Free Dreadfully Ever After by Steve Hockensmith Page A

only
within its high stone walls will we find what we seek
.
I have already begun the long journey north. Our only hope, I am convinced, is to strike immediately, taking the cure either by stealth or by force. In either case, my paltry peasant skills are unequal to the task at hand. I need assassins versed in the noble Shinobi ways of death. I need you, Georgiana, along with as many of your aunt’s ninjas as she might spare! Let us rendezvous at the Seasick Sheltie Inn in Aberdeen, and together we shall snatch your brother back from the very gates of Hell!
Yours etc.
,
Elizabeth

    Georgiana didn’t linger over the letter. She read it through just once and then dashed downstairs to find Lady Catherine. Her Ladyship was giving her kitchen staff their midmorning beating, but paused to hear Georgiana through. She immediately agreed to send a small force of ninjas to accompany her to Scotland.
    “I wish I could go along myself,” Lady Catherine said. “But I must remain here to continue administering the serum to Fitzwilliam. Only I, of all of us here, have some inkling as to its properties and proper use.”
    “I understand entirely. And how grateful I am to have you for an aunt in this hour of need!”
    Georgiana turned and started to hurry off, but Lady Catherine called her back.
    “Where are you going?”
    “Why, to pack my things. And I shall want to say goodbye to my brother, of course.”
    “And where is it you will tell him you are going?”
    “Well, I ... I hadn’t thought about that.”
    “That is obvious.”
    Her Ladyship approached, not stopping until she was
too
close—her chest mere inches from her niece’s, her eyes glaring down over a sharp nose that would, with but the slightest nod, poke the younger woman in the forehead.
    “Georgiana, do you know why I asked your sister-in-law not to tell Fitzwilliam that she is in search of a cure?” She didn’t pause for a reply. “It is for the same reason I will ask you not to speak to him now: We must preserve his peace of mind. His very soul is in flux. All that is good in him is weakened, dying, while unspeakable urges grow ever stronger. We mustn’t upset or agitate him, lest we tip him all the more quickly into the dark pit that looms before him. He rests now, and that is good. Would you disturb that rest to tell him that his sister and wife are risking their lives to save his? No. Just go, and I will find the best words to explain your absence.”
    “Oh, but surely I couldn’t—”
    “Just.” Lady Catherine narrowed her eyes. “Go.”
    “Yes. All right. If you really think it’s for the best….”
    Not a quarter of an later, Georgiana was hurrying out to a carriage already loaded with clothes and ropes and grappling hooks and an array of weapons from Her Ladyship’s arsenal. Riding up top were four ninjas dressed in coachmen’s livery.
    Anne de Bourgh was standing by the carriage door. Georgiana rarely saw her cousin venture outside, and her jet-black dress made her seem somehow incongruous in the full light of day, like a shaft of coal jutting from a glass of milk.
    “I understand you must leave us,” Anne said.
    “Yes. It pains me to quit my brother’s sickbed, and with such suddenness, but I fear it must be done.”
    Anne nodded.
    “Well, I, for one, am glad to see you go,” she said, “knowing that when you return, all will at last be set to rights.”
    She gave Georgiana a hug that imparted no warmth and then stepped aside, smiling. Once the carriage was rolling off up the drive, she reentered the house.
    As Anne took her young cousin’s place at Fitzwilliam’s side, curling from one of the chimneys came smoke that had been, not long before, the
real
letter Elizabeth had sent Georgiana from an inn on the road to London.

CHAPTER 11

    “There is one more thing you will no doubt tell me that I don’t need,” Elizabeth said as she and her mysterious companion passed through the Northern Guard Tower and into London. The