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.
It was more than his strapping handsomeness (though she had to admit, that counted for something). He was just so . . . different. And so unashamed about it. Elizabeth admired his confidence, even if it edged toward vanity. How he seemed to relish every opportunity to strip off coat and vest so as to demonstrate some new move. But perhaps such pride was simply the armor one needed to withstand the scorn of the Mrs. Goswicks (and, alas, the Mrs. Bennets) of this world.
If only there were some way she could strip away that armor and reach the man trapped within. He might be very different, underneath it all. Perhaps even as pleasing as his looks.
And his looks—they were pleasing indeed. So very, very pleasing . . .
“Lizzy, did you hear that?” Jane said.
Elizabeth blinked her eyes, and again she was seeing herself in the mirror instead of Master Hawksworth.
“Hmm, what, hear something?”
Jane was sitting up stiffly on her bed, and she turned toward the door and pointed. “Out there. In the hall.”
Elizabeth listened. Then listened some more. And just when she was about to say “I don’t hear anything,” she did.
A soft, clacking sort of sound it was, like fingernails rapping lightly against glass or a fork tapped against a tabletop.
“You hear it?” Jane asked, voice low.
Elizabeth nodded.
“What do you think it is?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I thought everyone else was asleep.” Elizabeth attempted a nonchalant shrug, yet when she went on talking she did it at a whisper. “Perhaps it’s a branch brushing against one of the windows.”
“I don’t think so.”
Jane nodded at her own window. Outside, dark shapes loomed in the dim moonlight—the silhouettes of the nearest trees.
They were perfectly still. There was no wind that night.
The quiet clicking continued.
Then a floorboard creaked.
Elizabeth turned to the bureau, put the hairbrush upon it, and slid off the stiletto knife she’d left there earlier.
Jane reached under her pillow and pulled out her nunchucks.
Master Hawksworth had insisted that the girls begin sleeping with their weapons. “So that even in your dreams, you will remember you are warriors,” he’d said. None of them had appreciated this much at first—particularly Lydia, who almost strangled herself with her own garrote one night as she dreamed she was putting on a new diamond choker. But Elizabeth was grateful for the edict now.
Slowly, she rose and crept toward the doorway. Moving silently was something they’d spent hours practicing that very day, walking again and again over a bed of twigs, dried leaves, and shards of shattered glass, doing laps and dand-baithaks by the score until they could all get across without making a sound. So there was no squeaking of old wood beneath their feet as they gathered together by the door.
The creaking outside, however, continued, as did the muffled rattle.
“I will go first.”
Whisper soft as Jane’s words were, Elizabeth could still hear the tremble in them.
“We will go together,” she said, and without waiting another moment—for what could waiting do but give fear more time to take root?—she opened the door.