It was Mr. Wickham, and he had a gun.
Mr. Collins was sitting there, with his hands up, puffing in terror.
Mr. Wickham nodded at me. “Elizabeth,” he said. “Sorry about that. I shoot everyone just as they appear, and I wasn’t expecting you. You were all very late yesterday, anyway, but I think I’ve figured that out. I think, usually, you’re not here, and then, right around ten o’clock, that’s when the Collinses get themselves together to go round to Rosings and tell everyone you’re missing, well, probably to inquire if you’re there. But yesterday, no one came at ten o’clock, and I was too busy musing over the appearance of Will Darcy to think it through, but… what happened with you two?”
I licked my lips. “You shot me.”
“I did,” he said. “But I’ve apologized, haven’t I? You’re not hurt. You’re fine. It was an accident. Can we get past that?”
Mr. Collins cleared his throat. “Mr. Wickham, is it? I don’t know if we were rightly introduced, but I did see you on the streets of Meryton back in November, if you recall? I was staying with the Bennets at the time. How about you put that gun down?”
Mr. Wickham pulled the trigger.
Mr. Collins’s cheek burst out in gore and shattered bone. He fell forward into his tea cup.
I clapped both hands over my mouth and made a very small noise in the back of my throat.
Wickham rolled his eyes. “Oh, don’t be that way.” He dropped the gun. I now realized he had a number of guns, all in a sort of bucket on his back. “I have shot Darcy, though, this morning, so you’ll probably be displeased about that.”
I lowered my hands. “Why are you shooting everyone?”
“I don’t rightly have to, I suppose.” He shrugged. “But it does get annoying, you know? One day, I shot someone just because Icould not bear to listen to them saying the same thing again, you know?Doyou know?”
I swallowed.
“Of course you know.” He nodded at me. “It’s your fault it’s been Thursday every day for so many bloody Thursdays, isn’t it?”
“It’s not my fault,” I said.
“Well, it’shisfault, then,” said Wickham. “Willie-Will’s. Whatever the case, I’ve gotten in the habit of it. Kill everyone except anyone useful, like the cook, and then you have the whole day, full of blessed peace.”
My lips parted in shock and horror.
“Oh, come now, it’s not as if they’re really dead!” He ambled out of the breakfast parlor. “You coming, then? There’s quite a spread at Rosings if you’re hungry.”
I stared at Mr. Collins, dead, bleeding into his tea cup. I let out something like a sob. And then I went after Mr. Wickham.
“I don’t understand how you ended up here!” I called as I ran after him. “You were not here, and you should start each day in Meryton.”
“Yes, if I get myself killed, I wake up there in my tent,” he threw over his shoulder. “And if that should happen, I don’t know if I’ll come back out here or not. I was here only because I was looking for Darcy and that pocket watch, but I think I’ve gotten out of that part of it.”
I fell into step with him. “You mean the part where you try to make it stop?”
“Yes,” he said, with a nod. “I’ve accepted it mostly, now, I think. It’s not so bad, once you have everyone shot dead, anyway. Peace, like I said.”
“Mr. Wickham,” I said, “you cannot go about shooting everyone every Thursday.”
“I assure you, Elizabeth, I can and I have and I do.”
“And no one has give you leave to call me by my first name!”
He shrugged. “I don’t suppose any of that sort of thing matters.”
I might have said more, but I looked up to see that Charlotte and Maria were cresting up over the hill, coming back from town, and I didn’t wish him to see that, so I urged him on, moving ahead of him so that he would catch me up.
I don’t know what I thought to accomplish by doing this, however, for it was not as if Charlotte and Maria would not immediately discover Mr. Collins’s body, and if they did so, they would then raise the alarm, which would mean they would eventually come to Rosings, and there, Mr. Wickham would probably shoot them.
I was protecting no one.
