pride and prejudice and zombies:: dreadfull ever after

Part 6

CHAPTER 6

Oscar Bennet was a man who appreciated peace and quiet. Yet for years his library had been the only place he could find either. Out in the green fields of Hertfordshire were the shambling, ever-ravenous escapees from Hell that it was his sworn duty to return to Satan in as many pieces as possible. His home, meanwhile, had been invaded long ago by more alarming creatures still—a swarm of strong-willed females. One foe he fought fearlessly. In the face of the other, his preferred tactic had been, most frequently, retreat to his book-lined safe hold.

Things had changed in recent years. Oscar Bennet had peace, of sorts, if not always quiet. (His wife's silences were like those of the battlefield: rare and brief and offering no relief, for they only gave one time to wonder what nerve-fraying onslaught might rain down next.) The dreadfuls still had to be dealt with, but the far fouler curse—that of unwed daughters and an estate entailed to a male relation—had been lifted. The Bennets' eldest girls had been joined in marriage to wealthy men, and no longer would worries of dowries and entailments weigh on the family.

Scandal, too, was something Mr. and Mrs. Bennet no longer needed to fear, for their youngest daughter, Lydia, had also been successfully married off—the match being "successful" only in the sense that a ring was on her finger before a child was in her womb. Mr. Bennet considered this a great triumph, given Lydia's character, which had been her own particular entailment from her mother. Lydia had always been a wild child, as much a slave to her impulses as any unmentionable, and it was a thing to savor that a husband, rather than her father, was accountable for her capriciousness. As Mrs. George Wickham, she was free to fill up the world with offspring as feckless and reckless as she, and this she had immediately set to doing. And if none of them looked a jot like Mr. George Wickham, what was that to Oscar Bennet?

Huzzah! Sweet freedom!

Yet Mr. Bennet had discovered something surprising about freedom from fear. It can be rather boring. Without challenges or strife or the struggle for something better and new, peace and quiet could seem very much like stagnation. It was, after all, peaceful and quiet in a grave. Or had been, once upon a time.

There was always an easy way to liven things up, though, especially in the spring when the undead emerged from the holes and caves and other hiding places in which they weathered the cold winter winds that stiffened them like snow-covered statues. One could go on patrol.

"I have yet to see a dreadful roosting in a tree," Mr. Bennet said.

His second-youngest daughter, Catherine "Kitty" Bennet, was near the top of a particularly tall elm at the time, swinging from branch to branch like a gown-wearing ape.

"I'm merely looking for the best vantage point from which to survey the area," Kitty said.

"You are merely showing off," her sister Mary replied. It was not really her place to criticize, Mr. Bennet thought, for she had spent the last hour idly spinning her katana with her right hand while holding up Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with her left. She knew the roads and footpaths of Hertfordshire so well she'd covered the last mile without once looking up from her book.

"Why would I bother showing off for you and Papa?" Kitty snipped back even as she did a double back-flip that sent her spinning to another branch.

"Because no young gentleman is around to show off for instead," Mary said.

"Simply exercising one's abilities is not showing off. At any rate, what respectable gentleman would take an interest in a girl who can do this?" Kitty grabbed a branch and swung around and around until the bark started chafing off under her calloused hands. "Or this?" She let go on an upswing, flinging herself to the top of the next tree. "Or this?" She executed a perfect swan dive, plummeting to within feet of the ground before grabbing the last available branch and slinging herself back to where she started.