It was too awful even to contemplate.
“Papa . . . I can’t.”
“Tut tut, child. You can. This one is newly born to darkness. Still weak. Those to come won’t be nearly so easy to deal with.”
Mr. Ford swatted at the vicar hard enough to rock his coffin, sliding it a little closer to the edge of the bier. His rigor-stiffened muscles were relaxing, becoming more limber, gaining strength.
Elizabeth took a step back. “Why me?”
Her father’s gaze, usually so full of impish affection when pointed her way, hardened till it bore into her like an augur. “Why not?”
She could think of a dozen reasons, of course, first and foremost being that she was a young lady. Yet something in her father’s eyes gave his reply before she could even speak.
None of that matters. Not if the dreadfuls have returned.
At that moment, Mary came back inside carrying a huge pair of hedge clippers and, showing an initiative that put a smile on her father’s face, a scythe.
“Capital! Well done, my child!” Mr. Bennet called to her. “Now, Mr. Cummings, don’t faint just yet, if you please. I very much doubt you had the opportunity to administer last rites the first time Mr. Ford died.” He leaned closer to the coffin and addressed himself to the moaning, slavering thing clawing at the empty air between them. “Looks like you’re both in luck.”
When Mary reached the bier, Mr. Bennet had her hand the clippers to her sister.
CHAPTER 3
A SHRIEK ECHOED OUT from the church, and Mrs. Bennet shrieked, too.
A moment later, there was a howl, and Mrs. Bennet howled.
Then there was a bellow and a squeal and a yelp and finally silence, and Mrs. Bennet bellowed and squealed and yelped but—a stranger to silence all her days—didn’t stop there. Instead, she comforted herself (as was her way) with a caterwauled cataloging of the various and sundry misfortunes about to beset her and hers.
Jane and Kitty and Lydia huddled around their mother on the church steps, patting her and fanning her and cooing comfort. They were up to their twenty-third “Everything’s going to be all right” when a grim-faced Mr. Bennet stalked from the church and swept right past the four of them.
“Where are you going, Mr. Bennet?” his wife called after him.
“Home!” he barked without looking back.
“Surely you’re not walking!”
“We walked here, we can walk back!”
“But that was before—”
At last, Mr. Bennet stopped. “I will have no more of your buts! I have let them vex me too long!” He looked past Mrs. Bennet at his daughters, including Elizabeth and Mary, who were now trudging slump-shouldered from the chapel. “Fall in behind me, girls. We must quick-march to Longbourn. And if your mother can’t keep up,” he locked eyes with his wife, “we leave her.”
He spun on his heel and stomped off again.
“Oh, Mr. Bennet, you can’t, you can’t!” Mrs. Bennet moaned, throwing the back of a hand to her forehead and going into a long, staggering swoon.
“He’s not stopping, Mamma,” Kitty told her.
“Well, come along, then, come along,” Mrs. Bennet said, setting off after her husband.
Elizabeth, Mary, and Jane had already done so without pause.
It was a sunny, unseasonably warm April day—the reason they’d decided to walk to the church rather than take the carriage. Yet there was no birdsong to be heard as the Bennets began the mile-long trek home, nor were there foals, calves, or lambs to watch frolicking in the fields. All creatures great and small and in between, it seemed, had been put to flight by the horrible keening screeches cutting through the Hertfordshire woodlands.
And it wasn’t even zombies making all the noise.
“They’re back! They’re back, after all these years!” Mrs. Bennet wailed. “The dreadfuls, right here in Meryton! And your father will be ripped to shreds and Longbourn will fall to that frightful cousin of his and he’ll surely throw us out to starve in the gutter—if we should be so lucky before the unmentionables get us—and why oh why are we walking home when we could be set upon at any moment by a horde of sorry stricken and torn limb from limb? That must be what happened to that poor, dear, lovely what’s-her-name who’s been missing these past two weeks.”
“Emily Ward,” Jane said softly. Unlike her mother, she knew the name well: Emily Ward had been her friend.
“Why, if they can grab perfectly healthy young girls like her, a mature individual such as myself will be no match for them,” Mrs. Bennet prattled on. “Look sharp, girls! They’ll be coming for your beloved mother first!”
