“Just look at them! Two days ago, they were proper young ladies. Now they look like escaped bedlamites!”
“Mamma, please,” Elizabeth said.
Mr. Bennet sighed and stirred his tea, though his teacup was empty.
“You would throw away our respectability, our station, our prospects, because of a single unmentionable? I thank Heaven, then, that we only saw one. Two, and you’d have no doubt hurried home and burned Longbourn to the ground without waiting for ruin to overtake us!”
Mr. Bennet hid himself behind a letter the footman had just brought in.
“We may as well go lie down in the nearest cemetery and simply await our fate,” Mrs. Bennet went on. “With the estate entailed and no male heir, there is no hope for us. Oh, if only you were a boy, Mary, as you were once so often thought. But, alas, you are all quite irreversibly—”
“Lord Lumpley is coming.”
Mrs. Bennet whipped around to face her husband.
“The baron?” she asked.
“The baron.”
“Is coming to Longbourn?”
“Is coming to Longbourn.”
“To pay a call?”
“To pay a call.”
“On us?”
“On me. I sent a letter yesterday requesting an audience to discuss the incident with Mr. Ford, and Lord Lumpley has agreed, though he chose to pay a call here instead of summoning me to him.”
“I wonder why he’d do that?” Lydia asked, and just in case anyone couldn’t tell the question was rhetorical, she winked and nodded at Jane and burst out laughing.
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Bennet!” Mrs. Bennet cried, and she swooped down on her husband and delivered one kiss after another to his forehead and cheeks. “Sweet, patient Mr. Bennet! Wily, crafty Mr. Bennet! Luring the baron here when you know how smitten he is with Jane! Oh, sly, shrewd Mr.—!”
“Enough!” cried flushed, flustered Mr. Bennet. “Lord Lumpley and I will be discussing unmentionables, not marriage!”
But Mrs. Bennet wasn’t listening.
“Hill! Hill? MRS. HILL!” she blared. “Where is that wretched woman when you really need—ah, there you are! We have so much to do to get ready! You must cut fresh flowers, polish the silver, launder the table linens, set out the girls’ best morning dresses . . . ooh, and run to the village for cakes! What? Which one first? Why, all of them, of course! The Baron of Lumpley is coming!”
Through it all, Lydia and Kitty whispered and tittered and snorted, ignoring Mary’s disapproving glowers (it falling to their sister to sit around looking dour and long-suffering now that Miss Chiselwood was gone).
Elizabeth and Jane, meanwhile, were exchanging significant looks of their own. Elizabeth’s was simultaneously concerned and fierce; Jane’s, discomfited and mildly reproachful. The two girls disagreed on few things, and one of them was about to pay them a call.
“You don’t seem as excited as your mother,” Mr. Bennet said dryly, eyeing first Elizabeth, then Jane.
“My excitement is merely of a different sort,” Elizabeth said.
“And I think it is premature for overexcitement of any sort,” said Jane.
“I see.” Mr. Bennet nodded sagely, then looked at Elizabeth again, eyebrow cocked. “You know, I’m suddenly put in mind of the next move I should like to teach you all. It is called the Fulcrum of Doom. We shall take it up directly when we return to the dojo.”
THEIR FATHER WAS OBVIOUSLY UNHAPPY WITH THEIR LIMP GRIPS AND HESITANT MOVEMENTS.
The Fulcrum of Doom turned out to be a remarkably simple move involving no more than a quickly lifted leg and a strategically placed knee. (It was presumed the Doomee would be male. Why had to be explained with some delicacy.) After running his daughters through it to his satisfaction—and nearly being Fulcrumed himself more than once—Mr. Bennet chose to focus on sword work.
It was a bit frightening, picking up one of the long-bladed, foreign-looking katanas for the first time, and when Elizabeth and her sisters began taking slow practice swings, her hands were soon slick with sweat. No matter how tightly she tried to clamp down, the hilt felt lubricious, loose. As with everything her father had been trying to teach them the past day, Elizabeth found it difficult to get a grip.
Yet Mr. Bennet seemed pleased with the way she and Jane handled their swords, and he steadily increased the speed of the girls’ swings and thrusts—right up to the moment Kitty’s katana spun from her hands and speared a post mere inches from Mary’s head.
“Smooth, controlled movements,” Mr. Bennet growled. “Where’s the poise? Where’s the presence of mind?”
“Over there,” Lydia said, pointing at Elizabeth and Jane.
Mr. Bennet glowered at her. “Prepare yourself for the punishment you have long deserved. The first and last time I made a joke while training under Master Liu, he took blow dart practice on my . . .”
He blanched and, for a moment, could go no further.
“Ten laps around the grounds, child,” he finally said.
“Ohhh!”
“Ten laps! Go!”
Lydia shuffled off in a half-hearted jog, her arms hanging slack at her sides.
They practiced some more after that, but before long Mr. Bennet gave the girls the rest of the day off to prepare for Lord Lumpley’s visit.
“I will remain in the dojo and am not to be disturbed,” he told them glumly. “I find I have much to meditate on.”
The girls marched off toward the house sluggishly, soaked with a perspiration that would be, for a proper young lady, an entirely alien and repulsive thing to experience. Yet, to her surprise, Elizabeth found that she didn’t much mind. It was what was to come that bothered her.
“Up we go,” she said to Jane as they trudged upstairs to change out of their soiled sparring gowns. “Onto the auction block.”
“You’re being ridiculous, Lizzy,” Jane admonished her gently. “A man like Lord Lumpley could never take a serious interest in any of us.”
It was true, Elizabeth knew. Yet it wasn’t a serious or, more to the point, honorable interest that concerned her, and as she dressed for the baron’s call, she paused from time to time to practice the Fulcrum of Doom.
CHAPTER 7
ONCE THE BENNET GIRLS were ready, they lined up in the drawing room for review. Mrs. Bennet gave each a thorough going-over, adjusting ribbons and straps, fussing over nonexistent stains and wrinkles, plucking out stray strands of hair, clucking over all the bruises and abrasions, etcetera. When she was satisfied (or as close to satisfied as she could ever come), she arranged her daughters artfully around the room: Elizabeth at the pianoforte, Jane and Mary doing needlework on a divan, Kitty and Lydia bent over a book of Latin conjugations Miss Chiselwood had left behind when fleeing from the house.
Then, the panorama prepared, they waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Lord Lumpley’s note said he’d arrive at three, rather late in the day for a call, but allowances were made for an aristocrat. Or would be if one ever showed up.
By four, Jane was more tranquil even than usual, for, wearied by the day’s training, she’d fallen fast asleep.
By four thirty, Kitty and Lydia’s constant sniggering and sauciness had frayed Mary’s nerves to the breaking point, and she threatened to use her knitting needles in a most unsisterly fashion.
By five, Mrs. Bennet was ranting that Lord Lumpley probably wasn’t coming at all, having heard (she conjectured—loudly) that the girls had taken to beating each other with sticks under the direction of their deranged father.
And at precisely five fourteen, Mr. Bennet came in and told his wife to hold her tongue, if that were possible without causing herself grievous injury. The baron’s carriage was pulling up out front.
“Well, don’t just sit there!” Mrs. Bennet cried, shooing her daughters from the spots that she herself had cemented them in nearly two hours before. “Come and greet His Lordship!”