Duelling Darcy

Elements of Succesful Sistering

"You can't see it, you can't smell it, nor hear, touch or taste it... but it's inescapable," Professor Bennet said with a pause for dramatic build-up as she let a lock of her chestnut hair quicken, curl and rise into the air and its promise of crackle.
"Who among you can tell me what 'it' is?" she asked her imaginary audience of acolytes.
"Love,' interrupted Jane, gutting the rhetorical question and sparking a melodious cackle of mischief from their younger sister Lydia who upon regaining some modicum of composure, as far as she so could, mouthed the word "lust" in answer.
"Stop it, both of you, I do require my effort not to be in vain," continued Professor Bennet, Christian name Elizabeth and Lizzie to her family. "I thought I'd continue like this: 'It' defies the five senses..."
A snort from the reading nook where Mary, the middle sister who'd never shown love of anything but being left alone and no lust apart from magicking moralising tomes out of book shops — which she'd recategorise from theft to saving whichever looted book of the day from disrespectful non-adoration — raised an unplucked, mouse-coloured eyebrow.
"Too much?" Elizabeth asked her.
"Too preachy," Mary unexpectedly replied, giver as she herself was of advice that was neither solicited nor for the most part of any practical use.
"They're first years, are they not, Lizzie? You are brighter than this fantastically round-about method," Mary statss as Lydia, uncharacteristically now flipping through one of their father's newspapers, gave Mary's put down a slight nod of approval.
"What if it," Lizzie answered as the bouncy curl fell limply down across her face, adding bedragglement to befuddlement.
"Teenagera don't want you to weave vivacious verse," Mary said with a certain belittling tone, "they want to see magick tricks."
"Fine!" Elizabeth snapped as each and every strand of hair alighted, her brow now creased aa the locks writhes g like snakes but as though every strand had been charged with... static electricity. Drawing the invisible potential from the parlour's air, Elizabeth gathered its power in a tight cloud of ice-blue lightning, and then hurled the crackling sphere against the portrait of their parents above the fire place.
An explosion of roaring flame. Jane gasped, the blue iris of her eyes turned liquid as they did when she prepared to defend herself.
Lydia laughed - mirth making her prettier until convulsing coughing depleted her face of most of its beauty; moods changed her appearance but as she was most days a giggling phenomenon of joie de vivre she was most often almost as handsome as the sylph-like almost in some lights transparent Jane who was a water magicienne.
Mary, jungle green eyes darkening, disapprovingly shook her head at Lizzie's magick trick and hastily retied her mud-brown shawl into a face mask, against the fumes, while the potted plant behind her used its blade-like leaves to fan the smoke away.
"What was that noise!?" exclaimed their baby sister Kitty as she rushed, trailing pastel ribbons behind her, into the room. "And that god awful smell?!" she added before turning around to witness as the oil painting was eaten by fire.
Elizabeth hadn't breathed since summoning the electricity, although as their mother — who like her found in Air and Fire combined a talent greater than the sum of its elements — would have no doubt seen fit to point out, one did not summon powers — only necromancers and other narcissists had the temerity to use that word — no, no, one "seduced" the elements; invited them and only the greatest of simpletons would issue such a invitation and expect for definite a response in the affirmative.
At that thought, Elizabeth finally drew breath and joined her sisters in coughing.
Jane reconquered composure first and asked Mary's dahlias for permission to use the water in their vase, and as the request was granted she redirected what became a sheet of tight mist to the painting,
"Ready?" she asked Lydia who raised a hand with an elegant yes-of-course nonchalance and nodded.
As soon as Jane's mist hit the canvas, steam joined the smoke, and Lydia asked the air to push them both out of the room. The door to the garden was in the midst of being opened by Kitty whose ribbons had wound themselves around and pulled down on the handle, and earth from a plant pot shaped itself into a hand, pushing the door open, after a suggestion from Mary — who managed to look as bored as ever she was with her sisters despite the above-average calamity of the present moment — and thus there Elizabeth Bennet stood, saved from fire smoke and steam, humiliated by no one but herself, and felt the threat of tears sting the lower lid of her ember eyes.
"Don't, please dont," said Jane who saw her distress and rose to embrace her, "don't hide behind anger."
"And you call me dramatic!" shrieked Lydia with ecstatic sarcasm.
Kitty's ribbons had just pulled shut the door when Kitty asked Mary — now pretending to read two books at the same time — why their sister, and the bright one too, the one who didn't need to marry as she was well paid as a Professor of Flame and Fire at Sowsteet Institute of Sorcery, and furthermore a senior consultant in cross-elemental magick research and development for the ministry — was acting more like their fiery mother than their airily cool father.
"Dashwood's retiring," Mary answered.
"And is that something that is a..." Kitty began tentatively before Lydia sent a gust of wind her way to silence her.
