A/N: Welcome back! Another chapter of Parlous Agency, our final arc.

Pride, Prejudice, and Pretense

Chapter 27: Black Friday

To reach the storeroom, Lizzy had to walk down a long, narrow hallway that ran alongside the dressing rooms.

Father Gabriel had impressed her and she wanted to look presentable, so she straightened her dress, smoothed it; it was wrinkled from a day of hard work and then sitting on the couch. The rolled yellow tape measure that she had used for fittings was still in one dress pocket, and a ballpoint pen in the other.

Behind her, distracting her and slowing her steps, she heard Uncle Gardiner quietly ask Aunt Gardiner about how much scotch Mrs. Bennet drank that afternoon.

"Why do you ask?" her aunt asked.

"That bottle was half-empty when she started pouring for us," her uncle answered, explaining his question.

"You know she's not going to work as hard as she did today without lubricant," Aunt Gardiner replied, but not unkindly. "And she worked hard today. The White Christmas idea was a good one, and she's celebrating."

"She's been sneaky celebrating all day."

Lizzy let go of the conversation as she stepped into the store room.

The store room always seemed cold, both because the heat in it never worked properly, and because the room was overcrowded with white gowns. Walking into it always produced the illusion of walking into a winter wonderland, cold and snowy.

Drifty.

Today, after a day of Christmas music playing in the shop, the snowy illusion caused a bit of Winter Wonderland to replay in Lizzy's mind, and made her think of herself and Darcy:

Later on
We'll conspire
As we dream by the fire
To face unafraid
The plans that we've made
Walking in a winter wonderland

The back door was hidden from view behind a large double rack of dresses, one rack higher than the other.

"Mom?" Lizzy called out softly as she stepped around the rack, less to provoke a response than to announce her arrival. She swallowed her sudden impulse to ask for Parson Brown, smiling at herself.

On the far side of the rack, Lizzy was confronted by her mother.

And a large man, a stranger — a killer.

Lizzy's smile died.

Mrs. Bennet was pale and huge-eyed, her elbow gripped by one large hand, the man's other hand holding a gun to Mrs. Bennet's temple. The back door stood open and the wind was whipping in; Lizzy inexplicably noted the swaying, loose wisps of her mother's graying hair as the wind blew them. She hadn't noticed how gray her mother had gotten.

Outside the door, the small back parking lot was dark.

Usually, a single light on a pole kept it illuminated; it was not shining. The only light in the lot was from inside the store room, an illuminated trapezoid of white light falling on the dirty, footprinted snow.

"Lizzy?" her mother whimpered, softly. "Lizzy?" Mrs. Bennet's eyes were terrified but unfocused, lost. Drunk, Lizzy realized. Uncle Gardiner was right. I hadn't paid enough attention.

In general. I tried to leave the spying and the artificial anxiety at Langley.

Lizzy felt her training rush back to her, overshadow her; she had distanced herself from her Company habits but they were not gone; her body tensed, poised itself, weaponized, although her comportment did not change.

"Mom, please, stand still," Lizzy said to her mother in a commanding whisper. Then she faced the man, staring into his eyes. "What do you want?"

The man lifted his head and tossed his chin over his shoulder, toward the open back door. Lizzy looked in that direction. She saw black shoes first in the light, then a black overcoat.

Then the black gun in his hand.

The white of his collar showed before his grim, satisfied smile.

"Father Robyn?"

The priest did not come inside. He stood in the trapezoid of light as if it were a fell spotlight.

"Hello, Fanny — or should I say, Agent Bennet?" He did not wait for a response. "I need you and — your mother? Mrs. Bennet? — to come with me."

Behind Father Robyn, Lizzy could now see the looming shadow of a large van, darkly silhouetted against the dark.

She did not try to process his sudden appearance — maybe later — instead she looked at her mother, speaking emphatically, unmistakably. "Do what he says, Mom." He's the Wicker Man.

Her mother nodded confusedly as she stared at Lizzy and then the gun in the priest's hand. "Agent Bennet? Father Robyn?" She repeated the words as if they lacked any meaning, brute sounds.

Lizzy stepped out the back door. Father Robyn backed carefully toward the van, staying well in front of Lizzy and then reaching with his free hand to open the van's side door.