“You must try to remain calm, Mamma,” said Mary. She herself did not look calm so much as addled: Her eyes were glassy, and she walked with the shuffling, stumbling steps of a clumsy somnambulist. “Remember: Mr. Ford hadn’t been interred yet. If what I’ve read of the sorry stricken is correct, it will be days, perhaps even weeks, before more can dig their way from the grave to attack us.”
“Days? Weeks?” Mrs. Bennet cried. “Do you hear that, Jane? You have mere days to marry a man of means and rescue us all! Or you, Elizabeth—you’ll be out in two weeks’ time. Catch a husband at the Goswicks’ ball and spare us a fate worse than death! Oh! Oh, my! You don’t suppose they’d cancel the ball, do you? They wouldn’t! They can’t! I need both of you on the market if we’re to head off utter disaster! Ohhh, by the time this business is done, we’ll all be roaming about in our shrouds with fresh brain smeared around our mouths like so much marmalade, you mark my words!”
Mr. Bennet stayed well ahead of the rest of the party, either scouting for zombies or merely sparing his ears. Jane and Elizabeth, meanwhile, fell behind together, leaving it to their sisters to prop up their mother and, more importantly, so far as Mrs. Bennet was concerned, provide a captive audience for her babblings.
“Lizzy? Lizzy, what happened in the church? You and Mary look dreadf—I mean, horrible.”
Without looking over or speaking a word, Elizabeth reached out and took her sister by the hand. They walked that way, together, until Elizabeth trusted herself to open her mouth without screaming.
“Father wanted us to kill him. It. The dreadful.”
Jane gasped. “You and Mary?”
Elizabeth nodded.
“The clippers and scythe . . . those were for you?”
Elizabeth nodded again.
“Why on earth would Father wish you to do such a thing?”
“He didn’t explain.”
“Well, did you do as he asked?”
“No. Neither Mary nor I could do it. Papa kept telling us it wasn’t Mr. Ford anymore. It wasn’t a person. Yet it’s one thing to accept the truth of that and quite another to lop off a man’s head as easy as pruning a rose.”
“So what did Father do?”
Elizabeth started to shrug, but it turned into a shiver. “He lopped off the man’s head as easy as pruning a rose.”
The girls walked in silence a moment before Jane spoke again.
“We’ve always wondered.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “We’ve always wondered.”
Their parents were fire married to ice, and the strain always showed. Yet Elizabeth and Jane had known since they were far younger than Lydia was now that some other wedge divided their mother and father. Something that had to do with them—and the strange plague that once threatened all England.
There was Mrs. Bennet’s disgust for her husband’s collection of exotic weapons. There was Mr. Bennet’s air of chagrined resignation as Jane first, and now soon Elizabeth, came out into society. And there were the snatches of overheard arguments that seemingly made no sense—“warriors” countered with “ladies,” “honor” parried with “propriety,” “China” scoffed away with “England,” and someone named “Mr. Lou” blunted by “every respectable bachelor in Hertfordshire.”
“Soon,” Elizabeth said, “we shall have our answers, I fear.”
She squeezed Jane’s hand, then let go, and the sisters walked on side by side but alone with their own thoughts. Up ahead, their father was still clomping wordlessly along the lane while their mother made up the difference by talking enough for two, if not two dozen.
“I just thank heaven Lord Lumpley wasn’t there to see Mary running around with a scythe in her hands. The last thing we need is some sort of public spectacle with gardening tools.”
“I rather think it was Mr. Ford creating the spectacle,” Mary mumbled. And then, because she was too much in shock to stop herself: “Anyway, I don’t care what Lord Lumpley thinks. The man is a libertine.”
“Oh, he is, is he?” Mrs. Bennet hooted. “Well, it’s not for the likes of you to sit in judgment on the likes of him. Some people might say the baron’s a little too . . . frisky. But such things are forgiven in our betters.”
“Oh, Mamma—you just like him because he fancies Jane!” Lydia said. “I heard he danced with her three times in a row at her coming-out ball!”
