“Oh, my. He’s even worse than I am!” the doctor scoffed. “It’s Keckilpenny. And even mangling my name, Sir, you have me at a disadvantage. You would be . . .?”
Hawksworth spread his legs and put his hands on his hips. “Elizabeth Bennet’s master.”
“Her what? Goodness gracious, this isn’t America. You make it sound as though you own her.”
“Master Hawksworth is my instructor in the deadly arts,” Elizabeth said, moving between the two men.
Dr. Keckilpenny nodded and looked the Master up and down. “Ahhhh. That explains the physique, I suppose. Though why anyone should want to be all swollen up like a Frenchman’s balloon, I don’t know.”
“Better to be swollen than as spindly as a dried-out twig,” Master Hawksworth sneered back.
“Buh ruhzzzz,” Mr. Smith moaned, hungrily ogling the Master’s physique. “Buh ruhzzzzzz!”
Master Hawksworth snapped into a Striking Viper pose. “Did that thing just speak?”
Before anyone could answer, there was a loud thump across the room. Another quickly followed, and Dr. Keckilpenny’s trunk rocked and scooted a few inches across the floor.
“Doctor,” Elizabeth said, “do you have any idea why your luggage would be moving?”
“Oh, yes. That’s Westlake. Or was it Eastbrook? Whichever, he’s the guard who was killed in the house the other night. Capt. Cannon let me keep him as sort of a spare, in case Mr. Smith didn’t work out. It appears he’s reporting for duty.”
Elizabeth stared at the doctor, aghast.
Master Hawksworth began edging toward the stairwell.
“Come, Elizabeth Bennet. Let us leave this lunatic to his obscenities.”
“My work won’t seem so obscene when it saves your life.”
“Ha!” the Master spat. “What will save us is strength, not the devilry of warped meddlers.”
“Ha ha! What will save us is ingenuity, not the brute force of blood-thirsty simpletons!”
“I can show you what brute force is capable of,” Master Hawksworth said, even as he kept sliding toward the stairs.
“I’m sure you could. I would expect no more nor less from the likes of you. The only thing that surprises me is that Miss Bennet would choose to be your pupil.”
“Buh ruhzzz! Buh ruhzzz!” Mr. Smith said.
“You stay out of this,” Dr. Keckilpenny snapped.
“Whether you like it or not, I am Elizabeth Bennet’s master, whereas you, to her, are nothing.” Master Hawksworth turned to Elizabeth and held out his hand. “Come. We are leaving.”
“Pah! The Elizabeth Bennet I know bows to no master save her own mind. And in that, I am something a buffoon like you could never be: her equal.”
Master Hawksworth curled his hand into a fist and stepped toward Dr. Keckilpenny. “I warn you. Do not insult me.”
“You’re right. Why should I bother when you make an ass of yourself with no assistance from me?”
The Master bent his knees and curled his hands like claws, beginning a Panther’s Pounce.
He never finished it. Elizabeth’s kick sent him flying halfway across the attic.
“Stop it! Both of you!” She planted herself between the men again. “You’re acting like children!”
With stunned slowness, Master Hawksworth pushed himself up off the floor. Yet it wasn’t anger Elizabeth saw upon his face when he turned to look at her. It was something approaching wonder—almost worship.
“Elizabeth Bennet, you are a marvel,” he said. “I will not pretend to command you again. Instead, I will ask you. I will beg you. Please. Leave now. With me. Stay with me. I need you. There is a hole in my heart . . . a hole only you can fill.”
“If there’s a hole in you anywhere, it’s in your head,” Dr. Keckilpenny declared. “Clearly, Miss Bennet intends to stay up here. With me.”
“Oh!” Elizabeth cried out. She flung up her hands, and it was as if a dam within her burst, and everything she’d been holding back came pouring out. “The holes in you both are so vast I think it would take the two of you together to make one whole man!” She swung a sharp glare on Hawksworth. “You! You came to us as a Master, yet you’ve not mastered your own fear! You can jump, you can strike poses, you can do dand-baithaks by the score. But there is one thing you cannot or will not do: fight! Oh, maybe you can work up the courage to thrash some helpless weakling.”
“Hey,” Dr. Keckilpenny said.
“But when have you willingly faced a worthy foe?” Elizabeth went on. “You never sparred with my father in the dojo. Never even sparred with me! And you always seemed to disappear or go conveniently lame when it was time to deal with zombies.”
The Master flinched, and Elizabeth knew she would never think of him as “Master” again.
“Your ‘shameful secret’ is obvious to me now, as it should have been all along,” she said. “You are a coward, Geoffrey Hawksworth.”
Hawksworth lowered his head and said nothing.
Elizabeth turned to Dr. Keckilpenny and found him eyeing his rival looking altogether too smug.
“And you. Do you know what you are?”
“Mad?” the doctor ventured.
“Yes! Mad! And cold, despite all your jokes. You treat the dead as your playthings, and the living—they don’t enter into the equation at all! Not so long as you’ve got your toys in your ivory tower!”
“Precisely!” Dr. Keckilpenny began brightly. “And all that’s left to make it paradise is a suitable playm—”
The heart for quips left him before he could even finish the word, and he sighed and slumped and said, “Oh, it’s hopeless, isn’t it?”
“You look for hope in the wrong place. Both of you,” Elizabeth said. She felt spent now, empty. “What each of you lacks I cannot give you . . . and would not if I could.”
She turned and started down the stairs, hoping she’d reach the bottom before the tears came.
She did.
After a long, still moment, Master Hawksworth left the attic, as well. It was obvious he wasn’t going after Elizabeth, however. He simply had no choice but to follow in her footsteps.
“Buh ruhz,” groaned Mr. Smith. “Buuuuuh ruhhhhhhzzzzzzzzz.”
Dr. Keckilpenny slouched over and slumped back atop his chest, which was now rattling so fiercely it was scratching the floorboards.
“No, Smithy. Not ‘buuuuh ruhhhhzzz,’” he said. “The word is damn.”
CHAPTER 35
“ELIZABETH.”
At the sound of her name, she left the blackness. She’d been sleeping but not dreaming, as with the dead—the restful dead, anyway.
She saw her haggard father kneeling beside her, sucked in a lungful of the malodorous air, heard the banging and scraping on the window boards and the raspy, incoherent cries outside. And she longed for oblivion again as memory returned.
She’d spent hours—it seemed like days—fighting back one breakthrough after another. Sometimes with her father, sometimes with her sisters, sometimes with soldiers or servants or men from the village. Never with Master Hawksworth. Whatever battles he was or wasn’t fighting, he was facing them without her.
She couldn’t remember falling asleep, nor did she recall crawling under the dining room table with the mothers nestling sleeping or weeping children. Yet here she was.
“Come with me,” her father said softly. “It begins soon.”
Elizabeth was too groggy to even ask what “it” was. She simply got up and followed.
Lydia and Kitty, she found, were passed out together atop the table, while Mary was slumped, drooling on herself prodigiously, against a grandfather clock in the hallway.
“Papa?” Elizabeth said.