Midnight in Austenland

“Mary, trust me, that’s a good thing.”

“I’ll die for him!” Mary stood in the threshold of the bathroom, the light behind her lining her pale hair in bright yellow.

“No one wants to kill you, Mary. There’s really no call for—”

“I’ll die for Mr. Darcy.”

“Um … did you just say ‘Mr. Darcy’?”

“No.”

Mary’s face seemed to cool, the red splotches of emotion fading. She reached around the far side of the bathroom door, picked up a rifle that she had placed just out of sight, put it against her shoulder, and pointed it at Charlotte.

“Holy crap!” Charlotte said, as Beckett might. “I thought England was all famous for not having guns!”

“The gentlemen go hunting.”

“Is that a prop gun?”

Mary cocked the rifle. The click sounded ominously real.

The door to the hall was just a step away. Charlotte glanced at it. Did she dare run? Would Mary get spooked and shoot?

“You did it,” Mary said, her hands shaking dramatically, the tip of the rifle aimed at Charlotte’s head, at her neck, at her feet, now at the wall. “You’re responsible for Thomas’s capture. No one would have cared if the old man had just disappeared. But you spoilt everything. And Thomas loves me! He practically said so!”

“Then I’m very happy for you two,” Charlotte said shakily.

Mary’s eyes narrowed. “I didn’t like how he’d look at you. Perhaps he was pretending to love you. I don’t know, I don’t know …”

That swaying rifle was pointing in the region of Charlotte’s head way too often. She decided fleeing was worth the risk.

Mary adjusted her stance, the bathroom light falling over her face, and Charlotte could see that the girl had put on makeup, apparently from Charlotte’s own stash. Her cheeks were well blushed, her lips pink, and one eye sported brown shadow all the way up to her eyebrow.

“Mary, you look pretty,” she said.

Mary hesitated; the rifle lowered. And that’s when Charlotte ran.

A gunshot rang in her ears as she threw open the door and fled into the hall.

“Mary’s got a gun!” she yelled, racing for the stairs. Miss Charming and Colonel Andrews poked their heads out of their bedrooms then quickly ducked back in again. Charlotte couldn’t blame them. She took the stairs two at a time.

Oh, come on already, police, she thought. Come on with your vicious billy clubs and beat the love crazies out of this psychopath!

Charlotte had no plan except to get out of the house. Maybe the house wasn’t a sentient, ancient beast that swallowed corpses whole, but it sure lodged a lot of nutjobs.

Another shot splattered plaster in the wall above her head. She screamed, nearly tumbled down the rest of the stairs, and knocked into the front door. Someone opened it from the outside.

“Charlotte,” said Eddie, “what’s—”

She pushed him out and ran for the gravel drive. “Mary. She’s back. With a gun.”

The front door opened and Mary came out, rifle on her shoulder.

“You should have left him alone!” she yelled.

A shot fired into the night. Eddie pulled Charlotte down flat then sprang back up, tackling Mary to the front stairs. He ripped the rifle from her hands, flung it away, and grabbed her fast. Mary struggled weakly for a few moments then started to weep. Her cry was high-pitched and rhythmic, reminding Charlotte of a wounded bird. Eddie didn’t let go, but after a moment, he did began to mutter, “There, there.”

Charlotte almost said, Hey, she just tried to shoot me in the head! Don’t there, there her!

But she couldn’t really blame him. Her cry was pathetic.

Mrs. Wattlesbrook stood over them, arms folded. “Really, Mary, you cannot expect to work here while engaging in such behavior. And your hair is a sight.”

Charlotte was lying on the gravel, her ears still ringing with the sound of rifle fire, and she wondered how many people had twice been the object of attempted murder on the very same day. She was special, that was sure, part of an elite club of other unknown almost-victims. Maybe she’d get a special citation from the queen. Maybe Lu would think she was cool.

“Are you going to faint again?” Eddie asked, kneeling beside her as the police cars rolled in.

“No … I think I’m getting used to it all,” she said, her voice sounding hollow and far away. “Attempted murder is becoming so mundane.”

He pulled her up into his arms. She closed her eyes.

“Oh no, Eddie,” she said, alert with a new thought. “You know what Mary would do first, before coming to kill me?”

Eddie groaned. “Let Mallery go.”

When the police went upstairs to the locked room, it was empty. Cut rope lay on the floor. Justin the guard was sound asleep in the hall beside a cup of tea, likely drugged and brought to him by Mary.

“At least it wasn’t yew tea,” said Eddie.

Charlotte had to push through half an hour of questions with the detective sergeant and wait outside with everyone else while the police conducted a thorough house search. There was no sign of Mallery. By the time the detective agreed that the rest of the questions could wait till morning, Charlotte felt more than half dead—at least two-thirds dead. The police were pretty well occupied with questioning their rifle-shooting prisoner, setting up a perimeter to catch an escaped murderer, and dredging a car out of a pond.

“I’m so sleepy,” Charlotte said, leaning into Eddie as they walked upstairs. Her speech was getting slurred and slushy. “I guess too much adrenaline in the system has some side effects, huh?”

Her eyes were closed when he picked her up and carried her into her room. She was going to accuse him of carrying her just so he could show off his manly strength, but speaking required so much effort. She’d removed her dress before the Mary incident, and handily she’d gone sans corset ever since her swim, so he slid her dressed as she was beneath the sheets. He lay down beside her.

“What are you doing?” she said, though it was barely intelligible.

“Staying beside you, making sure you aren’t attacked again tonight. If I don’t have that privilege, then no one should.”

“Okay,” she said. She turned on her side and looked at him once more before closing her eyes for good.