“And he claimed every other dance at Haye-Park last October,” Kitty chimed in, throwing a teasing glance back at Jane. “And at Stoke at Christmas and the Robinsons’ hunt ball, too. Absolutely everyone’s talking about it!”
Yet “absolutely everyone” did not include Jane, and she kept her opinion of Lord Lumpley to herself.
As did Elizabeth. There’d already been enough to inspire retching that morning without dragging him into it.
“Personally, I think our Jane’s altogether too retiring for a man like Lord Lumpley,” Lydia announced, and—perking up now that they’d abandoned looming doom for a subject more to her liking—she began skipping a gay circle around the others. “That’s why he’s going to marry me when I’m old enough!”
“That’s the spirit, my darling,” Mrs. Bennet said. “I’m glad at least one of you has the good sense to set her ambitions high.”
Mr. Bennet finally slowed his pace and glanced back before shaking his head and carrying on even faster than before. Elizabeth caught only the quickest glimpse of his face, yet that was all she needed to recognize the expression upon it: deep, pained disappointment. It was one of the few expressions Mr. Bennet ever let crack his sardonic mask. Elizabeth always hated to see it—and hated it most when it was directed at his daughters.
She did not see it again for the next quarter hour, for Mr. Bennet did not look back. To the side, yes, to scan forest and meadow for movement, to eye the horizon for silhouetted human shapes, heads askew, limbs stiff. But otherwise he kept his gaze to the path. On what lay ahead.
When the Bennet caravan at last returned to Longbourn, they found the youngest girls’ governess, Miss Chiselwood, taking the air around the grounds, a slim volume of romantic verse clasped in one bony hand.
“Oh,” she said in her usual flat, listless way. She’d been a lively, cheerful young woman once, but Kitty and Lydia soon cured her of that, and she eyed the girls now like a bowl of old mold-encrusted porridge she was expected to eat with relish. “Back already?”
“And not a moment too soon,” Mr. Bennet said, speeding past her bound not for the front door but, rather, around to the back of the house. “Oh.” He skidded to a stop and turned toward the governess. “By the way, we will no longer be requiring your services, Miss Chiselwood. If you would be so good as to pack up your things, I’ll have six months’ wages and a letter of recommendation for you by the end of the day.”
“No, Mr. Bennet, no!” Mrs. Bennet cried out.
“Yes, Mrs. Bennet, yes!” Mr. Bennet snapped back.
“Oh, thank you, God,” Miss Chiselwood whispered, and she hurried off to her room, practically skipping. Mrs. Bennet scurried after her trying to explain that her husband was having “an attack” and didn’t really mean anything he said, but the family’s former governess was all too happy to ignore her.
Mr. Bennet started around the house again. “With me, girls! This way!”
And he led his daughters to Mrs. Bennet’s “greenhouse”—really just a ramshackle hut rotting away beneath a great, green spider web of vines. A few seconds after he stalked in, a potted daffodil came flying out. Then a bluebell. Then a rhododendron, a primrose, an iris, and so on.
“Well, come along and help me,” Mr. Bennet said as he added an armload of daisies to the mound of flowers and spilled soil and shards of clay heaped at his daughters’ feet. “Your mother has just lost her potting shed.” He smiled then, a grin of manic glee Elizabeth found too disquieting to share. “And I’ve finally got back my dojo!”
CHAPTER 4
“IS NOTHING SACRED to that woman?” Mr. Bennet grumbled, waving a hand at a musty corner of the greenhouse. “There are geraniums on my sword rack.” He gathered up the offending flowers and carried them to the door. “Master Liu would flay the last strip of skin from my back.”
It was his seventh reference to “the Master” since they had begun clearing out the jumbled bric-a-brac and half-dead plants, and with each new allusion Elizabeth had to work harder to suppress a shudder.
“My throwing daggers in with the trowels? Old Liu would dip me in honey and stake me to an anthill!”
“Are those ferns hanging from my bo staff? The Master would feed me my own fingernails!”
“Your mother’s been using my hand claws as tillers! Master Liu would rip out my heart and chomp into it like an apple before my very eyes!”
Etcetera.
