Dawn Of The Dreadfuls Part 8

"After dinner, woman."

Which was answer enough for Mrs. Bennet.

"Ohhhhhhhhhh!" she cried, rolling her head and grabbing Mary with one hand, Kitty with the other. "My last hope, gone! Instead of throwing my eldest in the path of eligible bachelors, they're to be thrown to the unmentionables! And so go the rest of us, girls-to a potter's field or down a dreadful's gullet, one or the other! And all because your father started taking orders from some ponytailed stripling who doesn't even have the sense to cook his fish!"

Lydia and Kitty joined in with weeping of their own, and even Mary's eyes took to watering behind her spectacles (though Elizabeth suspected this had more to do with the way her mother was crushing her hand).

When Elizabeth glanced at Hawksworth to gauge his reaction to this spectacle, she was surprised to find him intently gauging hers. He seemed both puzzled and approving at the same time, as if he were asking himself a question Elizabeth herself had considered often over the years: How did she come to be in the same family as her younger sisters and mother?

As Elizabeth watched, a placid blankness fell over the Master's face, like a curtain being brought down on a play, and he looked away and rose from his seat.

"From now on," he said calmly, picking up his plate, "I shall take all my meals in the dojo."

Mr. Bennet watched him walk out with a look that was equal parts humiliation and jealousy. He then turned to his wife and undertook the fruitless task of calming her without outright giving in to her.

"I will speak to him in private, Mrs. Bennet. Our young friend doesn't understand the full importance of the ball, that's all."

"Explain it to him, then! Tell him the estate is entailed away, and helping two of our daughters land husbands is the least he can do if he's going to lead the other three to their doom!"

"Yes, well, there is more to the ball than the Master could guess, and I think he might change his mind once all the facts are laid out before him."

"What do you-?" Elizabeth began.

Her mother talked right over her question, though-and kept on talking until the opportunity to ask it was gone.

"The Master! Oh, how it rankles to hear you speak of the pup thus. So rude, he is! So aloof! To think that our very survival should require you to grovel before a guest in our own home-and such an ungracious one, at that!"

And so on.

As it turned out, a guest in their home Hawksworth was not, for he not only finished his dinner in the dojo, from then on he did his sleeping there, as well. Mrs. Bennet regarded his retreat from the dining table and guest room as a victory over the man, and the next morning she had another: Her husband informed her that the Master had relented. Jane and Elizabeth could attend the ball after all. Unfortunately, Mrs. Bennet had but a few hours to savor her triumph.

Mr. Bennet and the girls were practicing new stances with their Master-and, consequently, working on the speed of their laps and the crispness of their dand-baithaks-when the scream rang out from the house. It was a shriek of pure horror, high and piercing, and it didn't fade away but instead simply cut off, as if suddenly stifled.

Within seconds, Elizabeth and her father and sisters were charging inside, and they found Mrs. Bennet splayed out on the foyer floor. Her eyes were closed, and a kneeling Mrs. Hill was frantically fanning her with a piece of paper.

"My word!" the housekeeper cried. "I think she went and fainted for real, this time!"

"What happened?" Elizabeth asked.

"I don't know! Mrs. Goswick's man Bridges showed up with a letter, and she'd barely opened it before she was flat on her back!"

Mr. Bennet reached down and took the paper Mrs. Hill was using as a fan. She kept flapping her hand over Mrs. Bennet as he read the letter for all.

Mrs. Bennet, It has come to our attention that your daughters, Miss Jane Bennet and Miss Elizabeth Bennet, have, of late, and at the behest of your husband, Mr. Bennet, become engaged in most remarkable, and one could even say shocking, activities (of a martial nature-I trust you will know what I mean). As the girls have, apparently, committed themselves to these brutal pursuits, we would not, of course, and with regrets for the invitation previously extended, expect to see them at so genteel an occasion as the ball we will be hosting, Thursday next, at Pulvis Lodge.

Yours etcetera, etcetera, Mrs. J. Goswick.

"By gad," Mr. Bennet sighed when he reached the end. "The wretched woman does love her commas."

"Well, I think it was very kind of her to write as she did," Mary said. "To be thinking of Jane and Elizabeth's training when-"

"Oh, you stupid cow!" Lydia howled at her. "Don't you see what this means? Jane and Elizabeth aren't welcome at the spring ball. They've been told not to come! We're ruined!"

