Steve Hockensmith: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls

Well, there might be one: fair Jane of the golden hair and the milk-white skin and the inviting décolletage and the horrid, horrid family. But he had reason to hope her virtue wasn’t long for this earth.

And then the Baron of Lumpley groaned, for he remembered at last that he had work to do. Actual work! Damn the incessant burdens of noblesse oblige.

Without dressing (how could he without the usual retinue of six to help him?) he walked to the study and wrote the following note:

Hunt today—3 o’clock—come!

L.

Then he rang the bell and sat back, wrist aching from the strain of unaccustomed toil, and waited for his man Belgrave.

“My Lord?” Belgrave said blandly when he walked in a moment later. He was a studiously stoic little fellow of forty-and-some years with gray at his temples and a pale gray complexion and a gray, gray soul. If he noticed that his employer was lolling about without a stitch on, he didn’t show it. He never seemed to notice anything, which was one of the reasons Lord Lumpley depended on him so. As a test, the baron had once strutted around an entire morning with half an apple clinched between his naked cheeks, and when at last Belgrave commented upon it, it was only to say, “Pardon me, My Lord, but you seem to have bruised your fruit. Shall I fetch something fresh?”

“Take this.” Lord Lumpley held out the note. “Make copies, stamp them with my seal, and have them dispatched immediately to . . . oh . . . everyone.”

“Everyone, My Lord?”

“ Everyone within a twenty-mile radius.”

“Everyone within a twenty-mile radius, My Lord?”

The baron heaved a sigh. Work, work, work!

“Everyone who matters.”

“Ahhhh.” Belgrave nodded. “The gentlemen of the area.”

“Yes, yes. The usual bunch, you know who. Oh, and alert the Master of the Quorn. I’ll be needing all his dogs this afternoon. We’re to have one more hunt before The Season!”

“Very good, My Lord.”

Belgrave began backing toward the door.

Lord Lumley cleared his throat.

“Tell me, Belgrave . . . what do you think of my riding attire?”

Belgrave regarded the baron with cool, pale blue eyes that never blinked. Ever.

“His Lordship is, as always, the very picture of virile English manhood. Though I might point out that the traditional color for the hunt is red.”

“Ahhh, right you are, Belgrave. Make it so.”

A few minutes later, the baron’s dressing team arrived to begin stuffing him into his clothes. As the sockman worked on his left foot and the drawersman fussed over the fit of his trousers and the trussmen strained to stitch him up from behind in his fraying, crack-ribbed girdle, Lord Lumpley set his mind to the hunt.

How to snare Miss Jane Bennet?

Young ladies were always the most difficult quarry to corner, for they were ever surrounded by protectors: parents, patrons, governesses, guardians, chaperones. That’s why he loved orphans and working girls so—and so often! Like that milliner’s daughter, Emily What-Have-You. One day she was delivering him some new hats; practically the next, unfortunately, she was threatening to deliver a lot more than that. Such naifs were his bread and butter.

Yet a gentleman cannot survive on bread alone, even buttered. He must have fine caviar. Champagne. Fresh meat. Like Jane Bennet.

He even thought he might make a full meal of her instead of the usual snack. She was so very, very proper—and so wonderfully passive . Just what he needed in a wife. An impenetrable veneer of propriety, and not a lot of questions.

Of course, she was miles beneath him, but who above would have him? He was, after all, only a baron—enough to impress the rustics thereabouts, but barely a step above a peasant so far as dukes and earls were concerned. Even a viscount outranked him. A bloody viscount!

It would have been possible, once, to marry an equal. But that had its disadvantages, seeing as he was related to most of them. His family used to push cousins on him all the time: Keep it in the family, Dickie . Why marry an outsider? He’d seen where that lead, though. It had been the Lumpley way for generations, and now his relations were as inbred as a pack of shipwrecked poodles. It was a miracle he’d turned out as well as he had.

Of course, that hadn’t kept him from flirting with the idea—and doing much more than flirting with a few of his cousins. Which was why the rest of the family liked to pretend he was dead, and now he had this big old house all to himself.

“ Fini , My Lord,” his topsman said upon setting the hat just-so upon his head.

The baron’s dressing team waited with bated breath as he took his time inspecting himself in the mirror. At long last, he nodded with satisfaction, and the dressers tried to hide their sighs of relief. As one, they bowed and began backing toward the door.

“Not just yet,” the baron said, and he tapped a finger against his lower lip in a way his servants had all learned to dread. “It shall be quite some time before my guests arrive. I think I shall have a bath in the meantime.”

He held his arms out straight to the sides and waited for his dressers to begin his un dressing. He didn’t have to wait long. Thirty minutes later, he was naked again.

The rest of the day was a whirlwind of activity. Bath, dressers, meal, chambermaid, bath, dressers, meal, chambermaid (a different one), bath, dressers. And then at last it was time to head back downstairs and greet his guests.

He found his favorites—the young bounders, rakes, and scoundrels—red-coated and, having already polished off enough of the baron’s port to float a small boat, rosy-cheeked. An assortment of stick-in-the-muds, some dressed for the hunt, some not, stood around trying to hide their disapproval with varying degrees of success. In their midst, Lord Lumpley noted with an annoyance he certainly didn’t try to hide, was the stickiest stick from the muckiest mud: the local vicar, the Reverend Mr. Cummings. And—damnation!—the vicar noted him noting and headed his way.

The baron might have beat a quick retreat, but a thought hobbled him. He had agreed to speak to Cummings about a supposedly urgent matter—something that smug little nobody Bennet was insisting upon. The man actually wanted the vicar’s permission to . . . oh, it was simply too ghastly.

And even ghastlier—Mr. Cummings was now upon him, and there was no escaping conversation.

“If I might have a word, My Lord.”

“By all means, especially if it is good-bye .”

Mr. Cummings scowled.

The baron laughed as if he’d been joking. “You must forgive me my attempt at wit. Simply whistling in the dark. This matter with the dreadful . . . most disturbing, is it not?”

“It certainly is.” The vicar threw a pointed look over at the youngest, drunkest members of the hunting party, who were now badgering Belgrave to break into the brandies. “And hardly a fit subject for levity.”

Lord Lumpley shrugged. “Men keep their courage up however they must.”

Mr. Cummings tried to look shrewd. He had a round, bland face, best suited for displaying piety, mild reproach, and a hint of intestinal distress, and the expression didn’t suit him.

“They do not look much afraid to me, Sir. And what could they possibly have to fear from foxes, at any rate?”

The baron sighed, weighed his options, then simply walked away, heading across the foyer for the front doors. Unfortunately, the vicar assumed he was meant to accompany him, and did so.

“I said—”

“It is bigger game we are after today,” Lord Lumpley grated out, resenting each word. He hated justifying himself to anyone, but a clergyman! If he’d had his way, there would be a season for hunting them, just as with the foxes.