"It's a good thing, Itty Bitty Baby Kitty, because just imagine how many ribbons Lizzie can buy you on a head mistress's salary!"
"And why..." Kitty began before, as was her cursed lot, yet another sister interrupted her albeit this time Jane whose voice, melodious as an early autumn river searching for the next eddy, informed her that Lizzie was just a bit.. tense.
"Elizabeth thinks," Mary interjected, snapping a book about magickal topiary shut, "that we have no compassion for her poor nerves."
"But Lizzie doesn't suffer from..."
"Evidently," Lydia chuckled, "dear perfect Professor Bennet has more in common with our mother than we thought."
Lizzie's rekindled anger sucked at the air and her locks again curled tighter.
"There there," Jane soothed her, "Lydia didn't mean it."
Over Jane's shoulder, Lizzie saw that Lydia was just about to shot-put a "yes I did" into the emotional melee but failed to do so before Kitty's ribbon had macraméd themselves into a muzzle across her mouth, and Mary's hand of earth gave her a not quite so gentle slap.
"No hurricanes, please," Lizzie told Lydia, "remember last time, it took Mary and Kitty weeks to reassemble the furniture."
Technically, as far as magick could be said to be technical rather than the arts and crafts of building relationships with everything around one, Mary and Kitty were both Earth magiciennes.  But they'd specialised at an age younger than most practitioners.
Mary's affinities had migrated towards plants for the simplest of reasons: That their father's library adjoined his green house. Paper, being made of wood pulp, also always accepted her invitations to magick. At age five, Mary had magicked a sturdy hammock of interwoven honeysuckle into a fragrant cradle for her to read in peace.
Kitty, meanwhile, leaned towards what their father had once called baubles and banquets and other banaliti: no one loved the aesthetics, and its innate power of bending perception and thus amassing power, of what Kitty herself called "dressing up", and over time her relationship with, put simply, stylish, crystallised into a love affair with natural fibres and fabrics. And used them to keep would be lovers on their toes
A young gentleman who'd proven by his own lack of manners to be not deserving of that description had once held his hand far too low on Kitty's back during a ball. Not only would her, and many other magiciennes', dance cards remain shut to him from then on, but Kitty had asked a linen table cloth to wrap him up and discard him in the slop trough outside among the pigs
And then there was sweet Jane. While Water magick could be as treacherous as a dark deep loch and as ferocious as a winter ocean it couls also, depending on its practitioner, be as comforting as the pitter patter of spring rain against a bedroom window on a good day, and as relaxing as a warm bath on a bad one. Jane was the latter, she was affection and care, she soothed.  And Elizabeth was soothed.
"I did not mean to cause you alarm, Kitty," she said. "I had requested our sister's input on a speech I've been engaged in penning. In short... well, I have been attempting to find a more engaging first lecture to the new students."
"What do you mean 'find'? For whom?"
"The Board," Jane whispered.
"What board?" Mary said as her ribbons reached out and stroked Lizzie's hair affectionately.
"The board," Mary said with a dash of contempt, "of governors."
"What? At Sowsteet?" Mary said. "Who cares? Lizzie, you've been teaching there for seven years, why would the board care about your first lecture?"
"Dashwood," Jane said quietly.
"What? The head mistress? Who cares about her?"
"She's leaving," Lizzie said, "and I think the board might ask me to take over."
"More ribbons for me!"
"It's not mine yet," Lizzie said, touched that Kitty — just like the other three — harboured no doubt that Professor Elizabeth Bennet, Bs.FF, Mag.Elek, would soon be at the helm of the oldest magick teaching institute in England.
"There isn't as far as I've been informed any other candidate for the position but even so I just thought I'd make my introductory lesson a bit more..."
"Pretentious," Lydia offered unkindly as she absentmindedly turned pages in the newspaper.
"Poetic," Jane countered softly.
"Pitiful and poorly cadenced," said Mary dryly.
"There is nothing," Lizzie protested, "wrong with my cadence! And," she continued, glaring at Kitty whose ribbons were now weaving around Lizzie's waist to form a new skirt, "stop that!"
"But you'll need new clothes for your new job!"
"It's not mine yet."
"And it won't be if you don't dress up for the board."
"And," Lydia said, piping up and pointing at the gossip pages of the newspaper, "you'll need more than a new skirt if you want this too."
The sisters drew towards her like baby birds offered a feeding. Even Mary stood up to look at the page open on the delicate table. A picture of a man. A handsome man. And according to the headline, Sowsteet's new duelling teacher, who was, as per the first paragraph, seen as "a strong contender" to succeed Head Mistress Dashwood.
And at that point, that Lizzie was a fire magicienne came roaring to evidence as she incinerated not just the newspaper but the table it lay on and much of the floral wallpaper on the wall behind it.