pride And prejudice And zombies: dawn of the dreadfuls

chapter 5

FIRST, THE GIRLS had learned to sit. Next, they learned to stand.

The Natural Stance they mastered quickly, since it involved little more than keeping their feet together and their backs straight—exactly as they'd been taught by their mother and governesses all their lives. The Spread Eagle Stance took more getting used to. In fact, the first time their father said the words, "Now spread your legs wide like this," Mary gasped "Really, Papa!" and Kitty declared that she couldn't do it because it felt "naughty."

From standing, they moved on to yelling.

"A battle cry," Mr. Bennet said, "is a warrior's calling card. Only it does not say, 'Good afternoon. I have come for tea and crumpets.' It says, 'Death has come for you! Flee or be killed where you stand!' And it does so like this."

Mr. Bennet assumed the Spread Eagle Stance, scowled, and bellowed, "HAA-IEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

It was a very good battle cry indeed. So much so that Kitty instantly burst into tears. Once her father had her calmed, he asked Jane to try a cry of her own.

"Haiee," she said.

"Did you hear that, girls?" Mr. Bennet cupped a hand to his right ear. "I do believe a mouse just coughed."

Jane tried again.

"Haiee!"

"A consumptive mouse," Mr. Bennet said.

"Haa-ieeeee!"

"Which has stubbed its toe."

Mr. Bennet held up a hand and shook his head before Jane could unleash another of her half-hearted squeals.

"Your battle cry does more than announce your presence," he said. "It prepares you for combat by shattering the shackles of good manners and gentility. It is not a sound a gentleman or lady would choose to make. It is an animal sound—the roar of a killer stalking the jungle. As Master Liu used to say, a good battle cry 'unchains the tiger within.'"

"Perhaps I don't have a tiger inside me," Jane said.

"Everyone does, daughter. Everyone." Mr. Bennet turned to Lizzy. "You try it."

Elizabeth spread her legs, turned her feet outward, bent her knees, took a deep breath, closed her eyes—and split the world in two.

"HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

When she opened her eyes again, Elizabeth found her four sisters gawping at her, slack jawed.

"She certainly has a tiger," Lydia muttered, "and it's rabid."

"No," Mr. Bennet said. "It is hungry." He turned and headed for the door. "I must send word of what we saw in the church. Hopefully, we will not have to face what approaches alone. Keep practicing until I return, all of you."

"You want us to just stand around yelling?" Lydia asked.

"Only until you get it right," her father said, and then he was gone, striding across the lawn toward the back of the house.

"Haaiieee!" said Jane.

"Hiiyaaaa!" said Mary.

"Hooyaaah!" said Kitty.

"La!" said Lydia. "You have no idea how silly you all look!"

"Unfortunately, I think I do," Jane sighed. "Yet we must trust our father's wisdom."

"What if our father's a loony?" Kitty asked.

"You didn't see him with Mr. Ford," Elizabeth said. "What he did. It was not the work of a 'loony.' He is a warrior."

"And so are we to be," Jane said. Yet her words lacked the whip crack of conviction, and to Elizabeth she sounded resigned, not resolute.

"Outcasts, that's what all this will make us!" Kitty said, putting on a prodigious pout she'd learned from her mother. "Social papayas."

"Pariahs," Mary corrected. "And there's nothing wrong with standing apart. Fruitful, truthful observation requires a certain distance, I find, and our neighbors are entirely too—"

"Well, I don't think it's fair," Lydia cut in with a petulant stamp of one of her not-insubstantial feet. (Though only eleven, she was by far the stoutest of the Bennet girls.) "Jane's already out, and Lizzy will be within a fortnight, provided the Goswicks don't cancel the spring dance. But what of Lydia and Mary and me? No one's going to throw a ball for girls who run around screaming 'Haaiiieee!' like a bunch of savages."

"Lydia," Elizabeth said, shaking her head, "your coming out is still years off. You'd worry about a ball that far in the future when you saw an unmentionable in your church this very morning?"

Lydia shrugged. "Mr. Ford didn't look like much of a threat to me."

"Then imagine a thousand of him . . . with legs," Mary said. "From what I've read, there were more than that many at the Battle of Kent."

"So?" Kitty threw in. "That was Kent, and the battle put an end to them. Why, no one's even seen one of the things in years."

"Until today," Mary said. "For all we know, there are a hundred of them out in the woods this very moment, and they ate Emily Ward just like Mamma said."

Only Elizabeth noticed Jane wince.

"Well, Mamma also says there were never more than a dozen dreadfuls in Hertfordshire, even during the worst of it," Kitty sniffed. "So there."

"Mamma is not always right," Jane pointed out, understatement incarnate.

"All the same," Lydia said, "I'd still rather be an unmentionable than a spinster. If Father has his way, we'll all end up like Miss Chiselwood."

"Would that really be so bad?" Mary asked. "I'd hardly call becoming a governess a fate worse than death."

Lydia put her fists to her hips. "I would! If I'm not married by the time I'm seventeen, I'm running away to Dover and throwing myself into the sea."

As they had so many times over the years, Jane and Elizabeth shared a knowing glance and a mutual rolling of the eyes. It was actually a relief to set aside dreadfuls and battle cries and their father's possible insanity and commiserate again, for just a moment, over something as harmless as Kitty and Lydia's amour-mad ways.

"You may keep your date with the Channel when the time comes, if you so chose," Elizabeth told Lydia. "For now, however, we must follow the path our father has chosen for us . . . no matter how outlandish it might seem."

"Elizabeth is right. This is hardly the time to think of romance and matrimony," Mary said. "We must set aside such frivolousness."

"La!" Lydia snorted. "It set you aside a long time ago!"

"It's easy enough to say we should forget about love," Kitty added. "But I'd like to see any of you stick to it if some Sir Comely were to come along and woo you. Why, real passion can no more be 'set aside' than a dreadful will stay buried!"

Jane sighed.

"Sir Comely?" Elizabeth laughed.

"Mamma lets you read far too many novels," Mary said.

Yet their young sister had said something wise, quite without knowing it. Which was the only way she was likely to do it.

"Please, everyone," Jane said. "Let us return to our studies."

"Hiiyaaaa!"

"Haaiieee!"

"Hooyaaah!"

"La!"

"HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA-IIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"