Lizzy's mother followed. Lizzy glanced back: the other man still gripped her mother's elbow, still had the gun pressed against her head. He had closed the shop's back door.

Father Robyn gestured with his gun for Lizzy to stop beside the van.

It was big, tall, and lengthy, black. Lizzy had used similar vans for surveillance on previous missions. The rear of the van appeared to be empty, although her angle of view kept her from seeing all the way to the rear. The vans she had used had a windowed partition between the front two seats and the rear cargo area. This one did not; she could see forward to the windshield.

But it did have a bench seat behind the front seats.

"Put Mrs. Bennet in first," Father Robyn said to the other man.

The other man led Lizzy's mother to the side and helped her up and onto the bench seat. She slid all the way to the end, muttering. "I don't understand, Lizzy…"

"Now you," Father Robyn said to Lizzy, gesturing again with his gun. In the dark, she could not gauge his facial expression but the courtly mock-formality of his tone was completely gone.

Lizzy climbed inside and seated herself beside her mother. As she scooted over, she felt the seatbelts, and she immediately started helping her mother put hers on. Her mother's movements, intended to help, were slow, fumbling, but eventually she was belted.

The large man got squeezed onto the seat beside them, forcing Lizzy to sit bodkin. Father Robyn closed the side door from outside. Lizzy pretended to buckle it, timing her pretense to the shutting of the side door. The man seemed not to have noticed that the belt did not click.

The driver's door opened and Father Robyn got inside. The gun in his hand had been incongruous enough but for some reason, the sight of him behind the wheel of the van almost struck Lizzy as funny. Almost. He placed his gun on the passenger seat, within reach. The man beside her jabbed his gun into her ribs as a reminder of his presence, and the injury from Caspar Mountain protested sharply, the first time it had hurt in days. She did her best to stifle any reaction to the pain.

A moment later, the van was in motion, Father Robyn turning it onto the narrow street. Eyes on the street, he took a phone from his coat pocket, put it in a phone holder, and touched the screen; its GPS app glowed. An address had already been entered into it. Arrows showed, and a map — but the audio must have been turned off.

"Where are you taking us?" She glared at Father Robyn in the rearview mirror.

"To the end of this tale," he said, his lips stretching into a cruel smile. "At least, it will be the end for you — and Agent Darcy."

Lizzy's intake of breath was audible, impossible to hide, and Father Robyn's smile became a gloating smirk in the mirror.

"Your partner has caused me a lot of trouble, and you too. It's a shame your mother answered the door. I expected it to be you, the youngest in the shop still spry after a long day." He shrugged as if more affected by his dashed expectation than what it would mean for Mrs. Bennet.

"Who is Agent Darcy?" Mrs. Bennet asked, trying to understand the conversation but lagging behind. "Why is everyone an agent?"

Father Robyn nodded in response to her question, but agreeing with it, not answering it. "Yes, Mrs. Bennet, I've wondered that too."

"I'll explain it all later, Mom," Lizzy said, trying to sound kind, and unafraid. But she saw Father Robyn snicker in the mirror.

She stared back at him; she wanted to ask about Darcy but did not want to reveal more than she had. At least what Father Robyn said implied that Darcy was still alive, implied that they were heading toward him.

"So, you're him, the Wicker Man?"

As she asked, Lizzy squeezed her mother's hand, hoping she would understand the unspoken request for silence.

He smirked. "Me? Synecdochally, yes. Or, you might say that I am the head of the Wicker Man. It was never Wickham, despite the similarity of the names."

He pointed at himself, his head. "I am the head — but not the belly of the beast. Not the body. Others, like my friend here, make up the body." He waved one hand. "Think of it as vaguely but darkly like the relationship between Christ and his church."

Lizzy shook her head in disbelief. "Christ! You've got to be kidding! Are you really even a priest?"

Father Robyn navigated a turn but chuckled as he did. "What are any of us, really, Agent Bennet? We're all playing parts. Life's unequal stage. Are you Agent Bennet or are you Fanny Price…or are you Elizabeth Bennet?"

"The last," Lizzy said decisively.