"Now I'll never get to go to a dance!" Kitty wailed. "Not even one!"

As Lydia and Kitty fell into each other's arms weeping, Elizabeth simply waited for whatever her own reaction might be. Tears, anger, bitter laughter... what was it to be? And why didn't it come more quickly?

Before she had her answer, Jane whirled around and ran up the stairs, her face in her hands. Elizabeth turned to go after her and found herself facing Master Hawksworth. He was about forty feet off, on the lawn, watching through the open front door. Yet the intensity of his gaze made her feel they were face to face, uncomfortably close.

Elizabeth stood there frozen, staring at the brawny, dark-haired man framed in the doorway, and the answer she'd been awaiting-the certainty she longed for-seemed to come nearer in that moment.

Then she heard the first of Jane's sobs upstairs, and she had, if not an answer, at least a purpose, and one she couldn't ignore.

She turned her back to the door and went after Jane. Yet even when she was on the stairs, well out of the Master's line of sight, she could feel him watching her. It was as if he were searching for his own answer-one that lay buried somewhere, somehow, within her.

CHAPTER 12.

EACH NIGHT, as had long been their custom, Jane and Elizabeth ended the day before the mirror in Jane's room, talking and brushing each other's hair. The only difference after nearly a week of training in the deadly arts was that now they were dressing each other's wounds, as well.

That morning, their instruction under Master Hawksworth had reached a new stage. The girls weren't merely practicing anymore. They were fighting-not just each other, but their father, too. Which meant they'd done a lot of losing, and losing a sparring match with a mace or a practice sword or even bare hands is bruising work.

Elizabeth winced as Jane ran the comb over a spot where her father had rapped her with his bo staff. "A little tap," he'd called it at the time, "to remind you to keep your guard up." When she'd wobbled and feigned light-headedness, luring Mr. Bennet in for a (missed) lunge, she didn't just get the usual "Not bad" from the Master, who watched the matches, arms crossed, in a corner. She actually saw a hint of satisfaction crack the granite hardness of the young man's face.

"Ow!"

Jane's comb had caught on the dressings wrapped round her head.

"I'm sorry, Lizzy. Why don't we stop?" Jane moaned, settling onto her bed. "I feel as though my arms are about to fall off, anyhow."

"It's all right. It hardly matters if I have a tangle or two, does it? It's not as though Mrs. Goswick will be dropping by." Elizabeth smiled at her sister in the mirror. "Though I almost wish she would. I might not be able to beat you or Father, but I'd love the chance to spar with her. She'd come out of it with more than one 'little tap' to bandage, I'd wager."

"Lizzy, you must learn to be more forgiving," Jane said gravely. Yet she seemed to savor the image, and a moment later she returned her sister's smile-to Elizabeth's relief.

Master Hawksworth's resistance to the ball had been a disappointment, but it lacked the sting of a slight. So Mrs. Goswick's un vitation (as Elizabeth had dubbed it) had hurt Jane far more deeply. It had been four days since they'd received the lady's letter, and with each Elizabeth had tried a new tack with her brooding, wounded sister.

The first: enfolding arms and soft, soothing words.

The second: bitter recriminations and seething.

The third: refusing to speak of it.

The fourth: laughing about it.

This last had proved by far the most effective. She might have tried it first, only it had taken her all those days to be able to laugh again. She'd been in no hurry to marry, despite her mother's shoves toward the altar, yet to know that now a respectable marriage was forever denied her-that she and her sisters were, thanks to their father, outcasts-seemed to dry up every smile inside her. She'd been shocked to awaken that morning ready to make light of it all.

"It's not true, though," Jane said, and her smile turned sly in a way that was rare for her. "That it doesn't matter what you look like anymore, I mean. Someone notices."

"Et tu, Jane?" Elizabeth gasped in mock exasperation. "For Lydia and Kitty to indulge in such fantasies hardly surprises me: They need some outlet now that they have no coming-out b.a.l.l.s or suitors to look forward to. But you-?"

Jane shook her head. "It is no fantasy. Master Hawksworth looks at you in a way he doesn't look at the rest of us."

"If he does, it is merely because he thinks me a promising student."

"I agree." Jane c.o.c.ked a delicate eyebrow. "But promising what, I think, would be a fair question."

"Oh, don't look at me like that," Elizabeth laughed. "Salaciousness doesn't suit you."

