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 balls 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 cocked 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.