"Ah, yes," Father Robyn said as if he understood all she meant, "but Elizabeth Bennet predated Agent Bennet and Fanny Price — and all the other aliases, didn't she? Do you really think you can be her again? Go home again? Hasn't too much happened, too much muddy water under the bridge, the muddy waters your Company life forced you to swim in? Haven't you made too many compromises, bargaining away your integrity bit by bit, inch by inch? Like Wickham's hand slipping up your thigh?"

Lizzy jerked at that, his knowledge.

Father Robyn chuckled again. "Rook told me about that."

Rook?

"Lizzy, is this your priest? Why is he talking about your thigh? Who's this man beside me? Where are we going?" Mrs. Bennet was edging toward hysteria.

Father Robyn looked at the man and, before Lizzy understood the look, the man leaped up, bracing himself with his free hand, and used his gun to club Mrs. Bennet violently, a cobra strike.

Mrs. Bennet slumped in the seat, held up by her seatbelt, a rivulet of blood running down from her temple toward her ear.

Lizzy gasped and twisted in the seat to find herself facing the bloody gun muzzle. The man had moved again with remarkable speed.

"You bastards, she's got nothing to do with this!"

Lizzy twisted back to her mother and checked her pulse. It was weak but steady; her breathing was shallow but regular. Unconscious, hopefully not seriously hurt.

"Now, we can talk without interruption," Father Robyn said, ignoring Lizzy's shout, her attendance on Mrs. Bennet.

"Am I a priest?" He returned to Lizzy's earlier question. "It depends on what you mean. I went to seminary, took classes, graduated, and did all that was necessary to become a priest. So, yes, I am a priest — outwardly. But if you mean do I believe, am I a priest, inwardly — no, I'm no priest. But this was always the best cover I could devise. Who is less threatening than an Episcopal priest? Especially a gay one? Who is more likely to seem of less consequence?"

"So you're not gay? That's part of the cover too?"

His laugh was chilling. "Now, would that make me homophobic? — Let's just say that I'm serious about my pleasures, and I am willing to take them from wherever, and whoever, I safely can, man or woman, young (he looked at Lizzy) or old (he looked at Mrs. Bennet). I do not discriminate."

Lizzy put her arm around her mother, involuntarily protecting her.

"So, you've been behind the Wicker Man all along? Wickham was…what?"

"A clever distraction. No, he was more than that. in his way, a help. I had the idea long ago of having an…avatar. Someone who would serve as a focal point for what I was doing other than me, and so that I could remain completely hidden. Someone who ran the risks while I reaped the rewards. Wickham was my avatar.

"Except he could not control himself, unlike me. He liked corruption, liked to corrupt young women, and I could not break his habit. But he managed to keep his hobby from being much of a problem. Until you."

Father Robyn turned the wheel again. They were in a poorer neighborhood, among buildings with windows boarded. Father Robyn seemed eager to talk, to share his cleverness. But his willingness to share made it clear that he planned for her (and her mother and Darcy) to die.

"I was worried about you from the beginning. Normally, Wickham chooses women who are — fragile. But you were not fragile. There's an underlying strength, a courage and an unruliness to you that I don't think you can completely hide. And when Wickham stopped fucking Lady Catherine — and any of her other bedmates — after your first visit, I knew he was…too involved."

"Involved?" Lizzy asked, shaking her head, dubious.

"Oh, don't misunderstand me. Wickham was never in love with you. That possibility didn't exist for him. I would never have chosen him, given him responsibility, otherwise. But he became infatuated, completely invested in corrupting the heart and abusing the body of Fanny Price. And in breaking the heart of Ned Moreland. He was obsessed with sending Fanny, ruined, back to Ned. Her ruin was to be his masterwork. I tried to talk him out of it; I tried to warn you — Fanny — but not because, then, I suspected you. You are very good at pretending, Agent Bennet. No, my suspicion would come later. I simply wanted Wickham focused on the matters at hand, on the Wicker Man."

"So, the tension and contempt between the two of you?"

"All part of the act. Mostly part of the act."

Lizzy knew her seatbelt was still around her waist. Even with her twisting, it still looked as though it were clipped.

She slipped her hand into her dress pocket and closed it around one of the ballpoint pens. She used her thumb, carefully, with a small motion, to push the cap of the pen off, exposing the ballpoint, all the while keeping her hand and the pen in her pocket.