"You're right," Jane sighed, collapsing onto her back. "And at any rate, I'm too tired for it."

Yet Elizabeth, despite her protestations, was not. She retrieved another brush from the bureau and continued working on her dark, gently curling hair, brushing out knots as she sought to unsnarl her own thoughts.

Yes-she had noticed how the Master looked at her. Not with the dewy eyes of the pitifully smitten. His gaze was sharper than that, piercing, as if he were straining to see something hidden behind her eyes.

And he wasn't the only one to lapse into the occasional stare. More than once, Elizabeth had found herself gazing upon him with what was, for her, an unfamiliar muddling of her thoughts. As a teacher, he was demanding, condescending, aloof. Yet he was also, without doubt, the most fascinating man she'd ever met.

It was more than his strapping handsomeness (though she had to admit, that counted for something). He was just so... different. And so unashamed about it. Elizabeth admired his confidence, even if it edged toward vanity. How he seemed to relish every opportunity to strip off coat and vest so as to demonstrate some new move. But perhaps such pride was simply the armor one needed to withstand the scorn of the Mrs. Goswicks (and, alas, the Mrs. Bennets) of this world.

If only there were some way she could strip away that armor and reach the man trapped within. He might be very different, underneath it all. Perhaps even as pleasing as his looks.

And his looks-they were pleasing indeed. So very, very pleasing...

"Lizzy, did you hear that?" Jane said.

Elizabeth blinked her eyes, and again she was seeing herself in the mirror instead of Master Hawksworth.

"Hmm, what, hear something?"

Jane was sitting up stiffly on her bed, and she turned toward the door and pointed. "Out there. In the hall."

Elizabeth listened. Then listened some more. And just when she was about to say "I don't hear anything," she did.

A soft, clacking sort of sound it was, like fingernails rapping lightly against gla.s.s or a fork tapped against a tabletop.

"You hear it?" Jane asked, voice low.

Elizabeth nodded.

"What do you think it is?"

"I... I don't know. I thought everyone else was asleep." Elizabeth attempted a nonchalant shrug, yet when she went on talking she did it at a whisper. "Perhaps it's a branch brushing against one of the windows."

"I don't think so."

Jane nodded at her own window. Outside, dark shapes loomed in the dim moonlight-the silhouettes of the nearest trees.

They were perfectly still. There was no wind that night.

The quiet clicking continued.

Then a floorboard creaked.

Elizabeth turned to the bureau, put the hairbrush upon it, and slid off the stiletto knife she'd left there earlier.

Jane reached under her pillow and pulled out her nunchucks.

Master Hawksworth had insisted that the girls begin sleeping with their weapons. "So that even in your dreams, you will remember you are warriors," he'd said. None of them had appreciated this much at first-particularly Lydia, who almost strangled herself with her own garrote one night as she dreamed she was putting on a new diamond choker. But Elizabeth was grateful for the edict now.

Slowly, she rose and crept toward the doorway. Moving silently was something they'd spent hours practicing that very day, walking again and again over a bed of twigs, dried leaves, and shards of shattered gla.s.s, doing laps and dand-baithaks by the score until they could all get across without making a sound. So there was no squeaking of old wood beneath their feet as they gathered together by the door.

The creaking outside, however, continued, as did the m.u.f.fled rattle.

"I will go first."

Whisper soft as Jane's words were, Elizabeth could still hear the tremble in them.

"We will go together," she said, and without waiting another moment-for what could waiting do but give fear more time to take root?-she opened the door.

Side by side, Jane and Elizabeth stepped forward, weapons at the ready. They found themselves in a soft, low light flickering along the hall-the glow of a single candle resting on the floor at the end of the corridor. Beside it in the dim light was a hunched form in a shroud-like gown, its back to the girls.

There was another rattle, and the thing at the end of the hall shifted its weight and moaned softly.

"It's trying to get into Father's room," Jane whispered.

Elizabeth started down the hall. "The stiletto would be best."

"No." Jane caught Elizabeth by the arm. "The nunchucks."

"Don't be a fool. This is work for a blade."

"That little thing? It has no range. With these, at least, I can stun it before-"

"You can't stun a zombie."

"Of course you can."

"No, you can't."

"We must ask Papa."

"Well, I hardly think now is the time."

"I didn't mean now."