“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.”