"So, when did you begin to suspect me?" She needed to keep his attention, and to keep the other man's attention at least partly on Father Robyn, listening.

Father Robyn turned the van again. "After Wickham's trip to Rapid City. But I was unsure. My people did not discover the Company agents tailing Wickham until Wickham got to Vivos xPoint. I miscalculated. I thought the agents had picked him up there. Vivos xPoint, the community, is mine — or the Wicker Man's —including the security, of course. The Company team might have seen Wickham meet with Bang Fumerton. They had to be eliminated."

Another turn of the van.

"So, that place, the bunker community, Vivos xPoint, there was an explosion there recently, wasn't there?" Lizzy asked with a feigned innocence. She now had a sense of events, and she wanted to push a button, check his reaction, to see if she was right.

Father Robyn's head sank on his shoulders and his smirk twisted into a sneer. "Yes, after the mess on Casper Mountain, after the loss of Wickham, I called all the Wicker Man's lieutenants together. The failure with the Pow Wow, the chance you or Darcy…or Bingley…might put it all together, and suspect me…I called them all together to regroup, retrench, to end operations for a while until you were all dealt with, until I was sure I was, we were, safe."

Bingley is in danger too.

Lizzy made herself put the thought to the side, and focus: one mission at a time, even if she hadn't asked for this one.

The whole situation seemed impossible, artificial, staged — an evil priest in a van, a henchman with a gun — except that it wasn't.

It was Lizzy's Black Friday.

"But Darcy had figured it out, put it together, hadn't he?" I was right. Her tone was a deliberate goad.

Father Robyn's eyes burned. "Almost — but he thought I would be there in person. I wasn't."

"Your lieutenants all died?"

Father Robyn did not answer other than to flick his eyes toward the rearview, the anticipation of revenge visible in them.

Darcy gutted the Wicker Man, destroyed it. Now Father Robyn is here to destroy Darcy, me, Mom.

He'll kill us all — and then kill Bingley too, an afterthought but not to be forgotten.

Lizzy tried to keep the priest talking.

"Why The Wicker Man? Why use that name? That movie?"

Lizzy had a tight fist now on the ballpoint pen. Her fingers were wrapped around it, her thumb locked down over the non-writing end. The man beside her shifted in his chair; he hadn't noticed her hand in her pocket. He was looking at Father Robyn, not Lizzy. She made herself wait after another quick glance at her mother. Mrs. Bennet's temple did not seem to be bleeding much; a crooked stain of drying blood discolored her cheek. Lizzy was worried about her mother, worried about Darcy, but she had to choose her moment.

Father Robyn slowed for a red light — traffic signals had become rarer in the part of the city they were in, outskirts that Lizzy had never visited, not even as a child.

The priest sighed but in preparation, not frustration.

"I've lived my life…nailed to a religion I do not believe, that I detest," he said finally, in a quiet, convincing whisper that was just audible over the engine. "I did it because it allowed me to pursue what I do believe, to pursue a life, well, beyond good and evil.

He reached up and pulled his collar loose, removed it. "The movie appealed to me when I first saw it, the pagan against the Christian, the idea of appeasing the old gods — not the new, weak, crucified God of Christianity.

He turned to her as the light changed. "I want a different world, Agent Bennet, one ruled by the old gods, pagan, where only strength and pleasure are respected, not persons," he spit the word as the van moved under the green light, "a world ruled by natural justice, nature red in tooth and claw, as the saying goes, fangs and raw meat, not by the love and surrender, the milquetoast bromides, of the New Testament. I can't bring that world into being, ex nihilo, of course; but I can destabilize these — " he gestured out the windshield at the empty warehouses now surrounding them, " — these remnants of Christendom further, until the whole God-rotten system collapses under its own weeping, bleeding, self-righteous weight.

"All this backward belief in equality, in each person as an end, will finally die, and people will submit to their natural masters, to strength and pleasure."

Lizzy stared. "You mean — to the pleasure of the strong…"

He turned his head for a second and gave her a smile, chilling in context. "It's nature's way, and we all, including we strong, submit to Her — because she is strongest of all."

