pride and prejudice and zombies:: dreadfull ever after

Part 25

CHAPTER 25

At first, Mary didn't mind the stares. In fact, she rather relished them. So she was a lady walking through a respectable neighborhood beside two mangy dogs and a black box. What of it? She could choose her own company. If she should decide to go for a stroll with a flock of geese while pushing an orangutan in a purple perambulator, who had the right to stand in judgment?

She had released herself from the shackles of propriety. She was free!

Still, the gentlemen's frowns, the ladies' scowls, the children pointing and laughing—she wasn't entirely immune to it. There was freedom, and then there was making a spectacle of oneself.

So Mary tamped down her misgivings and kept up her nerve the best way she knew how.

"Mary Wollstonecraft tells us," she said, "and I quote: 'Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.' How true! It is one of the reasons I have never much missed such attentions. If one is pursued by suitors, let's say, is that really a thing to be envied? For what is the purpose of pursuit but capture, imprisonment, destruction even? Better, I think, to be left alone to one's own pursuits—those that elevate spirit, mind, and body—rather than wallow in sentiment."

Here, Mary remembered to pause (something she'd been mostly forgetting that morning) to allow Mr. Quayle the opportunity to either demonstrate his intelligence by agreeing or expose his ignorance by dissenting. She heard nothing from the little crate rolling along beside her, and after a moment she began to wonder if Mr. Quayle had been listening at all—or was even awake. Ell and Arr certainly seemed to know the way, turning crisply at all the right corners without any apparent pulling on the reins that disappeared into the slot of Mr. Quayle's box. For all Mary knew, the man inside was slumped against a pillow, snoring contentedly until a yap from his dogs alerted him that they'd reached their destination.

So she decided to try a test. She would ask the question her mother always claimed either put men to sleep or sent them fleeing.

"Have you ever read Mrs. Wollstonecraft?"

"I mean"—she quickly threw in before Mr. Quayle could answer (or not)—"did you ever read her? Before your ... change in circumstances?"

"Oh, I still manage to keep up my reading," Mr. Quayle replied, sounding as chirpy and cheerful as one could when speaking (it seemed from the rasp of it) through a throatful of scars and sand. "I've trained Arr and Ell to shave my face, load a flintlock, and prepare and cook an entirely satisfactory shepherd's pie. Turning the pages of a book was nothing. Yet I have, alas, never sampled Mrs. Wollstonecraft. I recently read her daughter's novel, though."

"Oh," Mary said. "That. Yes, I read it as well. Mrs. Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth to Mrs. Shelley, you know. I wanted to see what her sacrifice had begat."

"I take it from your tone that you did not find Mrs. Shelley's work worthy of her heritage."

"Most novels are worthless, Mr. Quayle. Frankenstein has the added defect of being perverse. I can only take solace from the fact that Mrs. Shelley's little grotesquerie will soon be forgotten, allowing her mother's legacy to live on, unsullied and immortal."

Mary almost stopped there, pronouncement complete, but she was overcome by the sudden urge to add four more words she had, up to then, rarely spoken.

"What do you think?"

"I'm afraid I must differ. The story aroused my sympathies in the deepest way imaginable. Though, thanks perhaps to my unique 'circumstances,' those sympathies often lay with the monster, not its creator. As to the book's perversity, yes, I will grant it was intended to shock, in some ways. But, given the things you and I have seen—"