on her brother in the middle of the night only to find her cousin hovering over his bed, so motionless she could have been a dressmaker’s mannequin.
    “Back again?” she said as Georgiana stepped up to the bedside. She reached out and pressed a clammy hand to Georgiana’s cheek, and it was hard to tell if Anne was gazing at her tenderly or trying, in her langorous way, to slap her. “What need has Fitzwilliam of anyone else when such a sister as you is with him?”
    Then she’d turned and swept soundlessly out of the room.
    The next day, Anne looked up from her breakfast—the same small dollop of red roe and salmon sashimi she took every morning—and said, apropos nothing, “How many unmentionables do you think you’ve killed?”
    “Oh, not so many. Only two hundred and seventy-three.” Georgiana thought a moment and then added: “And a half.”
    “Only?” Anne glanced at her mother, who was glowering at her from the head of the table. “Of course. Not so many when compared to some. Still, you’ve been in battle after battle, Georgiana, and your reflexes must be finely honed, indeed. So honed, in fact, it makes me wonder if you can entirely control them.”
    “I don’t think I understand you.”
    “Anne,” Lady Catherine said.
    “It’s just that you’ve been spending so much time with your brother,” Anne went on. “Even as he improves, there will certainly be moments when he will behave erratically, alarmingly, perhaps even like a—”
    “Anne!” Lady Catherine gave the table a thump with her fist that sent every plate and cup jumping. “This is neither the time nor the place!”
    If the downward-looking kimono-wearing servants shuffling around the room showed any sign of noticing the exchange, Georgiana didn’t see it. As far as she knew, none of them spoke English, for Her Ladyship populated her household staff entirely with imported Japanese peasants.
    “I bring it up only out of concern for Fitzwilliam,” Anne said coolly. “You warriors are always so eager to kill, I should think it would become something of a habit. An impulse barely held in check. And I would hate for something tragic to happen if your little potion didn’t work quickly enough.”
    “Not the time,” Lady Catherine grated out. “Not the place.”
    “Fine.”
    Anne returned her attention to her meal, albeit with a strangely serene smile upon her face. She plucked up a single roe with her chopstick and glanced over at Georgiana before sliding it between her thin lips.
    The proper time and place for the conversation to continue, Georgiana couldn’t help but think, was whenever she wouldn’t be around to hear it. And, indeed, Lady Catherine did all she could to arrange many such times, pressing her young niece to spar with her ninjas and sample the exotic weapons in her vast armory and make use of the small flock of dreadfuls she kept on hand for target practice. Yet always Georgiana resisted and, aside from those moments when she slept or bathed or ate, she stayed at her brother’s side. She would not leave it willingly unless Elizabeth herself asked her to.
    And then she did.
    One of Lady Catherine’s waiting geishas brought the letter to her in Fitzwilliam’s bed chamber. Fortunately, her brother had plunged into a deep slumber after taking his morning medicine, so he couldn’t inquire about the mud-speckled envelope that had just come, it seemed, all the way from the Yorkshire Dales. Georgiana didn’t open it until she was alone in her own room.
My dear Georgiana
,
I have not the time to tell you everything that has happened since your departure from Pemberley. Suffice it to say this: Our situation is more desperate than ever. The physician who holds the key to curing the strange plague has, I have just learned, left London for Aberdeen! He has there, I am told, a laboratory like a fortress, and