When he turned back to the road, gaining speed, Lizzy acted. My moment. As she turned in the seat, she yanked the ballpoint pen from her pocket, lifted it, and then whipped it down, driving the end of the pen into the neck of the man seated beside her. It sank sickeningly into him, and blood gushed hot around Lizzy's hand, drops splashing her face.

The man fell back off the bench, his gun going off, firing toward the top of the van. He gurgled as he landed on the floor, blood fountaining out of his neck.

Lizzy jammed her other hand in her other pocket and grabbed the rolled tape measure. She let it unspool as she pulled it free from her pocket. She leaped forward and wrapped the tape around the priest's throat. He was reaching for his gun when she yanked him backward, then quickly wrapped the tape around his neck again.

She pulled as hard as she could, one foot braced against the back of his seat.

He stopped trying to reach his gun and instead tried to steer. The van leaped up onto the sidewalk and careened toward a mailbox.

The van smashed into it, an explosion of envelopes and boxes.

Father Robyn reached up and tried to fit his fingers beneath the tape, to loosen Lizzy's noose around his neck, resist the chokehold. He whipped the steering wheel with his other hand, and the van ramped back off the curb and onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing an eighteen-wheeler that whipped past, horn blaring. Father Robyn was gasping for air.

Lizzy pulled on the measure with all her strength, thankful her aunt had the good sense to buy the unbreakable tape. Father Robyn turned the wheel again just before he collapsed forward, and the van crossed the opposite lane and went up and onto the opposite sidewalk, then through a chainlink fence, rusty and dirty in the bouncing headlights, bare earth and dark buildings beyond it.

The impact threw Lizzy forward, against the back of the driver's seat. A shed or outbuilding was ahead of them and the van plowed into the corner of it, the sound of splintering wood filling the night.

Lizzy tumbled over the driver's seat and onto Father Robyn, then was thrown to the side as the van's left side climbed a stack of cinder blocks, and the van tipped, tipped, almost tipped over, then fell back, rolling like a ship on the high seas.

The van finally stopped moving in a cloud of dust made visible by the headlights.

Lizzy ended up on her back, wedged between the seats.

As she put down a hand to scramble to her feet, she felt a gun on the floor. Whether it was Father Robyn's or the other man's didn't matter — she grabbed the grip, lifted it, and she shot the priest, twice.

He slumped heavily against the steering wheel, his breath escaping in a long involuntary sigh, the two ends of the tape measure hanging down from his neck, a yellow replacement for his white collar.

The engine had stopped, and a comparative, eerie silence filled the air.

Lizzy's ribs were aching, her body bruised. What she had done, the stink of blood, made her sick to her stomach.

Ignoring the pain and the odor, she stood quickly, and, after putting the gun in a pocket, checked on her mother. Mrs. Bennet was still unconscious, seat-belted safely in place, a parable of the drunk escaping injury in a wreck.

On the floor, in a pool of blood, below blood spatter on the wall of the van, was the other man, his eyes fixed open, the ballpoint pen still protruding from his neck.

Lizzy dragged the priest from the driver's seat and back toward the other man, dumping him there. She took the driver's seat. Somehow, Father Robyn's phone was still in the holder, the GPS still working. Lizzy turned the key, holding her breath. The engine fired, coughed, coughed again, then began to run.

Exhaling, she put the van in reverse, turning it around, and, punching the gas, she aimed for the hole in the fence from the van created on entry.

"Hold on, Darcy," she whispered fiercely, her eyes forward, "I'm coming, I'm coming."

The GPS showed her a right turn, and she took it.

A/N: Thanks for waiting. This one took some time and work, and then travel and the holiday and student papers added to it.

One or two more chapters to go (depending on how I break up the material), along with an epilogue. Obviously, there are still questions to be answered and more will be in the next chapters.

I'd be thankful if you left a review.

Oh, a heads-up. After I finish with this, I will probably leave it up for a few weeks but then I will take it down to begin the rewrite for publication.

Speaking of publication, my new novel, The Vanishing Woman (Meryton Press), is scheduled to be out today, on Black Friday. (Fingers crossed!) You can find it on Amazon. It's a Christmas tale — a romp through old mystery movies and romantic comedies.