If this Liu person had anything to do with Mr. Bennet’s plans for his daughters and his “dojo,” Elizabeth was very uneasy indeed. Yet the girls kept to their sweeping and dusting. So far, all questions to their father had been turned aside with a shake of the head and a firm “In due time.”
(Their mother, for her part, had made but one vain attempt to save her potting shed, but she’d retreated at the sight of her husband clutching a grime-covered spear. He’d found it staked to a currant bush and looked entirely inclined to use it for its intended purpose.)
“All right. That’ll do for now,” Mr. Bennet finally announced. He’d just tossed the geraniums onto the ever-growing heap of debris on the lawn and come back inside slapping the soil from his hands with obvious satisfaction. “Sit.”
The girls all looked around the little hut, as if they might have simply overlooked the divans and settees their father had in mind for them.
“There are no chairs, Papa,” Lydia said.
“There are no elephants, either. What is that to us?”
Mr. Bennet settled himself on the floor, legs crossed, back straight.
“We can’t sit on the ground!” Kitty cried.
“On the contrary. It is quite easy,” Mr. Bennet said. “Sit!”
Elizabeth caught Jane’s eye and nodded quickly at the floor. Jane was the eldest of the Bennet sisters, the leader. It was upon her to set the proper example.
But what was proper? Elizabeth could see her sister wasn’t sure.
She gave her head another downward jerk, and slowly, reluctantly Jane sank to the ground, her black skirt swirling in gray dust. Elizabeth followed suit, then Mary, then Kitty. Lydia remained upright, defiant, until Kitty yanked her to her knees with a sharp tug on the wrist.
“Good,” Mr. Bennet said. “But not good enough. In future, whenever we are within these walls, I will expect instant obedience. If I do not get it, there will be grave consequences.”
“Oh, really, Papa!” Lydia scoffed. “I can’t picture you whipping us with a cat-o’-nine-tails like ‘Old Liu’!”
Mr. Bennet glared at her. “Then you must change your picture of me. Whilst we are training, I am not your ‘Papa.’ I am your master, and you will mind me accordingly.”
“‘Training’?” Elizabeth said. “What sort of training?”
“Before I explain, we must have the first lesson. To attend me carefully, without the distraction of unnecessary comfort, you will learn to sit as warriors do.” Mr. Bennet held out his hands, palms up, over his crossed legs. “Like me.”
“Sit as what do?” Lydia said.
“We can’t sit like that,” Kitty protested.
Mr. Bennet shook his head in disgust. “You’re all so quick to point out what you can’t do. The time has come to learn what you can.”
“Well, it’s certainly not very ladylike,” Lydia pointed out.
“Ladylike be damned!” her father thundered, and all his daughters gasped. Yet they all did as he said, too.
Or they tried to, at any rate. Layer upon layer of binding feminine underthings—shifts under corsets under petticoats—made even so simple a task as sitting on folded legs a challenge worthy of a Hindu contortionist. After ten minutes of not entirely successful sitting practice, Mr. Bennet declared that the girls were close enough, and he would begin.
“Years ago,” he said, “when the threat from the dreadfuls was at its worst, certain Englishmen—and Englishwomen—turned to the East for guidance.”
“You mean like Lady Catherine de Bourgh,” Mary said.
“Hush, child! I’ve only just started!”
Mr. Bennet took a moment to compose himself, and began again.
“Years ago,” he said, “when the threat from the dreadfuls was at its worst, certain Englishmen and Englishwomen—such as the famous Lady Catherine de Bourgh—turned to the East for guidance. In the Orient could be found specialized methods of individual combat that seemed perfectly suited to the problem at hand. This rankled our more fervent patriots, who would have preferred an English solution to an English problem. But those of a more pragmatic turn of mind—and the resources to follow its dictates—undertook the long trek to furthest Asia and apprenticed themselves to masters of the deadly arts. I was one such person.”
Jane, Mary, Kitty, Lydia—all could contain themselves no longer.
“You have been to the Far East?”
“You fought in The Troubles?”
“Did you meet Lady Catherine?”
And, from Lydia: “My feet fell asleep. May I move my legs?”
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